Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/190

ON ' ASSOCIATION '-CONTKOVEESIES. 177 positions or judgments are included ; the apperceptive move- ment being adapted to the difference of the case. For the higher functions of intellect, then, the trains of association must come under the pressure of the will, as attention. The will can quicken up the associations into living power. By fastening the attention upon an object of thought, the assimilative force is quickened and resemblances more abundantly evoked ; the poet obtains his metaphors by severe concentration of mind upon the matter that he wishes to illustrate. So, imperfectly-formed bonds of contiguity may be rendered suggestive by means of intense application of thought to the present member of the couple ; as when we have forgotten someone's name, and keep cogitating on the image of the person till we recall it. Besides thus intensifying the forces of association, beyond their natural power in the passive mood, the apperceptive concentration can modify and work up the trains of thought ; it can combine them for some purposes, and divide or analyse them for others. The processes of logic or reason- ing, of imagination or art, of moral guidance, of working for ends, involve the double power of association proper and the control due to apperception. All these processes are copiously exemplified by Wundt in accordance with his main thesis. And now, as apperception is another name for will work- ing in the sphere of the intellectual trains, and as will sup- poses motives, the sources of apperception lie in the region of motives. But with Wundt, the motives of all our higher thinking transcend the sphere of the senses and the brain, the material organism and its functions. No doubt a certain class of motives is allied with this lower part of our being ; there are, of course, pleasures and pains of sense and appetite, and these pleasures and pains must be often operative as stimulants of attention, and must even intensify and control the trains of association. Nevertheless, all such motives are limited to the inferior and merely animal objects of thought and pursuit. They exemplify a sort of mechanical or physi- cal correspondence between the intensity of the feeling and the intensity of the action, just as the pace or work of a steam-engine is related to the consumption of coal. Apperception, on the other hand, does not follow the animal inclinations : it works under a class of altogether distinct and superior motives, regulated by laws peculiar to itself. These motives are the produce of heredity. They fall under three different classes the logical, the aesthetic, the moral. They have their foundations in our imma- 12