vicious circle. For on the one hand the factor which determines the activity of apperception is said to be the self, on the other hand the self is represented as ultimately identical with the apperceptive activity. This ambiguity is no doubt partly to blame for the disfavor in which Professor Wundt's theory of apperception is so widely held. It can be avoided only on the assumption that the self which decides and chooses consists of presentational elements (or the fused residues of such) bound together by ties resembling those of ordinary association. While of course these elements do not for the most part come to clear consciousness in our acts of choice, their influence is not on that account the less decisive.
It is important, however, to recognize that the essential feature of the complex thus constituted, — the feature, that is to say, which most nearly represents the essence of the self, — is not so much the presentational elements themselves as the manner in which they are associatively connected. For the presentational elements alone would afford no sufficient explanation of the character of individual acts of choice. Even in the simplest spinal reflex, the afferrent impressions afford no explanation of the movements they elicit, but the latter are correlated to the former in a manner which, while biologically highly purposive, is in itself entirely arbitrary. The associative connections between sensory and motor presentations in the cortex allow, within physiological limits, of an infinitely wider range of individual variation. It is these associative connections, depending as they largely do upon the emotional coloring with which the presentations invest themselves for the individual consciousness, and not the latter in themselves alone, which determine the elective affinities exhibited by the self in the presence of conflicting ideas or motives.
Professor Wundt is therefore perfectly right in maintaining that the decisive factor in volition is not to be found among the presentational elements of consciousness. And if we could wish any further admission from him, we have it already in his remark that the apperceptive connections of ideas must be assumed to have been developed out of associative connections.[1]
Charles A. Strong.
NEW YORK.
- ↑ Physiologische Psychologie, 3d ed., II, p. 388.
