interaction which the term apperception as used by Herbart is now to denote? We must go back a little to see. Empirical psychology Herbart rightly maintained must be analytical at the outset ; but, unfortunately, the most fundamental analysis of all—that which yields the duality of subject and object, as commonly understood-he treated as pertaining not to experience but to metaphysics. The whole business of empirical psychology he therefore confined to the interaction of presentations and its incidental consequences: "in the soul there are only presentations (Vorstellungen); out of these all that is to be in consciousness must be constructed (zusammengesetzt)." In short, for Herbart psychology was just a new ideology or presentationism, a theory of psychical statics and dynamics applied to, rather than derived from, experience. The conative activity commonly attributed to the subject of experience Herbart transferred to presentations: these tend always to adjust, rank and incorporate themselves into larger, compacter wholes, that in turn may repeat the process. This is the Herbartian apperception, of which the Leibnizian apperception is not the cause but the effect. We find an analogue to all this among human beings in the gradual progress from the 'state of nature' to that of civilised society. So close was the analogy between the two for Herbart that he devoted over thirty pages to its illustration2. But in the essential point the analogy obviously fails. We cannot talk of presentations per se, and if we could, still we could not regard them either as objects or as subjects. Nevertheless, for Herbart, new presentations, series of presentations or entire masses of them were at first material for some older presentation, series or mass, whose function was that of appropriating them-assimilating, and organizing or systematizing them, as the case might be. 1 Psychologie als Wissenschaft, neu gegründet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik, 1825, § 125, Hartenstein's ed., ii. p. 190. 2 Op. cit. ii. pp. 18-51. It is worth remarking too that M. Fr. Paulhan, in his book entitled L'Activité mentale et les Éléments de l'Esprit (1889), starting from the same analogy, has worked out independently under the title of 'systematic association' a theory closely resembling Herbart's doctrine of apperception. 3 Cf. Lotze, Metaphysik, § 273, for an important criticism. In the last and highest form of apperception, the 'masses' of which Herbart speaks would have been better described as 'systems,' for he recognises that they are always organized more or less. They are so described by Professor Stout; cf. his Analytic Psychology, 1896, ii. p. 114. Cf. op. cit. ii. § 125, pp. 190 f. The last form of this process has been described above as constituting a further elaboration, a sort of 'transfiguration' of the ideational continuum1. It also includes the most interesting and important of the facts covered by the Herbartian theory; and those moreover most in need of a technical name. We have got used to perception and conception as the names for processes resulting in percepts and concepts; but are obviously debarred from using 'intellects' on this analogy. Appercepts might be the Herbartian term, and one might be tempted-for the sake of the impressive alliteration-to talk of the four psychological A's, attention, assimilation, association and apperception. But in the way stands Herbart's doctrine that the progressive advance in cognition that characterizes the last three is explicable without the first. Moreover, apperception with him covers the remaining processes-is indeed at bottom just a more or less complex assimilation, more or less modified by preliminary inhibitions. And this is a fact that damages his whole doctrine. So far as his apperception has any pretension to be an independent process, so far it is 'mechanical'; it rests, that is to say, on the working of a preformed ideational basis. It is then no equivalent for intellection. So far as it is a process requiring subjective initiative and control, the mechanical interaction of presentations will not account for it. ་ The few psychologists who still employ the term apperception lay the chief stress on the subjective side, mean by it, in fact, just the active concentration of attention that constitutes the focus of consciousness' and ensures definite apprehension. But these psychologists are also given to describing those combinations of ideas that presuppose association as apperceptive. In other words, they try to unite the Leibnizian and the Herbartian apperceptions notwithstanding the diversity between them. This seems a clear case of falling between two stools. For attention may be concentrated for other ends than thinking -as in recollecting, skilful performance, &c. Thinking then cannot be characterized by what is merely one of its essential conditions but not the only one. Mutatis mutandis, the same may be said of the interaction and combination of ideas: 1 Cf. § 4 above, p. 301. 2 So, for example, Wundt. Cf. his Phys. Psychologie, 6th ed. vol. iii. (1911), pp. 307 f., 543 ff. thinking involves them but they do not suffice to constitute it. The one sine qua non of thought-selective control of ideas in order to solve a problem—is so far left out altogether. Having, however, admitted the want of a technical term for what the Herbartians call an apperceptive system and having disapproved of their term, it behoves us, if we can, to find a better. 