The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

" A child refuses to read; he is incapable of keeping his mind fixed on the letters, which have no attraction for him; but he looks with avid ity upon the pictures contained in a book. * What do they mean ? ' he asks. The father replies: ' When you can read, the book will tell you.' After several colloquies like this, the child resigns himself and falls to work, first slackly, then the habit grows, and finally he shows an ardor which has to be restrained. This is a case of the genesis of voluntary attention. An artificial and indirect desire has to be grafted on a natu ral and direct one. Reading has no immediate attractiveness, but it has a borrowed one, and that is enough. The child is caught in the wheelwork, the first step is made."

"A child of six years, habitually prone to mind^wandering, sat down one day to the piano of his own accord to repeat an air by which his mother had been charmed. His exercises lasted an hour. The same child at the age of seven, seeing his brother busy with tasks in vacation, went and sat at his father's desk. ' What are you doing there ? ' his nurse said, surprised at so finding him. ' I am,' said the child, 'learning a page of German; it isn't very amusing, but it is for an agreeable surprise to mamma.' "

Here, again, a birth of voluntary attention, grafted this time on a sympathetic instead of a selfish sentiment like that of the first example. The piano, the German, awaken no spontaneous attention ; but they arouse and maintain it by borrowing a force from elsewhere.* Second, take that mind-wandering which at a later age may trouble us whilst reading or listening to a discourse. If attention be the reproduction of the sensation from within, the habit of reading not merely with the eye, and of listen ing not merely with the ear, but of articulating to one's self the words seen or heard, ought to deepen one's attention to the latter. Experience shows that this is the case. I can keep my wandering mind a great deal more closely upon a conversation or a lecture if I actively re-echo to myself the words than if I simply hear them ; and I find a number of my students who report benefit from voluntarily adopting a similar course, t

Second, a teacher wlio wishes to engage the attention of his class must knit his novelties on to things of which they already have preperceptions. The old and familiar is readily at tended to by the mind and helps to hold in turn the new, forming, in Herbartian phraseology, an * Apperceptionsmasse ' for it. Of course it is in every case a very delicate problem to know what ' Apperceptionsmasse ' to use. Psychology can only lay down the general rule.

When, a few pages back, I symbolized the ' ideational preparation' element in attention by a brain-cell played upon from within, I added ' by other brain-cells, or by some spiritual force,' without deciding which. The ques tion ' which ?' is one of those central psychologic mys teries which part the schools. When we reflect that the turnings of our attention form the nucleus of our inner self; when we see (as in the chapter on the Will we shall see) that volition is nothing but attention ; when we believe that our autonomy in the midst of nature depends on our not being pure effect, but a cause, —

Principium quoddam quod fati feeder a rumpat, Ex infinite ne causam causa sequatur — f Repetition of this sort does not confer intelligence of what is said, it only keeps the mind from wandering into other channels. The intelligence sometimes comes in beats, as it were, at the end of sentences, or in the midst of words which were mere words until then. See above, p 281. we must admit that the question whether attention involve such a principle of spiritual activity or not is metaphysical as well as psychological, and is well worthy of all the pains we can bestow on its solution. It is in fact the pivotal question of metaphysics, the very hinge on which our picture of the world shall swing from materialism, fatalism, monism, towards spiritualism, freedom, pluralism, — or else the other way.

It goes back to the automaton-theory. If feeling is an inert accompaniment, then of course the brain-cell can be played upon only by other braincells, and the attention which we give at any time to any subject, whether in the form of sensory adaptation or of ' preperception,' is the fatally predetermined effect of exclusively material laws. If, on the other hand, the feeling which coexists with the brain-cells' activity reacts dynamically upon that activity, furthering or checking it, then the attention is in part, at least, a cause. It does not necessarily follow, of course, that this reactive feeling should be ' free ' in the sense of having its amount and direction undetermined in advance, for it might very well be predetermined in all these par ticulars. If it were so, our attention would not be ma terially determined, nor yet would it be 'free' in the sense of being spontaneous or unpredictable in advance. The question is of course a purely speculative one, for we have no means of objectively ascertaining whether our feel ings react on our nerve-processes or not; and those who answer the question in either way do so in consequence of general analogies and presumptions drawn from other fields. As mere conceptions, the effect-theory and the causetheory of attention are equally clear ; and whoever affirms either conception to be true must do so on metaphysical or universal rather than on scientific or particular grounds.

