IDEAS, ASSOCIATION OF. — It is the fact that the images of consciousness, as ideas and cognitive contents in general, present themselves in connection with one another so that the evocation of one tends to recall some of the others or the entire complex to which it belongs. The explanation of the principles and nature of this connection is of interest in itself to the theory of knowledge and the philosophical orientation of psychological schools: the common presupposition of all associationist schools is the “principle of synthesis,” namely that the element precedes the compound and the part comes before the whole... and the compound and the whole are its “result.” It is therefore a matter of seeking, through reflection and experimental investigation, what are the cohesive forces of the elements and parts and how they function in the various manifestations of conscious life, both in the cognitive sphere and in the practical sphere. Associationism is also called “psychic atomism,” inasmuch as it precisely explains the structures and complexes of consciousness starting from the elements or parts that contribute to them: it can be grounded and found both in pure empiricism or phenomenism as in absolute rationalism, insofar as both of these philosophical orientations place truth in a simple and immediate apprehension (in sensibility or in intelligence) and not in the functional solidarity of structures and in the convergence of the sensory sphere with the intellectual sphere. Thus associationism underpins (has been the pretext for) much of modern philosophy: it is affirmed by Kant with the theory of the “dust of sensations,” is already presupposed in pre-Kantian rationalism, and is developed into a system in English empiricism. But in the theoretical function of the association of ideas, empiricism and rationalism diverge: for empiricism, since every learning consists in the formation of associations, the meaning of complexes must be sought in the original elements from which learning begins; for rationalism, on the other hand (including idealism), the meaning of complexes derives solely from the activity of reason, and the contents of association are mere material for knowing or only the starting point of the same, which reason must surpass and negate.
The first theory of the association of ideas is traced back to Aristotle, who treats it in connection with memory and recollection (cf. De mem., 2, 451 b 10 ff.): the ease with which images drawn from experience return varies from individual to individual, inasmuch as for some a single experience suffices to recall something, and they recall it better than others who have had it many times. In general, recollection occurs when the initial movements of experiences (προσεχεται κινήσεις) recur in consciousness until they become “habitual”: the attraction of the associated elements, according to Aristotle, operates from past experiences on present experience, and according to whether something is presented as similar or contrary or continuous to another (ἀφοῦ ὁμολογῶ ἕναντὶν ἢ τοῦ ὑγιεινῆς, διὰ τοῦτο γίνεται ἢ ἀνάμνησις: ibid., ll. 19-20). The Aristotelian text suggested the three fundamental laws of the association of ideas, namely similarity, contrariety, and spatial and temporal contiguity, which St. Thomas illustrated as external forms of an interior induction: a) “...if we think or speak of milk, we easily arrive at white because of the whiteness of milk, and from white to air because of the clarity of the transparent which causes whiteness, and from air to moisture, because air is moist; from moisture, however, we arrive at recollecting the time of autumn, which he was seeking, by reason of contrariety: because this time is cold and dry.” b) “And he (Aristotle) says that what is universal seems to be the principle and means by which one can arrive at all things...”: not the universal in the abstract logical order, but in the intentional order of the movement of representative complexes, as the white milk in the example cited (in De mem. et rem., lect. 6, ed. A. Pirotta, Torino 1928, nn. 378-79). Aristotle’s conception is thus alien both to the empiricist position and to the rationalist one.
