ASSOCIATION. 603 



Bupposition accounts for the fact, and is consistent with the known in- 

 tellectual character of the inventor of the steam-engine." * 



Dr. Hodgson's account of association is bj all odds the 

 best yet propounded in English. f All these writers hold 

 more or less explicitly to the notion of atomistic ' ideas ' 

 which recur. In Germany, the same mythological suppo- 

 sition has been more radically grasped, and carried out to 

 a still more logical, if more repulsive, extreme, by Her- 

 bart X and his followers, who until recently may be said to 

 have reigned almost supreme in their native countrv.§ 

 For Herbart each idea is a permanenth' existing entity, the 

 entrance whereof into consciousness is but an accidental 

 determination of its being. So far as it succeeds in occu- 

 pying the theatre of consciousness, it crowds out another 

 idea previously there. This act of inhibition gives it, how- 

 ever, a sort of hold on the other representation which on 

 all later occasions facilitates its following the otlier into the 

 mind. The ingenuity with which most special cases of as- 

 sociation are formulated in this mechanical language of 

 struggle and inhibition, is great, and surpasses in analytic 

 thoroughness anything that has been done by the British 

 school. This, however, is a doubtful merit, in a case where 

 the elements dealt with are artificial ; and I must confess 

 that to my mind there is something almost hideous in the 

 glib Herbartian jargon about VorsteUungsmassen and their 

 Hemmungen and Hemmungssummen, and smken and erJwben 

 and schivehen, and Verschmelzungen and Comphxionen. Herr 

 Lipps, the most recent systematic German Psychologist, 

 has, I regret to say, carried out the theory of ideas in a 

 way which the great originality, learning, and acuteness he 



* The Senses and the Intellect, pp. 491-3. 



t See his Time and Space, chapter v, and his Theory of Practice, §§ 53 

 to 57. 



t Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1824), 2. 



§ Prof. Ribot, in chapter i of his ' Contemporary German Psychol- 

 ogy,' has given a good account of Herbart and his school, and of Beueke, 

 his rival and partial analogue. See also two articles on the Herbartian 

 Psychology, by G. F. Stout, in Mind for 1888. J. D. Morrell's Outlines of 

 Mental Philosophy (2d ed., London. 1862) largely follows Herbart and 

 Beneke. I know of no other English book which does so. 



