Associationism

“ The Impulse of Association.—Man has always lived with men; and there is perhaps nothing so distinctive of human nature as its faculty for association. We are so made that we only find ourselves and each other as we live together in societies, that we only find ourselves as we find one another. The exchanges of love and friendship, the riches of fellowship—these are the most fruitful experiences of life. “We are members of one another”; and are fulfilled in each other. Our mutual need has released in us the Instinct of Sociability. ”

“ It may be literally true, that the chief formation of a long-drawn social life is not the relation of authority and subordination between parts of the group, not the gradation of its members into classes, not the systems of sustaining, transporting or regulating organs, but certain ideals and standards, certain likes and dislikes, certain admirations and abhorrences become common to its members. Here then, I venture to suggest, is the ultimate test of association. The abiding of men in the same neighborhood without conflict is mere aggregation. ”

“ This demands, as we have also seen, perception of the consequences of a joint activity and of the distinctive share of each element in producing it. Such perception creates a common interest; that is concern on the part of each in the joint action and in the contribution of each of its members to it. Then there exists something truly social and not merely associative. But it is absurd to suppose that a society does away with the traits of its own constituents so that it can be set over against them. ”

“ Is association, as I describe it here, in itself less association, because every one enters and leaves it freely, chooses his place in it, judges and bargains for himself on his own responsibility, and brings with him the spring and warrant of personal interest? That it may deserve this name, is it necessary that a pretended reformer should come and impose upon us his plan and his will, and as it were, to concentrate mankind in himself? ”

“ The ideal that grows up in familiar association may be said to be a part of human nature itself. In its most general form it is that of a moral whole or community wherein individual minds are merged and the higher capacities of the members find total and adequate expression. And it grows up because familiar association fills our minds with imaginations of the thought and feeling of other members of the group, and of the group as a whole, so that, for many purposes, we really make them a part of ourselves and identify our self-feeling with them. ”

“ Association, therefore, if it retains one-love exclusiveness, contains the seeds of dissolution; and those seeds will be hastened to their harvest by the warmth of associate life. An Association of States with custom-house lines around each, is sure to be quarrelsome. ”

“ A desire or purpose being present in many minds, the idea of the association arises in some one or more of them, and, being communicated to others, becomes the immediate instrument through which the association is called into being; and only so long as this idea of the whole as an instrument for attaining the common end persists in the minds of the individuals does the association continue to exist. In this respect such an association is at the opposite end of the scale from the fortuitous crowd, which owes its existence to the accidents of time and place merely. ”

“ In ancient times an association of interest combined men in one guild or corporation for protecting the common persons in that corporation from oppression. In modern times identity of political creed or opinion has bound men together in one league, in order to establish those political principles which appeared to them of importance. Similarity of taste has united men together in what is called an association, or a society, in order by this means to attain more completely the ends of that science to which they had devoted themselves. ”

“ And thence would spring society, free association, hundreds of associations which would regulate social life; though at the same time they would remain variable, in fact often opposed and hostile to one another. ”

“ Yet association is the impulse at the core of our being. The whole social process is that of association, individual with individual, group with group. Progress from one point of view is a continuously widening of the area of association. Our modern civilization has simply overlaid and falsified this primary instinct of life. ”

“ The principle of association, as everyone knows, involves that whenever two things have been associated sufficiently together, the suggestion of one of them to the mind shall immediately raise a suggestion of the other. ”

“ Association has been assumed as the leading principle in the operations of the human mind, and then made the only one, forgetting first that nature must be the foundation of every artificial principle, and secondly that with respect to the result, even where association has had the greatest influence, habit is at best but a half-worker with nature, for in proportion as the habit becomes inveterate, we must suppose a greater number of actual impressions to have concurred in producing it. ”

“ Experiments in Association.—In the history of human kind numerous experiments in association have been made; those which have served well in the competition between groups have survived, and have tended to become permanent types of association, receiving the sanction of society, and so to be reckoned as social institutions; others have been thrown on the rubbish heap as worthless. ”

“ We believe in association—which is but the reduction to action of our faith in one sole God, and one sole law, and one sole aim—as the only means we possess of realising the truth; as the method of progress; the path leading towards perfection. The highest possible degree of human progress will correspond to the discovery and application of the vastest formula of association. ”

“ When they are allowed to meet freely for all purposes, they ultimately look upon public association as the universal, or in a manner the sole, means which men can employ to accomplish the different purposes they may have in view. Every new want instantly revives the notion. The art of association then becomes, as I have said before, the mother of action, studied and applied by all. ”

“ Here are associations whose ties go over and under and through it, a meeting of merchants, a military corps, a college class, a fire-club, a professional association, a political, a religious convention;—the persons seem to draw inseparably near; yet, that assembly once dispersed, its members will not in the year meet again. Each returns to his degree in the scale of good society, porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection can be neither frivolous nor accidental. ”