It is only with English empiricism that the association of ideas receives systematic and prominent development: Locke’s treatment in *An Essay Concerning Human Understanding* (Bk. II, chaps. 33: “Of the Association of Ideas”) is limited to collecting experimental data, especially from the pathology of perception and behavior. The classic of the association of ideas is D. Hume, who places it at the beginning of his theory of knowledge (cf. *A Treatise of Human Nature*, Bk. I, pt. 1, sec. 4: “Of the Connection or Association of Ideas”; *Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding*, pt. 1, sec. 3; pt. 2, sec. 5). Association is called a “gentle force” (a gentle force), and to the associative principles of similarity-contrariety and contiguity indicated by Aristotle, Hume adds the relation of cause and effect as the most important, because it is this that grounds the persuasion of reality that external impressions are incapable of giving. It is at this point that Hume’s empiricism passes into a form of productive subjectivism or apriorism of feeling, as it has also been called: unlike the other associative relations, that of cause and effect cannot rely on any “impression of external experience”: “Sight and touch give us an idea of the actual motion of bodies, but they cannot so much as conceive that wonderful force or power which would keep a body perpetually in motion and which bodies never lose except by communicating it to others” (*Enquiries*, pt. 2, sec. 4, § 29; ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford 1936, p. 33). A man is convinced that by eating bread he will be nourished, but the nourishment that follows has no relation to the sensible qualities that bread presents: the connection between these and the *wonderful force or power* that is causality, and concretely with the *secret powers* by which bread nourishes, lies outside external experience however it is considered. Hume therefore, with regard to the association of causality (which for him is the category of the real insofar as it underpins the very identity of objects: it ensures their “permanence” in time), speaks of “habit” and “custom” (habit, custom), in the precise sense of “inner conviction” or even “belief” (belief). The nature of this “belief” is that of a “particular feeling” (a peculiar feeling): but concerning the nature of this feeling, its origin, and its precise functions regarding the notion of reality, Hume confesses never to have clarified it, limiting himself to saying that it is “something felt rather than conceived” (“felt,” rather than conceived) and approaches the impression from which it is derived in its form and influence (*Treatise...*, Appendix, ed. Selby-Bigge, Oxford 1928, p. 627). It is well known that Kant presented his critical reform of thought as a generalization of this Humean conception of causal belief (cf. E. Kant, *Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik*, ed. E. Cassirer, Berlin 1913, §§ 2 and 5; pp. 18 ff. and 26).
It is only with the positivism of the 19th century that the principle of the association of ideas is explained solely with reference to elementary sensations: these form the primary content of truth, and all other operations of consciousness are considered secondary and derived. Modern experimental psychology is largely dominated by this principle, which M. Wertheimer has presented in two moments or hypotheses:
1. The hypothesis of music or “bundle”: “Every complex results from a sum of elementary contents or pieces (e.g., sensations).” For example, if one has a1, b1, c1 and replaces b1 and c1 with b2 and c2, then one has a1, b2, c2. Thus, one has an associative multiplicity of components variously connected (a “bundle”), and everything is therefore constructed upon “extrinsic connections” (Und-Verbindungen).
2. Hypothesis of association: “If a certain content A has frequently been found united with B (‘in spatio-temporal contiguity’), then there is in A a tendency to recall B” (M. Wertheimer, Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt, I, in Psychol. Forschungen, Berlin 1922, p. 49). A typical example was the mnemonic exercises with nonsense syllables (e.g.: Pud sol dap rus mik nom, from K. Koffka, Principles of Gestalt psychology, London 1936, p. 557): association is reduced to a factor that is entirely external, adventitious, contingent (sachfremd, says Wertheimer), and at the same time, once the connection of A and B is established, the succession of B after A is understood to occur in a necessary and unambiguous manner.
A first reaction to the psychology of association came from the so-called “Graz school,” and first from von Ehrenfels, who maintained the priority of the formal factor over merely associative factors: namely, that in objects of experience there exists a “formal quality” (Gestaltqualität), e.g., the rhythm of a melody, which cannot be explained as a mere summation of elementary sounds but presents itself as original. The critique continued with the “Würzburg school,” directed by Külpe, which, advocating a “psychology of thought” (Denkpsychologie) and the originality of higher functions of understanding (Külpe, Ach, Willwll) and willing (Ach, Lindworski), restricted association to the sphere of sensory representations.
