James Sully, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The mind is not furnished at birth with ready-made ideas; it is built up, out of the materials that sense supplies, by the great organizing principle of association.1 The infant begins with simple sensations and feelings; these, occurring together or in succession, cohere by contiguity, and the like calls up the like by similarity, until out of the elementary contents there grow perceptions, memories, trains of thought, the whole furniture of the developed mind.234
This is the tradition of Locke and Hume, of the Mills and of Bain, and I hold it because it explains, economically and without mysterious faculties, how experience makes the mind that has it. I do not deny the contribution of the nervous organization, nor the native dispositions the child brings; but the architecture of thought is raised by association working on the data of sense.
Give me sensation and the laws by which sensations cohere and reproduce one another, and I will show you the growth of intelligence without recourse to innate ideas or to powers that explain by naming.5
Here, it is evident, the philosophical discussion encroached on the psychological domain; and, in truth, Locke, when seeking to show that the infant mind is not furnished with ready-made ideas of God, and so forth, is really psychologising.The Human Mind Vol 2, pp. 351–352
PSYCHICAL ELEMENTS: SENSATIONS, ETC. We shall now proceed to trace more in detail the processes by which the several functional activities of the mind develop and give more and more complexity of form to the mental life. In doing this we must, it is evident, set out with the simplest known mental elements out of which the higher forms are elaborated.The Teachers Handbook of Psychology, pp. 90–91
This grouping goes on according to the Laws of Association. These laws will be fully discussed by and by. Here it is enough to say that the main law runs somewhat as follows: Two or more mental phenomena which have occurred together tend to recur together.Outlines of Psychology, pp. 50–51
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS: CONTIGUITY. 10. Reproduction as Effect of Suggestion. The general nature of association has already been discussed.1 So far, however, we have only been engaged with it in its more rudimentary form, that is to say, as the process by which presentative and representative elements are perfectly integrated and unified into percepts.The Human Mind Vol 1, pp. 294–295
Integration appears to include the results of grouping as just described. It is the classing 1 It is a point of some difficulty whether all processes of combination of psychical elements are properly included under the term ' association'. Wundt proposes thesis.Outlines of Psychology, pp. 51–52
Associationism was the dominant British theory of mind for two centuries and Sully gave it its last full and graceful English statement, but it was displaced from several directions. Wundtian and Titchenerian experimentalism moved the science from the analysis of the cultivated adult mind into the laboratory; Gestalt psychology argued that organized wholes are prior to and not built from elements, so that the associative building-up misdescribes perception; behaviorism recast association as stimulus-response conditioning while rejecting the introspective frame. Yet association did not simply vanish: associative learning is a robust phenomenon, and connectionist and modern cognitive science have restored association within a richer architecture. Sully's specific elementarist associationism is superseded; the insight that experience organizes the mind by association survives, transformed.