632 PSYCHOLOGY. 



doubt. Here then is a native wealth of inner forms whose 

 origin is shrouded in mystery, and which at any rate were 

 not simply ' imjoressed ' from without, in any intelligible 

 sense of the verb ' to impress.' 



Their time- and space-relations, however, are impressed 

 from without — for two outer things at least the evolution- 

 ary psychologist must believe to resemble our thoughts of 

 them, these are the time and space in which the objects lie. 

 The time- and space-relations betiveen things do stamp copies 

 of themselves ivithin. Things juxtaposed in space impress us, 

 continue to be thought of as thus juxtaposed. Things se- 

 quent in time impress their sequence on our memory. And 

 thus, through experience in the legitimate sense of the word, 

 there can be truly explained an immense number of our 

 mental habitudes, many of our abstract beliefs, and all our 

 ideas of concrete things, and of their ways of behavior. 

 Such truths as that fire burns and water wets, that glass 

 refracts, heat melts snow, fishes live in water and die on 

 land, and the like, form no small part of the most refined 

 education, and are the all-in-all of education amongst the 

 brutes and lowest men. Here the mind is passive and 

 tributary, a servile copy, fatally and unresistingly fashioned 

 from without. It is the merit of the associationist school 

 to have seen the wide scope of these effects of neighbor- 

 hood in time and space ; and their exaggerated applications 

 of the principle of mere neighborhood ought not to blind 

 us to the excellent service it has done to Psychology in 

 their hands. As far as a large part of our thinking goes, 

 then, it can intelligibly be formulated as a mere lot of habits 

 impressed upon us from without. The degree of cohesion 

 of our inner relations, is, in this part of our thinking, pro- 

 portionate, in Mr. Spencer's phrase, to the degree of cohe- 

 sion of the outer relations ; the causes and the objects of 

 our thought are one ; and we are, in so far forth, what the 

 materialistic evolutionists would have us altogether, mere 

 offshoots. and creatures of our environment, and naught 

 besides.* 



* In my own previous chapters on habit, memory, association, and 

 perception, justice has been done to all these facts. 



