604 PSYCHOLOGY. 



shows make only the more regrettable.* Such elaborately 

 artificial constructions are, it seems to me, only a burden 

 and a hindrance, not a help, to our science. f 



In French, M. Rabier in his chapter on Association,:}: 

 handles the subject more vigorously and acutely than any 

 one. His treatment of it, though short, seems to me for 

 general soundness to rank second only to Hodgson's. 



In the last chapter we already invoked association to 

 account for the effects of use in improving discrimination. 

 In later chapters we shall see abundant proof of the im- 

 mense part which it plays in other processes, and shall 

 then readily admit that few principles of analysis, in any 

 science, have proved more fertile than this one, however 

 vaguely formulated it often may have been. Our own attempt 

 to formulate it more definitely, and to escape the usual con- 

 fusion between causal agencies and relations merely known, 

 must not blind us to the immense services of those by 

 whom the confusion was unfelt. From this practical point 

 of view it would be a true ignoratio elenchi to flatter one's 

 self that one has dealt a heavy blow at the psychology of 

 association, when one has exploded the theory of atomistic 

 ideas, or shown that contiguity and similarity between 

 ideas can only be there after association is done.§ The 

 whole body of the associationist psychology remains stand- 

 ing after you have translated ' ideas ' into ' objects,' on the 

 one hand, and ' brain-processes ' on the other ; and the 

 analysis of faculties and operations is as conclusive in these 

 terms as in those traditionally used. 



* See bis Grundtatsachen des Bewusslseins (1883), chap, yiei passim, 

 especially pp. 106 ff., 364. 



f The most burdensome and utterly gratuitous of them are perhaps 

 Steinthal's, in his Einleitung in die Psycbologie, 2te Aufl. (1881). Cf. also 

 G. Glogau: Steinthal's Psychologisohe Formelu (1886). 



X Lemons de Philosophic, i. Psychologic, chap, xvi (1884). 



§ Mr. F. H. Bradley seems to me to have been guilty of something very 

 like this ignoratio elenchi in the, of course, subtle and witty but decidedly 

 long-winded critique of the association of ideas, contained in book il 

 part n. chap. i. of his Principles of Logic. 



