Experimental Study of Associative Processes 125 
with these associations which we have mentioned, and with 
others like them, he deals as the animals deal with theirs. 
The process, in the man’s mind, leaving out extraneous men- 
tal stuff, may be homologous to the association-process in 
animals. Of course, by assiduous attention to the elements 
of these associations, a man may isolate them, may thus get 
these associations to the same plane as the rest. But they 
pass through the stage we have described, even then, and 
with most men, stay there. The abstraction, the naming, 
etc., generally come from observers of the game or action, 
and concern things as f-lt by them, not by the participant. 
CRITICISM OF PREVIOUS THEORIES 
We may now look for a moment at what previous writers 
have said about the nature of association in animals. The 
complaint was made early in this book that all the state- 
ments had been exceedingly vague and of no value, except as 
retorts to the ‘ reason’ school. In the course of the discus- 
sion I have tried to extricate from this vagueness definite 
statements about imitation, association of ideas, association 
by ideas. There is one more theory, more or less hidden in 
the vagueness, — the theory that association in animals is the 
same as association in man, that the animal mind differs 
from the human mind only by the absence of reason and 
what it implies. Presumably, silence about what associa- 
tion is, means that it is the association which human psy- 
chology discusses. When the silence is broken, we get such 
utterances of this theory as the following : — 
“T think we may say then that the higher animals are able 
to proceed a long way in the formation and definition of 
highly complex constructs, analogous to but probably differ- 
ing somewhat from those which we form ourselves. These 
