Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/373

 360 F. H. BEADLET : effect the perception ? Or, again, if the idea was not present, and there really has been an ideal reproduction (or, again, an external suggestion), does that by itself explain sufficiently my altered perception ? We must remember that, having two objects apparently the same, after an idea has been suggested, we may go on to perceive the suggestion as a fact in one case and not in the other. This must point to a strengthening as distinct from a recovery. And when I thought of an army, if the idea of an Englishman was already there, it could hardly be recovered ; and where through association it was brought in by the ants, yet how was it altered and turned into an army? Was it not by a transfer through blending following on the reinstatement ? We must say then that fusion, the importance of which will appear in the sequel, is not a case of reproduction. Can we go on to find a principle which underlies the two laws we have just set forth ? l I think we can, though we must not say that these laws can be deduced directly from it. Every mental element (to use a metaphor) strives to make itself a whole or to lose itself in one, and it will not have its company assigned to it by mere conjunction in presentation. Each struggles to develop itself by the weapon of identity, which gives strength by coalescence and en- largement by recall. And this effort to succeed by associa- tion with like characters may bring loss of life to the single member. To speak more strictly, each element tends (that is, moves unless prevented) by means of fusion and redinte- gration to give itself a context through identity of content, and in the result which is so made the element may not survive in a distinguishable form. It is also a fact that the collision, which results in great part from this movement, causes pain and unrest ; and I think we may see that the unrest cannot cease as long as the elements given are unable to form a whole possessed throughout of such a content that it suggests nothing out of harmony with anything else. The reader may dismiss this statement as mere " transcendental- ism " ; but until my error is shown me I shall believe that it is strict empirical psychology, a mere general statement of the way in which events do happen. We may call it, if we please, the law of Individuation, and we should find that thought and will are each one case of it, made distinct by the different fields in which particularisation is worked out. But we must remember that our law perhaps to some extent 1 The process which Wundt calls Assimilation I take to be subordinate where it is not fictitious.