ABSTRACT
The mind’s most frequent intellectual act is to connect one thing with another, but its highest performance is to think a thing apart into its elements. Dissociation or analysis furnishes the data for the advanced types of human thinking and action and, by giving a chance for the operation of the law of partial activity, is the basis of reasoning and intelligent morality. For the habits of human thought are not merely habits of response to the actual gross situations of life, to ‘being hungry when in sight of an apple tree’ or ‘being sleepy in bed’ or ‘being struck by a foe,’ but are responses to whole classes of situations at once and to detailed elements, aspects and features of situation. We can respond to the quality eight, regardless of whether it be eight kittens, eight dollars, eight elephants or eight trees,—to the quality round, regardless of whether it be the ring of a circus or the ring of a bride.
