598 PSYCUOLOOT. 



extended usage consists, as we know, in dividing intellectual phenom- 

 ena into classes, in separating those which differ, in grouping together 

 those of the same nature and in giving to these a common name and in 

 attributing them to the same cause ; it is thus that we have come to dis- 

 tinguish those diverse aspects of intelligence which are called judgment, 

 reasoning, abstraction, perception, etc. This method is precisely the 

 one followed in Physics, where the words caloric, electricity, gravity, 

 designate the unknown causes of certain groups of phenomena. If one 

 thus never forgets that the diverse faculties are only the unknown 

 causes of known phenomena, that they are simply a convenient means 

 of classifying the facts and speaking of them, if one does not fall into 

 the common fault of making out of them substantial entities, creations 

 ■which now agree, now disagree, so forming in the intelligence a little 

 republic; then, we can see nothing reprehensible in this distribution 

 into faculties, conformable as it is to the rules of a sound method and 

 of a good natural classification. In what then is Mr. Bain's procedure 

 superior to the method of the faculties ? It is that the latter is simply 

 a classification while his is an explanation. Between the psychology 

 whicli traces intellectual facts back to certain faculties, and that which 

 reduces them to the single law of association, there is, according to our 

 way of thinking, the same difference that we find in Physics between 

 those who attribute its phenomena to five or six causes, and those who 

 derive gravity caloric, light, etc., from motion. The system of the 

 faculties explains nothing because each one of them is only a fiatiis rods 

 which is of value merely through the phenomena which it contains, and 

 signifies nothing more than these phenomena. Tiie new theory, on the 

 contrary, shows that the different processes of intelligence are only 

 diverse cases of a single law; that imagination, deduction, induction, 

 perception, etc., are but so many determinate ways in which ideas may 

 combine with each other ; and that the differences of faculties are only 

 differences of association. It explains all intellectual facts, certainly 

 not after the manner of Metaphysics which demands the ultimate and 

 absolute reason of things ; but after the manner of Physics which seeks 

 only their secondary and immediate cause." * 



The inexperienced reader may be glad of a brief indica- 

 tion of the manner in which ah the different mental oper- 

 ations may l)e conceived to consist of images of sensation 

 associated together. 



Memory is the association of a present image with others 

 known to belong to the past. Expectation the same, with 

 future substituted for past. Fancy, the association of 

 images without temporal order. 



Belief in anything not present to sense is the veiy lively, 



* La Psychologic Angloise, p. 242. 