“ The Implications of Human Association.—Society is one word, but many things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of purposes. One man is concerned in a multitude of diverse groups, in which his associates may be quite different. It often seems as if they had nothing in common except that they are modes of associated life. Within every larger social organization there are numerous minor groups: not only political subdivisions, but industrial, scientific, religious, associations. ”

“ I have already shown that men who live in ages of equality continually require to form associations in order to procure the things they covet; and, on the other hand, I have shown how great political freedom improves and diffuses the art of association. ”

“ In successive associations the same processes are at work: if to the given idea or perception like ideas attach themselves, we call the result association by similarity; if the objective connections alone are observed, we call it association by contiguity. The simplest case of assimilation is the cognition of an object; recognition of an object is the simplest case of successive association: into each of these as well as into the more complicated forms, both processes of association enter. ”

“ I build you up but to tear you down, for if I were to let sentiment and sincerity once take root, were to let any tenderness of association once accumulate, or any ‘love of the old’ once pass unsnubbed, what would become of us, who have our hands on the whipstock, please? Fortunately we’ve learned the secret for keeping association at bay. We’ve learned that the great thing is not to suffer it to so much as begin. Wherever it does begin we find we’re lost ”

“ He notes at the outset that “the spirit of free association is widely extended in the United States, and it produces results of surprising efficiency.” There are two motives for association, he thinks, the consciousness of weakness, which is generally operative abroad, and the consciousness of strength, which is our motive here. He says:
The need of association comes generally from the conscience of one's own feebleness or indolence.... ”

“ Ideal type of association.
The right of association, which has hitherto been checked by law, by ignorance, by prejudice, by difficulties of communication, etc., had scarcely begun to manifest its full importance till in the present century. Associations of every kind will some day cover the globe, or rather everything, so to speak, will be accomplished by associate enterprise; and within the limits of the great body of society innumerable groups of the most diverse kinds will form and dissolve with an equal facility, without impeding the general movement. ”

“ Friends of Association! scattered over the face of our wide country! do you realize this? Do you feel that your works ought to justify and fortify your words? We are surrounded by a world full of want, vice and misery, which Association realized would greatly modify and ultimately cure. But those who know nothing of this truth will never cause it to be realized; it would be absurd to expect anything of the kind. The work must be accomplished by us, and by those whom our acts rather than words shall win over to a knowledge of the truth. ”

“ In other words, I regard human association as the result of the perceived advantage which it yields, and as coming into existence only in proportion as that advantage was perceived by the only faculty capable of perceiving it, the intellect. ”

“ Constantly proper end of action on the part of every individual considered as trustee for the community, of which he is considered as a member, the greatest happiness of that same community, in so far as it depends upon the interest which forms the bond of union between its members.†
But communities, as is well known, tend to behave in the same way to people who are better organised as well as to people who are worse organised than the standard of the group. ”

“ We speak no less for the whole associative movement in this country than for ourselves when we beseech our friends who are looking upon our operations not to judge of our principles or our purposes by any immediate results which they may have witnessed. The question is often asked of us whether our present mode of life answers our expectations—whether Association is found to be valuable in practice as it seems to be correct in theory, and the like. But all such inquiries betray an ignorance of the actual condition of the enterprise. ”

“ The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. ”

“ Every beginning of a series of associations, that is every departure from the continued beaten track of old impressions or ideas remembered in regular succession, therefore implies and must be accounted for from some act of the mind which does not depend on association. ”

“ Need I urge that in this crisis the friends of Association ought to be most earnest and untiring in the promulgation and advocacy of their faith; that they ought to improve the opportunities which are daily presented of commending the truth to others whose minds are but newly prepared to receive it? What Associationist so dull that he cannot improve every "strike," every collision respecting the hours or the wages of labor, to the advancement of the good cause? ”

“ Although my present strong convictions are in, favor of cooperative Association rather than of communities of property, I look with an indescribable interest on every attempt to redeem society from its corruptions, and establish the intercourse of men on a basis of love instead of competition. ”

“ By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and co-operation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one’s very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. ”

“ History has taught us nothing if not that men can continue to associate only by the laws of association. The golden rule is the first and last of these, but the first and last of the golden rule is that it can be operated only through laws, habits, forms, and institutions. ”

“ Let me take another case, in which the cord of association is not so inconceivably slender, namely, when two or more persons standing in a close relation to one another are mistakenly treated a little too much as if mutually independent, the objection is heard that it matters not whether it is A or B, that it is, in fact, all the same, as they belong to the same concern. ”

“ We do not doubt for a moment that the association we desire to have illuminated is due either to contiguity or to a perceived similarity of ideas, but why have we this particular association instead of the limitless multitude of associations that would be equally intelligible by the same formulae? ”