f
spiritual ether are not atoms at all, but deeds, actions, performances.
The laws of the association of ideas are not the laws of a mental
chemistry, but laws of mental behaviour; very fixed and reliable laws, but
still having to do with modes of behaviour. Their separating and uniting,
their relations to one another, their grouping into unities, their
"syntheses," are not automatic permutations and combinations, but express
the _activity_ of a thinking intelligence. Not even the simplest actual
synthesis comes about of itself, as psychologists have shown by a neat
illustration.

[Illustration: Square _a_2, next to smaller square _b_2. Above them are
horizontal lines _a_ and _b_, the same lengths as the widths of the
squares below them. Caption: _a_ and _b_ only associated. Squares of _a_
and _b_ in juxtaposition.]

[Illustration: Square _c_2. Above it is horizontal line _c_, the same
length as the width of the square below it. Caption: _a_ and _b_ really
synthetised to _c_. Square of _a_ + _b_ as a true unity = _c_2.]

Given that, through some association, the image of the line _a_ calls up
that of the line _b_, and both are associatively ranged together, we have
still not made the real synthesis _a_ + _b_ = _c_. For to think of _a_ and
_b_ side by side is not the same thing as thinking of _c_, as we shall
readily see if we square them. The squares of _a_ and _b_ thought of
beside one another, that is, _a_2 and _b_2, are something quite different
from the square of the really synthetised _a_ and _b_, which is (_a_ +
_b_)2 = _a_2 + 2_ab_ + _b_2, or _c_ 2. This requires quite a new view, a
spontaneous synthesis, which is an action and not a mere experience.

The Ego.

It was customary in earlier psychology, as it still is in all apologetic
psychology, to regard the soul as a unified, immaterial, indivisible and
therefore indestructible _substance_, as a monad, which, as a unity
without parts, superior to its own capacities and the changes of its
states, is at all times one and the same subject. Many attempts have been
made since the time of Plotinus to accumulate proofs of this substantial
unity. We may leave this question untouched here, and need not even
inquire whether these definitions are not themselves things of the
external world employed as images and analogies and pushed too far. But
there are three factors which may be established in regard to the
psychical in spite of all naturalistic opposition;