As regards immediate sensorial attention hardly any one is tempted to regard it as anything but an effect.* We * The reader will please observe that I am saying all that can possibly be said in favor of the effecttheory, since, inclining as I do myself to the cause-theory, 1 do not want to undervalue the enemy. As a matter of fact, one might begin to take one's stand against the effect theory at the outset, with the phenomenon of immediate sensorial attention. One

are ' evolved 'so as to respond to special stimuli by special accommodative acts which produce clear perceptions on the one hand in us, and on the other hand such feelings of inner activity as were above described. The accommoda tion and the resultant feeling are the attention. We don't bestow it, the object draws it from us. The object has the initiative, not the mind. Derived attention, ivhere there is no voluntary effort, seems also most plausibly to be a mere effect. The object again takes the initiative and draws our attention to itself, not by reason of its own intrinsic interest, but because it is connected with some other interesting thing. Its brainprocess is connected with another that is either excited, or tending to be excited, and the liability to share the excite ment and become aroused is the liability to 'preperception' in which the attention consists. If I have received an insult, I may not be actively thinking of it all the time, yet the thought of it is in such a state of heightened iiritability, that the place where I received it or the man who inflicted it cannot be mentioned in my hearing without my attention bounding, as it were, in that direction, as the im agination of the whole transaction revives. Where such a stirring-up occurs, organic adjustment must exist as well, and the ideas must innervate to some degree the muscles. Thus the whole process of involuntary derived attention is

might say that attention causes the movements of adjustment of the eyes, for example, and is not merely their effect. Hering writes most emphati cally to this effect : " The movements from one point of fixation to another are occasioned aud regulated by the changes of place of the attention. When an object, seen at first indirectly, draws our attention to itself, the corresponding movement of the eye follows without further ado, as a con sequence of the attention's migration and of our effort to make the object distinct. The wandering of the attention entails that of the fixation point. Before its movement begins, its goal is already in consciousness and grasped by the attention, and the location of this spot in the total space seen is what determines the direction and amount of the movement of the eye." (Hermann's Handbtich, p. 534.) I do not here insist on this, because it is hard to tell whether the attention or the movement comes lirst (Ber ing's reasons, pp. 535-6, also 544-6, seem to me ambiguous), and because, even if the attention to the object does come first, it may be a mer 2 effect of stimulus and association. Mach's theory that the will to look is the spacefeeling itself may be compared with Bering's in this place. See JMach's Beitrilge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1886), pp. 55 ff.

accounted for if we grant that there is something interest ing enough to arouse and fix the thought of whatever may be connected with it. This fixing is the attention ; and it carries with it a vague sense of activity going on, and of acquiescence, furtherance, and adoption, which makes us feel the activity to be our own. This reinforcement of ideas and impressions by the pre existing contents of the mind was what Herbart had in mind when he gave the name of apperceptive attention to the variety we describe. We easily see now why the lover's tap should be heard — it finds a nerve-centre half ready in ad vance to explode. We see how we can attend to a com panion's voice in the midst of noises which pass unnoticd though objectively much louder than the words we hear. Each word is doMy awakened ; once from without by the lips of the talker, but already before that from within by the premonitory processes irradiating from the previous words, and by the dim arousal of all processes that are connected with the ' topic ' of the talk. The irrelevant noises, on the other hand, are awakened only once. They form an unconnected train. The boys at school, inatten tive to the teacher except when he begins an anecdote, and then all pricking up their ears, are as easily explained. The words of the anecdote shoot into association with ex citing objects which react and fix them ; the other words do not. Similarly with the grammar heard by the purist and Herbart's other examples quoted on page 418.

Even where the attention is voluntary, it is possible to conceive of it as an effect, and not a cause, a product and hot an agent, The things we attend to come to us by their own laws. Attention creates no idea ; an idea must already bo there before we can attend to it. Attention only fixes and retains what the ordinary laws of association bring ' be fore the footlights ' of consciousness. But the moment we admit this we see that the attention per se, the feeling of at tending need no more fix and retain the ideas than it need bring them. The associates which bring them also fix them by the interest which they lend. In short, voluntary and involuntary attention may be essentially the same. It is true that where the ideas are intrinsically very unwelcome

and the effort to attend to them is great, it seems to us as if the frequent renewal of the effort were the very cause by which they are held fast, and we naturally think of the ef fort as an original force. In fact it is only to the effort to attend, not to the mere attending, that we are seriously tempted to ascribe spontaneous power. We think we cart make more of it ifiue will ; and the amount which we make does not seem a fixed function of the ideas themselves, as it would necessarily have to be if our effort were an effect and not a spiritual force. But even here it is possible to conceive the facts mechanically and to regard the effort as a mere effect.