The most resolute critique of the association of ideas came from the “psychology of form” (Gestaltpsychologie), founded by M. Wertheimer and expanded with original research by W. Köhler, K. Koffka, and K. Lewin. The cornerstone of this school is the following principle: “There exist wholes (perceptual), the behavior of which is not determined by any of their individual elements, but instead the behavior of their parts is determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole” (M. Wertheimer, Über Gestalttheorie, Erlangen 1925, p. 45). To this phenomenological principle, the “formists” added an explanatory principle known as that of “physical forms” (physische Gestalten) or isomorphism, inasmuch as it is admitted: a) that the behavior of nervous energy in perceptual and operative centers follows the laws of internal self-regulation, as observed, for example, in the distribution of electrical energy in a closed circuit; b) the strict dependence of perceptual and dynamic structures on such phenomena of self-regulation of the underlying “transverse functions” (Querfunktionen) of the nervous system. Thus, the unity of functional consciousness could be affirmed inasmuch as “what is internal, is external” (Denn was innen, das ist aussen), a Goethean motto that the formists apply in the sense of a rigorous correspondence between sensory experience and the physiological processes that accompany it, and not, as some have misunderstood, between organic processes and the environment (cf. W. Köhler, Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand, Erlangen 1920, p. 173 ff.).
An energetic reprise of the principle of association, against the “psychology of form,” was attempted by G. E. Müller, who, distinguishing a double simultaneous and successive collective apprehension, attributed the tendency of elements to gather into “complexes” of collective apprehension to “factors of coherence” (Kohärenz-faktoren) such as spatial contiguity, equality, similarity, efficacy (Eindringlichkeit = “penetration”), symmetrical progression, the influence of the contour, etc. (G. E. Müller, Komplextheorie und Gestalttheorie, Göttingen 1923, p. 9 ff.). But the harvest of results and the genius of the explanatory method displayed by the advocates of Gestalt overcame the last resistances of the old psychology; in America, the “principle of form” had an interesting development in the psychology of behavior (cf. E. C. Tolman, Purposive behaviour in animals and men, New York 1932).
While spiritualist psychologists of neo-scholastic tendency are disposed to accept the established results of the research of the “school of form,” two fundamental reservations are advanced: a) against the unjustified depreciation of the so-called sensory material in relation to subjective organizational factors; b) the physico-materialistic interpretation of these factors (principle of isomorphism). It is finally affirmed that the central core of human understanding is not in the apprehension of “form,” but of the “meaning” of objects, and therefore above the purely perceptual sphere there is the original life of thought to which it relates and on which it depends (Michotte, Gemelli, Moore).
The reality is that all functions of consciousness relate to one another and each to its own object according to a principle of inner cohesion in view of the terminal result to which they must arrive: the exercise of the animal instinct and the life of human intelligence. Hegel had already energetically criticized the psychology of association point by point. “First, it is not ideas that are associated. Second, those modes of relation are not laws, and more than laws they are arbitrary and accidental processes: the progression in images and representations according to association is properly the antithesis of thought.” Hegel observes that being is the proper determination of intelligence and that “intelligence integrates the given through the meaning of universality and what is proper, what is internal, through that of being.” Therefore, the dynamism of association remains within the realm of pure externality and thus of insignificance until such connections are subsumed under a “universal connection,” and the bond (Band) shifts from subjective to objective (G. W. Hegel, Enzyklop. d. philos. Wissenschaften, ed. L. Boumann, Berlin 1845, § 455, p. 329 ff.; Zusatz, p. 331 ff.). But since idealism condemns immediate experience as mere “appearance,” such subsumption of sensible and representative contents, on which the association of ideas operates, proves unfounded; in Aristotelianism, on the other hand, the universal has its starting point in sensory and representative contents, to which it must continually “refer” to guarantee its warmth of reality (τὰ μὲν εἶδῃ τὸ νοητικὸν ἐν φαντασμασι νοεῖ: De an., III, 7, 431 b 2). By virtue of the dominion that the concept exercises over the image, the process of the association of ideas can be stimulated, directed, inhibited, and criticized as occasion demands, just as the conscious exercise of freedom can curb or direct the inclinations and habits that life forms.