ABSTRACT
Important as is the action of the mind in connecting impressions with ideas and acts, ideas with ideas and acts and acts among themselves, it would be a gross mistake to restrict mental action to the single field of connections, habit formation, association. The mind works not only by association, by connecting this situation with that response, but also by dissociation or analysis, by breaking up a total situation into its elements. The abstract and general notions which we found in Part I to be essential features in the higher types of human thinking and the operations of parts of impressions or ideas which will later be found to be essential features of reasoning, are mental products which come, not by putting things together, but by separating them into parts. The bare facts of experience give only white paper, white balls, white liquids, never the thought of mere whiteness by itself ; the law of association, so far as hitherto described, would lead to an interminable repetition of selections from our experience and responses, never to the original insights of the mathematical or scientific thinker; the same law in conduct would provide only a better and better selection from amongst acts, a greater skill due to the elimination of failures, never with totally new moral insights or new combinations of bodily movements. But in fact we do separate out elements in thought which have never appeared before by themselves, but only as parts or elements of total experiences. We do come to make isolated movements which have previously been only parts of instinctive and habitual reactions. And this work of analysis of total impressions into ideas of parts and elements and qualities and of complex acts into minute separate movements is of the utmost use in giving command over the problems of thought and the activities of the body. By dividing we conquer. How this process of analysis occurs will be clear from a few simple cases.
