Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/798

732 the first attempt, not seldom a curiously felicitous one, to carry through that parallelism of the physical and psychical, wjich since then has come to count for more and more in the science of mind. Nor should it be forgotten that Hartley himself, for all his paternal interest in the doctrine of vibrations, was careful to keep separate from its fortunes the cause of his other doctrine of mental association. Of this the point lay in no mere restatement, with new precision, of a principle of coherence among &quot;ideas,&quot; but in its being taken as a clue by which to follow the progressive development of the mind s powers. Holding that mental states could be scientifically understood only as they were analysed, Hartley sought for a principle of synthesis to explain the complexity exhibited not only in trains of representative images, but alike in the most involved combinations of reasonings and (as Berkeley had seen) in the apparently simple phenomena of objective perception, as well as in the varied play of the emotions, or, again, in the manifold conscious adjustments of the motor system. One principle appeared to him sufficient for all, running, as enunciated for the simplest case, thus : &quot;Any sensations A, B, C, &c., by being associated with one another a sufficient number of times, get such a power over the corresponding ideas (called by Hartley also ves tiges, types, images) a, b, c, &c., that any one of the sensa tions A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite in the mind b, c, &c., the iueas of the rest.&quot; To render the principle applicable in the cases where the associated elements are neither sensations nor simple ideas of sensa tions, Hartley s first care was to determine the conditions under which states other than these simplest ones have their rise in the mind, becoming the matter of ever higher and higher combinations. The principle itself supplied the key to the difficulty, when coupled with the notion, already implied in Berkeley s investigations, of a coales cence of simple ideas of sensation into one complex idea, which may cease to bear any obvious relation to its con stituents. So far from being content, like Hobbes, to make a rough generalisation to all mind from the phenomena of developed memory, as if these might be straightway assumed, Hartley made a point of referring them, in a subordinate place of their own, to his universal principle of mental synthesis. He expressly put forward the law of association, endued with such scope, as supplying what was wanting to Locke s doctrine in its more strictly psycho logical aspect, and thus marks by his work a distinct advance on the line of development of the experiential philosophy. The new doctrine received warm support from some, as Law and Priestley, who both, like Hume and Hartley him self, took the principle of association as having the like import for the science of mind that gravitation had acquired for the science of matter. The principle began also, if not always with direct reference to Hartley, yet, doubtless, owing to his impressive advocacy of it, to be applied systematically in special directions, as by Tucker (1768) to morals, and by Alison (1790) to aesthetics. Thomas Brown (d. 1820) subjected anew to discussion the question of theory. Hardly less unjust to Hartley than Reid or Stewart had been, and forward to proclaim all that was different in his own position, Brown must yet be ranked with the associationists before and after him for the prominence he assigned to the associative principle in sense-perception (what he called external affections of mind), and for his reference of all other mental states (internal affections) to the two generic capacities or susceptibilities of Simple and Relative Suggestion. He preferred the word Suggestion to Association, which seemed to him to imply some prior con necting process, whereof there was no evidence in many of the most important cases of suggestion, nor even, strictly speaking, in the case of contiguity in time where the terra seemed least inapplicable. According to him, all that could be assumed was a general constitutional tendency of the mind to exist successively in states that have certain re lations to each other, of itself only, and without any external cause or any influence previous to that operating at the moment of the suggestion. Brown s chief contribution to the general doctrine of mental association, besides what he did for the theory of perception, was, perhaps, his analysis of voluntary reminiscence and constructive imagination faculties that appear at first sight to lie altogether beyond the explanatory range of the principle. In James Mill s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), the principle, much as Hartley had conceived it, was carried out, with characteristic consequence, over the psychological field. With a much enlarged and more varied conception of association, Professor Bain has re-executed the general psychological task in the present generation, while Mr Herbert Spencer has revised the doctrine from the new point of view of the evolution-hypothesis. John Stuart Mill made only occasional excursions into the region of psychology proper, but sought, in his System of Logic (1843), to determine the conditions of objective truth from the point of view of the associationist theory, and, thus or otherwise being drawn into general philosophical discussion, spread wider than any one before him its repute. It is remarkable that the Associationist School has been composed chiefly of British thinkers, but in France also it has had distinguished representatives. Of these it will suffice to mention Condillac, the author of the sensationalist movement in the 18th century, who professed to explain all knowledge from the single principle of association (liaison) of ideas, operating through a previous association with signs, verbal or other. At the present day the later English school counts important adherents among the younger French thinkers. In Germany, before the time of Kant, mental association was generally treated in the traditional manner, as by Wolff. Kant s inquiry into the foundations of knowledge, agreeing in its general purport with Locke s, however it differed in its critical procedure, brought him face to face with the newer doctrine that had been grafted on Locke s philosophy ; and to account for the fact of synthesis in cognition, in express opposition to associationism, as represented by Hume, was, in truth, his prime object, starting, as he did, from the assump tion that there was that in knowledge which no mere association of experiences could explain. To the extent, therefore, that his influence prevailed, all such inquiries as the English associationists went on to prosecute were discounted in Germany. Notwithstanding, under the very shadow of his authority a corresponding, if not related, movement was initiated by Herbart. Peculiar, and widely diil erent from anything conceived by the associationists, as Herbart s metaphysical opinions were, he was at one with them, and at variance with Kant, in assigning fundamental importance to the psychological investigation of the develop ment of consciousness, nor was his conception of the laws determining the interaction and flow of mental presentations and representations, when taken in its bare psychological im port, essentially different from theirs. In Beneke s psycho logy also, and in more recent inquiries conducted mainly by physiologists, mental association has been understood in its wider scope, as a general principle of explanation. Associationists differ not a little among themselves in the statement of their principle, or, when they adduce several principles, in their conception of the relative importance of these. Hartley took account only of Con tiguity, or the repetition of impressions synchronous or immediately successive; and the like is true of James Mill, though, incidentally, he made an express attempt to 