its particular theory, and to view them in its own way.
But in addition to this scientific psychology, there is another
so-called psychology, which is, strictly speaking, philosophic. This, I
need hardly say, is the association philosophy. It proceeds by analyzing
certain cognitions and sentiments into their elements, and straightway
declaring that they mean nothing more than these. That is to say, the
associationist passes from genesis to validity, from the history of a
conscious state to its objective meaning. Thus, from showing that an
intuitive belief, say that in causation, is not original (in the
individual or at least in the race), it goes on to assert that it is not
a valid immediate cognition at all. Now, I am not concerned here to
inquire into the logical value of this transition, but simply to point
out that it is extra-scientific and distinctly philosophic. If logically
justifiable, it is so because of some plainly _philosophic_ assumption,
as that made by Hume, namely, that all ideas not derived from
impressions are to this extent fictitious or illusory.
And now we are in a position to understand the bearing of our scientific
analysis of acknowledged illusions on the associationist's treatment of
the alleged illusions of common sense. There is no doubt, I think, that
some of the so-called intuitions of common sense have points of analogy
to acknowledged illusions. For example, the conviction in the act of
perception that something external to the mind and independent of it
exists, has a certain superficial resemblance to an hallucination of
sense; and moreover, the associationist seeks to explain it by means of
these very processes which underlie what is recognized by all as
sense-illusion.[158] Again, it may be said that our notions of force and
of a causal nexus in the physical world imply the idea of conscious
energy as known through our muscular sensations, and so have a
suspicious resemblance to those anthropomorphic illusions of which I
have spoken under Illusions of Insight. Once more, the consciousness of
freedom may, as I have suggested, be viewed as analogous in its form and
its mode of origin to illusions of introspection. As a last example, it
may be said that the mind's certain conviction of the innateness of some
of its ideas resembles those illusions of memory which arise through an
inability to think ourselves back into a remote past having a type of
consciousness widely unlike that of th
|