Compare the explanations of association offered by Hartley, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill.
According to Hartley, association which also means memory, reasoning, and learning were all connected with each other. Ideas and sensations occurred, in connection with each other. He proposed that repetition of ideas and sensations were essential for association. As child grows he gathers experiences, ideas, and sensations, which help in the development of connections of increasing complexity.
According to James Mill, the mind was just like a machine, and functions in the same mechanical way. With the association being automatic and passive the mind only reacted to external stimuli, and humans were incapable of acting spontaneously.
He believed that the ideas and sensations were only some kind of mental element. The association was mechanical, and ideas and sensations were merely the result of accumulation individual mental elements.
John Stuart Mill greatly differed from his father’s view. He sought mind as something that had an active part in the fusion of ideas. He said that higher order complex ideas did not add up from simpler processes. In fact, when these simple ideas combined, they gave a new product having qualities neither of the simpler elements had. This was called creative synthesis.