Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/550

 528 HERBART. change, i. e., the movements of representations. These names of themselves betray Hcrbart's conviction that mathematics can and must be applied to psychology. The bright hopes, however, which Herbart formed for the attempt at a mathematical psychology, were fulfilled neither in his own endeavors nor in those of his pupils, although, as Lotze remarks, it would be asserting too much to say that the most general formulas which he set up con- tradict experience. — The unity of the soul forces represen- tations to act on one another. Disparate representations, those, that is, which belong to different representative series, as the visual image of a rose and the auditory image of the word rose, or as the sensations yellow, hard, round, ringing, connected in the concept gold piece, enter into complica- tions [complexes]. Homogeneous representations (the memory image and the perceptual image of a black poodle) fuse into a single representation. Opposed representations (red and blue) arrest one another when they are in con- sciousness together. The connection and graded fusion of representations is the basis of their retention and reproduc- tion, as well as of the formation of continuous series of re- presentations. The reproduction is in part immediate, a free rising of the representation by its own power as soon as the hindrances give way ; in part mediate, a coming up through the help of others. On the arrest of partially or totally opposed representations Herbart bases his psychological cal- culus. Let there be given simultaneously in consciousness three opposed representations of different intensities, the strongest to be called a, the weakest c, the intermediate one b. What happens ? They arrest one another, /. e., a part of each is forced to sink below the threshold of consciousness.* What is the amount of the arrest? As much as all the weaker representations together come to — the sum of arrest or the sum of that which becomes unconscious (as it were to represent, which again becomes actual representation when the arrest ceases. The parts of a representation transformed into a tendency, and the resi'^ua remaining unobscured, are not pieces cut off, but the quantity denotes merely a degree of obscuration in the whole representation, or rather in the representa- tion which actually takes place.
 * By their mutual pressure representations are transformed into a mere tendency