ASSOCIATIONISM or ASSOCIATIONIST PSY CHOLOGY. This is the name of a theory that mental experi ences consist in the last resort of certain ultimate elements of consciousness which are variously combined into complex wholes under the laws of association. (See ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.) In its extreme form this theory treats the whole development of the mind as little more than an increase in the combinations of pre-existing elements. The theory was probably modelled more or less on the atomic theory in physics—the simple elements of experience corresponding to physical atoms, and association to gravitation.
Associationism may be traced to some extent to the ancient Epicureans and Stoics. But it is mainly modern, and, indeed, British, though not without some adherents in France and Germany.
In the modern period, Hobbes is the first thinker of permanent note to whom this doctrine may be traced. Though, in point of fact, he took anything but an exhaustive view of the phenomena of mental succession, yet after dealing with trains of imagination, or what he called mental discourse, he sought in the higher de partments of intellect to explain reasoning as a discourse in words dependent upon an arbitrary system of marks, each associated with, or standing for, a variety of imaginations; and, save for a general assertion that reasoning is a reckoning—otherwise a com pounding and resolving—he had no other account of knowledge to give. The whole emotional side of mind, or, in his language, the passions, he, in like manner, resolved into an expectation of consequences based on past experience of pleasures and pains of sense. Thus, though he made no serious attempt to justify his analysis in detail, he is undoubtedly to be classed with the asso ciationists of the next century. They however, were wont to trace their psychological theory no further back than to Locke's Essay. Bishop Berkeley was driven to posit expressly a principle of suggestion or association in these terms :—"That one idea may suggest another to the mind, it will suffice that they have been observed to go together without any demonstration of the neces sity of their co-existence, or so much as knowing what it is that makes them so to co-exist." (New Theory of Vision, §25); and to support the obvious application of the principle to the case of the sensations of sight and touch before him, he constantly urged that association of sound and sense of language which the later school has always put in the foreground, whether as illustrating the principle in general or in explanation of the supreme im portance of language for knowledge. It was natural, then, that Hume, coming after Berkeley, and assuming Berkeley's results, though he reverted to the larger inquiry of Locke, should be more explicit in his reference to association; but he was original also, when he spoke of it as a "kind of attraction which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to show itself in as many and as various forms." (Human Nature, i. 1, §4). Other inquirers about the same time conceived of association with this breadth of view, and set them selves to track, as psychologists, its effects in detail.
David Hartley, in his Observations on Man, published in 1749 (I I years after the Human Nature, and one year after the better known Inquiry of Hume), opened the path for all the investiga tions of like nature that have been so characteristic of English psychology. A physician by profession, he sought to combine with an elaborate theory of mental association a minutely de tailed hypothesis as to the corresponding action of the nervous system, based upon the suggestion of a vibratory motion within the nerves thrown out by Newton in the last paragraph of the Principia. So far, however, from promoting the acceptance of the psychological theory, this physical hypothesis proved to have rather the opposite effect, and it began to be dropped by Hartley's followers (as F. Priestly, in his abridged edition of the Observa tions, 17 7 5) before it was seriously impugned from without. When it is studied in the original, and not taken upon the report of hostile critics, who would not, or could not, understand it, no little importance must still be accorded to the first attempt, not seldom a curiously felicitous one, to carry through that paral lelism of the physical and psychical, which since then has come to count for more and more in the science of mind. Nor should it be forgotten that Hartley himself, for all his paternal interest in the .doctrine of vibrations was careful to keep separate from its fortunes the cause of his other doctrine of mental associa tion. Of this the point lay in no mere restatement, with new pre cision, of a principle of coherence among "ideas," but in being taken as a clue by which to follow the