'Intellective system' at once suggests itself. This at all events does not lose sight of what seems the salient characteristic of these systems from the standpoint of psychology, viz. that they are all the result of a subjective selection of what is relevant to a meaning or intention-a result synthesizing and fitting together disjecta membra that have first to be found. Such a result is systematic only because it is due to an interest in, and a search for, system. But according to Herbart, it is a result that comes about whether or no, simply through the interaction of the presentations concerned; and according to his modern representatives seems to come about provided attention is specially restricted to a part of its field. They cannot mean this, of course1. What they mean is rather-and it is true enough that when such systems are already formed, and especially when they are well organized, and colligated by an appropriate terminology and nomenclature, they may become as ideational wholes amenable to the working of association and inhibition, like other ideas. Most of the detail of Herbartian expositions falls under this head. Such detail has proved especially helpful to the application of psychology to education for which the Herbartians have long been distinguished; but it involves nothing new in principle. The processes otherwise described as classifying, diagnosing, explaining belong here, as when we ask What is this? or Is this it? The new is adjusted to and further develops the old. Once formed and familiar, the subsequent ideational working of these systems involves nothing new in principle, we have said. Still their very 'mass' affects their relations to each other 1 Wundt, in fact, when he comes to the treatment of his 'apperceptive combinations,' finds it needful to supplement his original 'concept of apperception,' as merely implying the entrance of a presentation into the focus of attention, with a certain ' relating (beziehende) function' which itself implies volition and purpose. This it is, he holds, that discriminates thinking from mere association. Cf. op. cit. pp. 544 f. 2 Cf. Steinthal's division of apperceptions into identifying, subsuming, harmonizing, creative (op. cit. § 200-15). The last is obviously quite out of line with the rest. in a way that throws a new light on the progress of experience. The greater this mass and the better such systems are compacted and organized as unitary wholes, the more each appropriates to itself by a sort of differential 'attraction' any new experiences that are germane to it, and pro tanto inhibits any that are not. The greater the diversity of the subjective interests that sustain them, the more remote and isolated two such systems tend to be. In short, the further we advance into this region of conceptual 'constellations,' the more we leave behind the continuity and instability of mere ideation. Adapting Descartes' comparison of the soul to a spider seated at the centre of its web we may represent man as constructing his own microcosm as a house of many mansions, each a 'universe of discourse,' into one or other of which he enters (sich einstellt, as the Germans say) as his interests or circumstances determine. The same things may chance to present themselves in each, but their aspects and importance will not be the same. In one they may awaken many memories and images, in another none at all or wholly different ones: here they may be welcomed and entertained, there repulsed or ignored. Subjective selection then is the clue to the structure of each one's intellectual domain, as it is also to that of the 'ideational tissue,' the memory-train, the sensory differentiations, successively elaborated out of the primary presentational continuum which we conceive as all that the subject has confronting it when its experience begins. CHAPTER XIII FORMS OF SYNTHESIS The Bias towards Formal Logic in Psychology. § 1. If we agree that it is through acts of judgment, which successively resolve composite presentations into elements, that concepts first arise, it is still very necessary to inquire more carefully what these elements are. On the one side, we have seen logicians comparing them to so many letters, and on the other, psychologists enumerating the several sensible properties, e.g. of gold or wax-their colour, weight, texture, &c.-as instances of such elements. In this way formal logic and sensationalist psychology have been but blind leaders of the blind. Language, which has enabled thought to advance to the level at which reflexion about thought can begin, is now an obstacle in the way of a thorough analysis of it. Children or savages would speak only of 'red' and 'hot,' but we of 'redness' and 'heat.' They would probably say, "Swallows come when the days are lengthening and snipe when they are shortening"; we say, "Swallows are spring, and snipe are winter, migrants." Instead of "The sun shines and plants grow," we might say, "Sunlight is the cause of vegetation." In short, there is a tendency to resolve all concepts into substantive concepts; and the reason of this is not far to seek. Whether the subject or starting-point of our discursive thinking be actually what we perceive as a thing; or whether it be a quality, an action, an effectuation (ie. a transeunt action); whether it be a concrete spatial or temporal relation, or finally, a resemblance or difference in these or in other respects-it becomes in every case, by the very fact of being the central object of thought, pro tanto a unity, and whatever can be affirmed concerning it may so far be regarded as its property or attribute. It is, as we have seen, the |