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The Principles of Psychology is a monumental text in the history of psychology, written by William James and published in 1890. There were four methods in James' psychology analysis (i.e. the logical criticism of precursor and contemporary views of the mind), introspection (i.e. the psychologist's study of his own states of mind), experiment (e.g. in hypnosis or neurology), and comparison (the use of statistical means to distinguish norms from anomalies). But just as innatism gives the mind too much credit for time and space, associationism gives it too little credit for art and creativity in general. It treats ideas as bumping into each other and forming broader patterns, even in the end novels and architectural blueprints, in much the same way that atoms bump into one another to form molecules. In this way, it neglects intellectual power. In James' day, the salient effort to give a thoroughly materialistic account of mind was that of Herbert Spencer. James demonstrates the great confusion inherent in this account. On the one hand, Spencer denied that material facts can ever give rise to feelings, in statements that would seem to commit him to dualism. "Can the oscillations of a molecule," Spencer asked rhetorically, "be represented side by side with a nervous shock, and the two be recognized as one? No effort enables us to assimilate them."
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