progressive development of the mind's powers. Holding that mental states could be scientifi cally understood only as they were analysed, Hartley sought for a principle of synthesis to explain the complexity exhibited not only in trains of representative images, but alike in the most involved combinations of reasonings and (as Berkeley had seen) in the apparently simple phenomena of objective perception as well as in the varied play of the emotions, or again in the mani fold conscious adjustments of the motor system. One principle appeared to him sufficient for all, running, as enunciated for the simplest case, thus: "Any sensations A,B,C, etc., by being asso ciated with one another a sufficient number of times, get such a power over the corresponding ideas (called by Hartley also vestiges, types, images), a,b,c, etc., that any of the sensations A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite in the mind, b,c, etc., the ideas of the rest." To render the principle applicable in the cases where the associated elements are neither sensations nor simple ideas of sensations, Hartley's first care was to determine the conditions under which states other than these simplest ones have their rise in the mind, becoming the matter of ever higher and higher combinations. The principle itself supplied the key to the difficulty when coupled with the notion, already implied in Berkeley's investigations, of a coalescence of simple ideas of sensation into one complex idea, which may cease to bear any ob vious relation to its constituents. So far from being content, like Hobbes, to make a rough generalization to all mind from the phe nomena of developed memory,' as if these might be straightway assumed, Hartley made a point of referring them, in a subor dinate place of their own, to his universal principle of mental synthesis. He expressly put 'forward the law of association, endued with such scope, as supplying what was wanting to Locke's doctrine in its more strictly psychological aspect, and thus marks by his work a distinct advance on the line of development of the experimental philosophy.
The new doctrine received warm support from some, as Law and Priestley, who both, like Hume and Hartley himself, took the principle of association as having the like import for the science of mind that gravitaticn had acquired for the science of matter. The principle began also, if not always with direct reference to Hartley, yet, doubtless, owing to his impressive advocacy of it, to be applied systematically in special directions, as by Abraham Tucker (1768) to morals, and by Archibald Alison (179o) to aesthetics. Thomas Brown (d. 182o) subjected anew to discus sion the question of theory. Hardly less unjust to Hartley than Reid or Stewart had been, and forward to proclaim all that was different in his own position, Brown must yet be ranked with the associationists before and after him for the prominence he as signed to the associative principle in sense-perception (what he called external affections of mind) and for his reference of all other mental states (internal affections) to the two generic ca pacities or susceptibilities of simple and relative suggestion. He preferred the word suggestion to association, which seemed to him to imply some prior connecting process, whereof there was no evidence in many of the most important cases of suggestion, nor even, strictly speaking, in the case of contiguity in time where the term seemed least inapplicable. According to him, all that could be assumed was a general constitutional tendency of the mind to exist successively in states that have certain relations to each other, of itself only, and without any external cause or any influence previous to that operating at the moment of the sug gestion. Brown's chief contribution to the general doctrine of mental association, besides what he did for the theory of percep tion was, perhaps, his analysis of voluntary reminiscence and con structive imagination—faculties that appear at first sight to lie altogether beyond the explanatory range of the principle. In James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) the principle, much as Hartley had conceived it, was carried out, with characteristic consequence over the psychologi cal field. With a much enlarged and more varied conception of association, Alexander Bain re-executed the general psychological task, while Herbert Spencer revised the doctrine from the new point of view of the evolution-hypothesis. John Stuart Mill made only occasional excursions into the region of psychology proper, but sought, in his System of Logic (1843), to determine the conditions of objective truth from the point of view of the associationist theory, and, thus or otherwise being drawn into general philosophical discussion, spread wider than any one before him its repute.
