wholly, nor do I mean that, where it is superseded, as in the working of pleasure and pain, that which operates must be ideal.[1] But, to a greater or less extent, all psychology, in its practice, is compelled to admit the working power of Identity. A psychologist may employ this force unwillingly, or may deny that he employs it; but without it he would be quite unable to make his way through the subject. I do not propose here to touch upon Coalescence or Blending, a principle much neglected by English psychologists. I will come at once to Redintegration, or what is more familiar to us as Association by Contiguity. Here we are forced to affirm that what happens now in the soul happens because of something else which took place there before. And it happens, further, because of a point of identity connecting the present with the past.[2] That is to say, the past conjunction in the soul has become a law of its being. It actually exists there again because it happened there once, and because, in the present and in the past, an element of content is identical. And thus in the soul we can have habits, while habits that are but physical exist, perhaps, only through a doubtful metaphor. Where present and past functions have not an inner basis of identity, the word habit, if used, has no longer its meaning.[3] Hence we may say that to a large extent the soul is itself its own laws, consists, itself, in the identity between its present and its past, and (unlike Nature) has its own ideal essence not quite external to itself. This seems, at all events, the view which, however erroneous, must be employed by every working psychologist.
- ↑ On this point, and on what follows, compare Mind, xii., pp. 360 and foll.
- ↑ I have shown, in my Principles of Logic, that Contiguity cannot be explained by mere Similarity. See the chapter there on the Association of Ideas.
- ↑ The question seems to turn on the amount of inward identity which we are prepared to attribute to a physical thing.
