Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/93

PRESENTATION AND REPRESENTATION. 79 the Herbartians postulate a spontaneous tendency of presen- tations to arise unless they are repressed. But although they give us a scheme which appears to have scientific form, in that it presents a theory related to well - formulated mechanical notions, it has not been found adequate as a basis of psychological theory in general. As neither of these opposed systems has given us fully satisfactory results, we might well have been led to examine the postulate of the permanency of presentations upon which they are both based had our attention not been called to this subject by other considerations ; and, having discovered that this postulate cannot be maintained, we may well ask what effect the abandonment of it has upon the two opposed systems thus considered. If this postulate be denied, Herbartianism clearly loses its main support, and its complex structure falls, leaving little more of value to us than the record of more or less isolated remnants of valuable introspective detail, the worth of which we must all acknowledge. But the Associationist's structure does not seem thus to fall into utter ruin if this postulate upon which it was originally based be denied. I am quite willing to agree that the Associationists have exaggerated the importance of their doctrines, and have in some measure obstructed true psychological advance by their atomistic treatment of our mental life ; by the introduction of the notion that presentational agglutination can make up a new psychic totality ; that " mental chemistry" can produce new " ideas " by a rearrangement of psychic atoms into psychic molecules, as it were by a rearrangement, in other words, of supposedly stable " representations ". Nevertheless, it must certainly be granted that they have done Psychology notable service by giving a basis for introspective observation and record, and that the observations recorded in, and by means of, the laws of Association which they have formulated, have been, and are certain to be in the future, of the greatest service in the development of Psychology. It is a satisfaction, therefore, to find this restatement of the postulate upon which they rely involving no fundamental break-down of their system ; for the real basis of the teachings of the Associationists is not to be found in this postulate. If our contention be valid there will, of course, result cer- tain important changes of conception, to which we cannot now refer, although we may note that the view here main- tained gives us an added argument in opposition to the doctrine above referred to, viz., that supposititious stable