The associationist school has been composed chiefly of British thinkers, but in France also, it has had distinguished representa tives. Of these it will suffice to mention Condillac, who professed to explain all knowledge from the single principle of association (liaison) of ideas, operating through a previous association with signs, verbal or other. In Germany, before the time of Kant, mental association was generally treated in the traditional man ner as by Wolff. Kant's inquiry into the foundations of knowl edge, agreeing in its general purport with Locke's however it differed in its critical procedure, brought him face to face with newer doctrine that had been grafted on to Locke's philosophy; and to account for the fact of synthesis in cognition, in express opposition to associationism, as represented by Hume, was, in truth, his prime object, starting as he did, from the assumption that there was that in knowledge which no mere association of experience could explain. To the extent, therefore, that his in fluence prevailed, all inquiries made by the English association ists were discounted in Germany. Notwithstanding, under the very shadow of his authority a corresponding, if not related, movement was initiated by J. F. Herbart. Peculiar and widely different from anything conceived by the associationists, as Her bart's metaphysical opinions were, he was at one with them and at variance with Kant, in assigning fundamental importance to the psychological investigation of the development of con sciousness, nor was his conception of the laws determining the interaction and flow of mental presentations and representations, when taken in its bare psychological import, essentially different from theirs. In F. E. Beneke's psychology also, and in more re cent inquiries conducted mainly by physiologists, mental asso ciation has been understood in its wider scope, as a general principle of explanation.
The associationists differ not a little among themselves in the statement of their principle, or when they adduce several princi ples, in their conception of the relative importance of these. Hartley took account only of contiguity, or the repetition of im pressions synchronous or immediately successive ; the like is true of James Mill, though incidentally, he made an express attempt to resolve the received principle of similarity, and through this, the other principle of Contrast, into his fundamental law—law of Frequency, as he sometimes called it, because upon frequency, in conjunction with vividness of impressions, the strength of asso ciation, in his view, depended. In a sense of his own, Brown also, while accepting the common Aristotelian enumeration of princi ples, inclined to the opinion that "all suggestion may be found to depend on prior co-existence, or at least on such proximity as is itself very probably a modification of co-existence," provided account be taken of "the influence of emotions and other feelings that are very different from ideas, as when an analogous object suggests an analogous object by the influence of an emotion which each separately may have produced before, and which is, there fore, common to both." To the contrary effect, Spencer main tained that the fundamental law of all mental association is that presentations aggregate or cohere with their like in past experi ence, and that, besides this law, there is in strictness no other, all further phenomena of association being incidental. Thus in par ticular, he would have explained association by contiguity as due to the circumstances of imperfect assimilation of the present to the past in consciousness. A. Bain regarded contiguity and simi larity logically, as perfectly distinct principles, though in actual psychological occurrence blending intimately with each other, contiguous trains being started by a first (it may be implicit) representation through similarity, while the express assimilation of present to past in consciousness is always, or tends to be, fol lowed by the revival of what was presented in contiguity with that past.
The highest philosophical interest, as distinguished from that which is more strictly psychological, attaches to the mode of mental association called inseparable. The coalescence of mental states noted by Hartley, as it had been assumed by Berkeley, was further formulated by James Mill in these terms:—"Some ideas are by frequency and strength of association so closely combined that they cannot be separated ; if one exists, the other exists along with it in spite of whatever effort we make to disjoin them." (Analysis of the Human Mind, 2nd ed. vol. i., p. 93.) J. S. Mill's statement is more guarded and particular :—"When two phenomena have been very often experienced in conjunction, and have not, in any single instance, occurred separately either in experience or thought, there is produced between them what has been called inseparable, or, less correctly, indissoluble, associa tion ; by which is not meant that the association must inevitably last to the end of life—that no subsequent experience or process of thought can possibly avail to dissolve it ; but only that as long as no such experience or process of thought has taken place, the association is irresistible; it is impossible for us to think the one thing disjoined from the other."—(Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, 2nd ed., p. 191.) It is chiefly by J. S. Mill that the philosophical application of the principle has been made. The first and most obvious applica tion is to so-called necessary truths—such, namely, as are not merely analytic judgments but involve a synthesis of distinct notions. Again, the same thinker sought to prove inseparable association the ground of belief in an external objective world. The former application, especially, is facilitated, when the ex perience through which the association is supposed to be con stituted is understood as cumulative in the race, and transmissible as original endowment to individuals—endowment that may be expressed either, subjectively, as latent intelligence, or, objec tively, as fixed nervous connections. Spencer, as before suggested, is the author of this extended view of mental association.