When we speak of a setting to an idea we are not entitled to think of it as a sharply defined group of ideas, or sharply limited subconscious process. When we identify it with the residua of past experiences we are not entitled, on the basis of exact knowledge, to arbitrarily make up a selected cluster of residua which shall exclude those and include these residual elements of antecedent associated experiences, and dogmatically postulate the composition of the complex which we call the setting. Analysis by the very limitations of the method fails to permit of such arbitrary selection, and synthetic methods are not sufficiently exact for the purpose. All we can say is that from the residua of various past experiences a complex is sifted out to become the setting. And even then no process is entirely autonomous and entirely removed from the interfering, directing, and coöperative influence of other processes. Even with simple and purely physiological processes, such as the knee jerk, this is true. Although the knee jerk may be schematically conceived as a simple reflex arc involving the peripheral nerves and the spinal cord, nevertheless other parts of the nervous system—the brain and the spinal cord—provide coöperative processes which take part, and under special conditions take a very active part, in modifying the phenomenon. While we are justified, for the clarifying purposes of exposition, in schematizing the phenomenon by selecting the spinal reflex as the predominant process, yet we do not overlook the coöperative processes which may control and modify the spinal reflex. If this is true of purely physiological processes, it is still more true of the enormously more complex processes of human intelligence. We may say, then, not only that with our present knowledge and our present methods we are not able to precisely differentiate the settings of ideas, but that it is highly improbable that settings as complexes of residua are with any preciseness functionally entirely autonomous and removed from the influence of other associative processes. We need further investigations into the psychology and processes of settings, and until we have wider and more exact knowledge it is well not to theorize and still more not to dogmatize. It is an inviting field which awaits the psychologist. ----- Footnote 183: In making the analysis, therefore, I was in no way antagonistic in my mind to the Freudian hypothesis. Footnote 184: