DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 487 



ments, are in truth the residuary simplicities of consciousness, whose 

 stability the eddies and currents of phenomenal experience have left 

 undisturbed." * 



The truth is that Experience is trained by hoth associa- 

 tion and dissociation, and that psychology must be writ 

 hoth in synthetic and in analytic terms. Our original sen- 

 sible totals are, on the one hand, subdivided by discrimi- 

 native attention, and, on the other, united with other totals, 

 • — either through the agency of our own movements, carrying 

 our senses from one part of sj^ace to another, or because 

 new objects come successively and replace those by which 

 we were at first impressed. The ' simple impression ' of 

 Hume, the 'simple idea' of Locke are both abstractions, 

 never realized in experience. Experience, from the very 

 first, presents us with concreted objects, vaguely continuous 

 with the rest of the world which envelops them in space 

 and time, and potentially divisible into inward elements 

 and parts. These objects we break asunder and reunite. 

 We must treat them in both ways for our knowledge of 

 them to grow ; and it is hard to say, on the whole, which 

 way prejDonderates. But since the elements with which 

 the traditional associationism performs its constructions — 

 'simple sensations,' namely — are all products of discrimi- 

 nation carried to a high pitch, it seems as if we ought to 

 discuss the subject of analytic attention and discrimination 

 first. 



The noticing of any part whatever of our object is an 

 act of discrimination. Already on p. 404 I have described 

 the manner in which we often spontaneously lapse into the 

 undiscriminating state, even with regard to objects which 

 we have already learned to distinguish. Such anaesthetics 

 as chloroform, nitrous oxide, etc., sometimes bring about 

 transient lapses even more total, in which numerical dis- 

 crimination especially seems gone ; for one sees light and 

 hears sound, but whether one or many lights and sounds 

 is quite impossible to tell. Where the parts of an object 

 have already been discerned, and each made the object of 

 a special discriminative act, we can with difficulty feel the 



* Essays Philosophical and Theological : First Series, pp. 268-273. 



