Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/188

 ON ' ASSOCIATION '-CONTEOVEESIES. 175 association by Similarity under the influence of fluctuations of feeling. As the course of associative reproduction is hindered by active attention and logical thinking, we must give our- selves up passively to the play of representations, if we wish to get persistent and coherent association. The flow of representations in dreaming and madness offers the best field of observation for the study of associations as such. In the ascending flood of ideas of the insane, we can some- times follow step by step the process whereby logical thinking gradually undergoes dissolution by the increasing dominance of association. Hence the attempt to derive logical thinking from association is open to suspicion. In Wundt's conception these laws are afflicted with the incurable disqualification of passivity, which restricts their unassisted workings to the lower forms of sensation and memory. Instead of pushing them to the explanation of the higher faculties of reasoning and imagination, as the English associationists profess to do, he considers it neces- sary to take an entirely new departure, to lay down a principle of Intellectual Activity, with laws of its own and a foundation of its own ; locating it in a purely spiritual region of the mind, which has nothing in common with the physical constitution of the senses and the brain. This prin- ciple of activity he names Apperception, and thus expounds. In vision we are aware of the wide distinction between the central point of the retina and the surrounding portions stretching away to the circumference. It is in the centre that our visible discrimination reaches the utmost pitch of minuteness ; hence to observe a given object thoroughly we turn upon it this visual centre. Such, says Wundt, is the difference between apperception and passive or listless con- sciousness. Apperception is thus nothing more than atten- tion at the highest pitch of concentration ; it is a thing of all degrees from bare consciousness up to the full strain of stimulated activity. Now as such activity is most usually an effort or effect of will, Apperception is another name for will applied to the operations of thought. In mere association, apperception is not absent, but it is of a more primitive kind than in what is called distinctively the " apperceptive " combination of representations. The activity of apperception, in the lower association, is directly determined by the " psychical stimulus " of a representation, the frequency of its repetition, &c. ; while, in the higher kind of apperceptive activity, there is an act of choice. Hence apperception is in the full sense volitional, and not