The History of the Concept of Association of Ideas

By David Rapaport. New York: International Universities Press, 1974, xiii + 189 pp., $8.50.

Publication of David Rapaport's 1938 doctoral dissertation will strengthen his reputation as a historian of ideas. This is a brilliant survey of the prehistory of psychology as a discipline, i.e., of the epistemological advances of the 17th and 18th centuries which made possible the scientific study of the human mind. Rapaport's central concern throughout his professional life was with the psychology of thinking, a concern that began with the focus of this work on the concept of association.

The history of this concept is investigated from three points of view: that of its development as modern philosophy picked up the threads of Hellenistic thought about the issues of being and consciousness, that of the formulation of "psychic law" or the unity of psychology, and that of the genesis of the current concept of association. The philosophers whose views on these matters are explicated in detail are Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.

In the early 17th century, associations were regarded as mere sources of errors in thinking; Descartes, who believed the sources of knowledge to be innate ideas, tried to specify the mechanism of associations in order to limit their undesirable influence. By contrast, Hobbes views associations as the determiners of mental processes, albeit with certain exceptions. Locke, who invented the