e form of a direct personal
confession.

In the year 1890 I published a work on psychology in which it became
my duty to discuss the value of a certain explanation of our higher
mental states that had come into favor among the more biologically
inclined psychologists. Suggested partly by the association of ideas,
and partly by the analogy of chemical compounds, this opinion was
that complex mental states are resultants of the self-compounding of
simpler ones. The Mills had spoken of mental chemistry; Wundt of a
'psychic synthesis,' which might develop properties not contained in
the elements; and such writers as Spencer, Taine, Fiske, Barratt, and
Clifford had propounded a great evolutionary theory in which, in the
absence of souls, selves, or other principles of unity, primordial
units of mind-stuff or mind-dust were represented as summing
themselves together in successive stages of compounding and
re-compounding, and thus engendering our higher and more complex
states of mind. The elementary feeling of A, let us say, and the
elementary feeling of B, when they occur in certain conditions,
combine, according to this doctrine, into a feeling of A-plus-B, and
this in turn combines with a similarly generated feeling of C-plus-D,
until at last the whole alphabet may appear together in one field of
awareness, without any other witnessing principle or principles beyond
the feelings of the several letters themselves, being supposed to
exist. What each of them witnesses separately, 'all' of them are
supposed to witness in conjunction. But their distributive knowledge
doesn't _give rise_ to their collective knowledge by any act, it _is_
their collective knowledge. The lower forms of consciousness 'taken
together' _are_ the higher. It, 'taken apart,' consists of nothing
and _is_ nothing but them. This, at least, is the most obvious way
of understanding the doctrine, and is the way I understood it in the
chapter in my psychology.

Superficially looked at, this seems just like the combination of H_2
and O into water, but looked at more closely, the analogy halts badly.
When a chemist tells us that two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen
combine themselves of their own accord into the new compound substance
'water,' he knows (if he believes in the mechanical view of nature)
that this is only an elliptical statement for a more complex fact.
That fact is that when H_2 and O, instead of keeping far apart, get
into closer quarters, s