LECTURE XXI ,

§ I.  Concepts and Judgments.   § II. Distinguishing Marks of
Intellectual Processes.   § III. Development of the Intel- .
LECTUAL Functions.   § IV. Mental Disturbance,

§  I

ASSOCIATIONS are due to the interconnections obtaining
within the whole circle of our ideational consciousness.
And it is a necessary corollary from this that all the
relations into which ideas can enter with one another take their
origin from those connections by likeness and contiguity which
lie at the root of the association-process in general. But it is
equally plain that the inference so often drawn, ' all ideational
connections are associations,' is wholly unjustifiable. This infer¬
ence has its source in an error with which we are already familiar,
—that which transformed the forms of association into ' laws of
association.' It rests upon the supposition that these forms are
themselves elementary processes, whereas they are really, as
we have seen, complex products resulting from the elementary
connections by likeness and contiguity. But while we grant
that all the possible interrelations of ideas are reducible to
these two elementary types, we do not mean to assert that the
association-products can be exhaustively and without exception
classified under the heads of simultaneous and successive associa¬
tion. There is one limitation which must not be disregarded.
We never speak of association except where the elements
which mediate the connection belong to a restricted circle of
ideas. Thus assimilation is confined to perceptions of so homo¬
geneous a character that they can be connected to form one
single idea, complication to disparate impressions, which are
inseparable concomitants in perception. The same thing holds
of successive associations by similarity and contiguity, which,
you remember, only differ from simultaneous associations in the