Experimental Study of Associative Processe. 
CoNCLUSION 
I do not think it is advisable here, at the close of thi: 
paper, to give a summary of its results. The paper itself 
is really only such a summary with the most important evi- 
dence, for the extent of territory covered and the need of 
brevity have prevented completeness in explanation or il- 
lustration. If the reader cares here, at the end, to have the 
broadest possible statement of our conclusions and will take 
the pains to supply the right meaning, we might say that 
our work has described a method, crude but promising, and 
has made the beginning of an exact estimate of just what 
associations, simple and compound, an animal can form, 
how quickly he forms them, and how long he retains them. 
pple described the method of formation, and, on the con- 
dition that our subjects were representative, has rejected’. 
reason, comparison or inference, perception of similarity, 
and imitation. | \It has denied the existence in animal con- 
sciousness of any important stock of free ideas or impulses, 
and so has denied that animal association is homologous 
with the association of human psychology.) It has homolo- 
gized it with a certain limited form of human association. It 
has proposed, as necessary steps in the evolution of human 
faculty, a vast increase in the number of associations, signs 
of which appear in the primates, and a freeing of the ele- 
ments thereof into independent existence. It has given us 
an increased insight into various mental processes. It has 
convinced the writer, if not the reader, that the old specula- 
tions about what an animal could do, what it thought, 
and how what it thought grew into what human beings 
think, were a long way from the truth, and not on the road 
to it. 
Finally, I wish to say that, although the changes proposed 
