Excerpt from A History of the Association Psychology

This study of the Association Psychology was originally projected in 1903. After the first six chapters were substantially completed the work was laid aside for more urgent matters. The material for the remaining chapters has been gathered from time to time and the whole revised within the past year.

The writer is personally quite sympathetic with the Association Psychology. Its defects have always seemed attributable to the imperfect knowledge of mental data and nervous processes in past generations, rather than to the analytic and empirical methods employed by the school. The present study, while essentially historical in character, aims to bring out the general consistency of the Associationist movement and to trace back certain recent developments of psychology to their source in the writings of this school.

A sympathetic historian is ever in danger of reading into earlier writers the more definite results of later analysis, or of attributing to them his own views. I have endeavored to avoid this by quoting verbatim from the writers examined. This puts the reader in a position to judge whether the interpretations offered by the historian are correct.

It was originally intended to add a chapter on the criticisms preferred against the Associationists by their contemporaries. This plan was abandoned on account of the length of time required to complete the study. For the same reason the French sensation-associationist movement has been less fully dealt with than was originally proposed.

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