Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/194

ON ' ASSOCIATION '-CONTROVERSIES. 181 treatment of Association, as almost exclusively an affair of motives. This point of view is not special to Wundt. It is set forth with great clearness in the following passage in Professor Adamson's review of Mr. Sully's Psychology, in MiNDix. 438. " Each separate fact of conscious experience stands out momentarily from the vast complex of the individual mind, and, as one says, receives so much attention, but it is always accompanied by this complex, and the question, what deter- mines the train of thought, what causes us, as we say, to think of something else, is really the question what causes attention to include this or that at the moment. The motives are infinitely numerous, and vary indefinitely in character in successive stages of individual development ; for the most part, indeed, they are distinctly what would be described as logical ; but the essential fact is the movement of attention as expressed in the view taken of the part more immediately under consideration." That the motives to attention are an important part of the course of thought, I freely admit. But to call these motives infinitely numerous seems to me an exaggeration that passes the limits of a figure. If the human mind possessed any constituent fairly describable as infinitely numerous, it would, as a study, be entirely beyond our limited capacity. But our motives, for all purposes whatever, are anything but infinite in number ; while those that operate in directing the current of thought are only a fraction of the whole. Nay more. "Whatever be the total of such motives, their mode of operating reduces itself to a few understood particulars, which have been already adverted to in the course of this discussion. If there be any part of the mind open to the description of being "infinitely numerous" in details, it is Association in its characteristic feature of linking mental elements together. We can count, in a rough way, the names of a language ; and using the estimate as a datum, we can prove beyond dis- pute that the distinguishable links of associated particulars in the mind of an educated man must greatly exceed one hundred thousand. I doubt if the most liberal calculation of motives would furnish one-hundredth of this number. Let us consider the actual case of the acquisition of a lan- guage, with its thousands of couplings of words and phrases, and consider how much motives have to do with it. In the first place, what number of motives are at work first and last ? I imagine they could be easily counted up, whatever way we may look at them. The wish to open up a new avenue to