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condition for pleasure. Identification in one form or another, is back

of nearly all intellectual pleasures. Discovery of a true relation is

accompanied by pleasure, failure to identify is painful.

It is not without interest in this connection to observe how easily

and satisfactorily the dynamic (functional) psychology disposes of the

confusion expressed in the classical discussion between nominalism,

realism, and conceptualism. So long as precepts, recepts, Anschaun-

gen, concepts, and the like, are conceived as possessions or contents

of the mind this discussion is inevitable, but when we become fully

aware that these are names for acts or parts of processes the difficulty

disappears.

When a mode is perceived there is a simple psychic act, even

though the stimulus be of the most varied character. Here we have

to draw a line as important as any in psychology. We, from the out-

side as observers, say that a stimulus has been perceived, but what

we actually did was to affirm a mode (quality, attribute). Subsequent

(psychological) activities consist in combinations of this material into

relations. The act of perceiving does not posit any relation (unless

the implicit relation to the subject be so considered, and this is thought

back into the psychic and is a matter of metaphysic and not of psy-

chology). Psychological work is all apperceptive; its processes are

all synthetic (even its analyses). What Romanes calls a 'recept' is a

thinking together of percepts. This unifying work of consciousness

is a function of its unity which, as an equilibrium, is organically nec-

essary. All organization must unify.

Here, for example, is a roll of paper passing through a ruling

machine armed with many pens. I load one pen with blue ink and

from that time forward a blue trace moves along the paper along with

the red, green, and black traces. I may shift the adjustment here

and there and these traces are brought into various relations, forming

patterns, etc. The initial inking is the perceiving. This process adds

to the activities in the mind a new one which may be shifted, com-

bined, and modified in various ways but never thereafter will the

mind-process-group be the same as it would have otherwise been.

The psychic equilibrium has been changed. The relations between

the several percepts is infinite but some of these are employed instead

of others in our constructive thought. Out of activities, all of which

cohere in an organism, our selection of part and our conception or

thinking together is more or less an act of violence and must always

so remain. In so far as a teleological nexus is formed the thinking

together is true, in so far as the union is a purely arbitrary one or

non-teleological, it is false.

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