Robert M. Young Online Writings
'Association of Ideas' 50k
I was delighted to be asked to write a history of the concept of the association of ideas, a topic which had loomed large in my own doctoral research on the history of ideas about the relationship between ideas and mind and brain. It was a psychological atomism which paralleled the mental atomism of the tradition extending from Newton to Behaviourism. I am glad that my exposition was balanced by critique, since mental atomism provides no basis for a set of evaluative categories which could be integrated with parameters of character and personality, i.e., values. The essay appeared in Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas. N.Y.: Scribner's, 1968, vol. 1, pp. 111-18.