Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/370

 ASSOCIATION AND THOUGHT. 357 content must preserve its identity. It must from beginning to end be a self-same whole which keeps together without any foreign assistance. We must be able to say that from the beginning it has been and still is merely itself, and is therefore in the end because of its beginning. This claim may be invalid, but it is involved in our beliefs as to what thought must be if it keeps its character. The standard is, in short, to include all the facts and to get them consistent, but to do this merely in an ideal form. The end in other words is individuality, which in the attempt to be perfect must try to be complete, because its autocracy is not possible if its empire is limited. I believe that what follows will make this more clear, and I have stated it that we may realise the task before us. This goal has to be reached by a natural development from the lowest beginnings of psychical life. I have said that Association in its usual sense has failed to account for this development, and has failed at the end because wrong at the beginning. We have now to modify its principles and make them more effective ; but I will first repeat how entirely I accept their main tendency. Psychology is concerned with nothing beyond presentation and its laws, with nothing but the process of given events and the modes of their happening. It is from these elements that we must explain the generation of all else, for at all events no other explanation is admitted within our science. I shall state lower down what I mean by presentation, and will now point out the changes to be made in our ordinary doctrine. First, the Atomism must go wholly. We must get rid of the idea that our mind is a train of perishing existences, that so long as they exist have separable being, and, so to speak, are coupled up by another sort of things which we call relations. If we turn to what is given this is not what we find, but rather a continuous mass of presentation in which the separation of a single element from all context is never observed, and where, if I may use the expression, no one ever saw a carriage, and still less a coupling, divided from its train. You may urge that your doctrine is the absolute truth in the light of metaphysics. That may be so, but in psychology, because it will not work, it must not be let in. And to the Associationist, as to the Herbartian, we must reply that in our science their metaphysics are irrelevant, and that in other respects we can accept wholly the principles of neither, because (as they are used) they do not seem to work successfully, and because without great incon- sistencies they would not work at all.