Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/250

236, or symbolic concept is then reproduced after the manner of so-called 'association by similarity' through the elements which it has in common with the particular presentation momentarily present. In a similar manner the concept recalls the subsumed particulars; only here, as in the reproduction of a part through the whole, the associative course is ambiguously determined. This does not, however, justify Münsterberg's idea that such a connection ought to be assimilated to association by succession. Association by succession occurs when an impression due to external stimulus joins itself to other impressions or memory-pictures which immediately followed it on a former occurrence. This is attributed to "associative habit" by Wundt, who gives for it the same physiological explanation as for association by simultaneity. Münsterberg first emphasized the note-worthy difference between the two forms, but decided that association by simultaneity remained the only psychophysically explicable connection. To meet the question as to how motion in one centre joins itself to the already vanished excitation of a different centre, he assumed constant ocular or auricular sensations, or a constant visual image, as the common bond between successive disparate presentations. But this explanation, as well as the one which introduces connected complexes of reflex movements, only puts off the difficulty, and leaves still unexplained the fact that the order of reproduction is the same as that of perception. Exception must also be taken to Münsterberg's negative conclusion from the experiments undertaken to test the occurrence of successive association when constant impressions are artificially excluded. The number of orderly reproductions is too great to be ascribed to chance, and Münsterberg himself has carefully shut out the possibility of any constant cause other than pure successive association. A study of the countless forms of association leads to the conclusion that there is no essential difference between inner and outer association, but defeats the tendency to unify so far as to leave unreduced at least two basal, though closely related, forms of association, simultaneity and immediate succession. .

In his recent article on "Organic Beauty" Naville holds that representations both of material phenomena and of psychic states