Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/239

No. 2.] is sensitive as well as intellectual, aesthetic, and moral. The painful is avoided as incongruous to our nature as sensitive. Only in this sense can it be said that all our actions are determined by pleasure and pain. While the law of psychogenesis is thus held to be a law of development by elimination of the incongruous, no attempt is made to account for the origin of the congruous. It is a theory of survival, not of origin.

After a short statement of the rival theories of association by similarity and by continuity, the author asks if problem of association cannot be approached from another side. Current theories of association have taken mainly successive associations into account, but the forms of simultaneous association, known as complications and assimilations, together with the simple, intermediate form of sensuous recognition, are also to be considered. Hence W. proposes successive and simultaneous associations as the fundamental forms. Complications are combinations of ideas from disparate senses: as such their elements are easily found by introspection. Assimilations are formed by the coalescence of ideas or parts of ideas from the same sense: every impression of sense sets a throng of tendencies left over from earlier impressions in sympathetic vibration: of this throng, some enter into fitting combinations with the given impression, while others remain below the threshold of consciousness. In this way illusions are formed. Inasmuch as memory-pictures as well as sense-impressions must be affected by the assimilative process, it may be said that every representation is a picture of fancy. Two combining processes underlie assimilation: firstly, the given impression calls up components of ideas like itself; secondly, the latter arouses other components not found in the given impressions, but still combined with it in former cases. The second form is mediate, and clearly a form of association by contiguity. As in the first form, only like elements are aroused, association by similarity does not take place: the fundamental processes of association are consequently the combination of the like and of the contiguous. In successive associations the same processes are at work: if to the given idea or perception like ideas attach themselves, we call the result association by similarity; if the objective connections alone are observed, we call it association by contiguity. The simplest case of assimilation is the cognition of an object; recognition of an object is the simplest case of successive association: into each of these as well as into the more complicated forms, both processes of association enter. As all feelings have a basis in ideation, the feeling of cognizing must result from indefinite memory-pictures in the background of