502 PSYCHOLOGY. 



the present, and turn to discriminations of a less simple 

 sort. 



THE 'PKOCESS OF ANALYSIS. 



And first, of the discrimination of simultaneously felt 

 impressions ! Our first way of looking at a reality is often 

 to suppose it simple, but later we may learn to perceive it 

 as compound. This new way of knowing the same reality 

 may conveniently be called by the name of Analysis. It is 

 manifestly one of the most incessantly performed of all our 

 mental processes, so let us examine the conditions under 

 which it occurs. 



I think we may safely lay down at the outset this fun- 

 damental principle, that any total impression made on the 

 mind must be unanalyzahle, lohose elements are never experi- 

 enced apart. The components of an absolutely changeless 

 group of not-elsewhere-occurring attributes could never 

 be discriminated. If all cold things were wet and all wet 

 things cold, if all hard things pricked our skin, and no 

 other things did so ; is it likely that we should discrimi- 

 nate between coldness and wetness, and hardness and 

 pungency respectively ? If all liquids were transparent 

 and no non-liquid were transparent, it would be long before 

 we had sejDarate names for liquidity and transparency. If 

 heat were a function of position above the earth's surface, 

 «o that the higher a thing was the hotter it became, one 

 word would serve for hot and high. We have, in fact, a 

 number of sensations whose concomitants are almost in- 

 variably the same, and we find it, accordingly, almost im- 

 possible to analyze them out from the totals in which they 

 are found. The contraction of the diaphragm and the ex- 

 pansion of the lungs, the shortening of certain muscles and 

 i;he rotation of certain joints, are examples. The converg- 

 ing of the eyeballs and the accommodation for near objects 

 are, for each distance of the object (in the common use 

 of the eyes) inseparably linked, and neither can (without a 

 sort of artificial training which shall presently be mentioned) 

 be felt by itself. We learn that the causes of such groups 

 of feelings are multiple, and therefore we frame theories 

 about the composition of the feelings themselves, by ' fusion,' 