Effort is felt only where there is a conflict of interests in the mind. The idea A may be iDtrinsically exciting to us. The idea Z may derive its interest from association with some remoter good. A may be our sweetheart, Z may be some condition of our soul's salvation. Under these circumstances, if we succeed in attending to Z at all it is always with expenditure of effort. The ' ideational prepararation,' the ' preperception ' of A keeps going on of its own accord, whilst that of Z needs incessant pulses of voluntary reinforcement — that is, we have the feeling of voluntary re inforcement (or effort) at each successive moment in which the thought of Z flares brightly up in our mind. Dynami cally, however, that may mean only this : that the associa tive processes which make Z triumph are really the stronger, and in A's absence would make us give a * passive ' and unimpeded attention to Z ; but, so long as A is present, some of of their force is used to inhibit the processes con cerned with A. Such inhibition is a partial neutralization of the brain-energy which would otherwise be available for fluent thought. But what is lost for thought is con verted into feeling, in this case into the peculiar feeling of effort, difficulty, or strain.

The stream of our thought is like a river. On the whole easy simple flowing predominates in it, the drift of things is with the pull of gravity, and effortless attention is the rule. Biit at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other way. If a real river could feel, it Avould feel these eddies and set-backs as places of effort. "I am here flowing, "it would say, "in the direction of greatest resistance, instead of flowing, as usual, in the direction of least. My effort is what enables me to per form this feat." Really, the effort would only be a passive in dex that the feat was being performed. The agent would all the while be the total downward drift of the rest of the water, forcing some of it upwards in this spot ; and although, on the average, the direction of least resistance is downwards, that would be no reason for its not being upwards now and then. Just so with our voluntary acts of attention. They are momentary arrests, coupled with a peculiar feel ing, of portions of the stream. But the arresting force, instead of being this peculiar feeling itself, may be nothing but the processes by which the collision is produced. The feeling of effort may be ' an accompaniment,' as Mr. Brad ley says, ' more or less superfluous,' and no more contribute to the result than the pain in a man's finger, when a ham mer falls on it, contributes to the hammer's weight. Thus the notion that our effort in attending is an original faculty, a force additional to the others of which brain and mind are the seat, may be an abject superstition. Attention may have to go, like many a faculty once deemed essential, like many a verbal phantom, like many an idol of the tribe. It may be an excrescence on Psychology. No need of it to drag ideas before consciousness or fix them, when we see how perfectly they drag and fix each other there.

I have stated the effect-theory as persuasively as I can.* ' It is a clear, strong, well-equipped conception, and like all such, is fitted to carry conviction, wrhere there is no con trary proof. The feeling of effort certainly may be an inert accompaniment and not the active element which it seems. No measurements are as yet performed (it is safe to say none ever will be performed) which can show that it con tributes energy to the result. We may then regard atten tion as a superfluity, or a 'Luxus,' and dogmatize against

* F. H. Bradley, " Is there a Special Activity of Attention ?" in ' Mind,' xi. 305, and Lipps, Gruudtatsachen, chaps, iv and xxix, have stated it similarly. its causal function with no feeling in our hearts but one of pride that we are applying Occam's razor to an entity that has multiplied itself ' beyond necessity.' But Occam's razor, though a very good rule of method, is certainly no law of nature. The laws of stimulation and of association may well be indispensable actors in all at tention's performances, and may even be a good enough ' stock-company ' to carry on many performances without aid ; and yet they may at times simply form the background for a ' star-performer,' who is no more their ' inert accompa niment ' or their ' incidental product ' than Hamlet is Horatio's and Ophelia's. Such a star-performer would be the voluntary effort to attend, if it were an original psychic force. Nature may, I say, indulge in these complications ; and the conception that she has done so in this case is, I think, just as clear (if not as ' parsimonious ' logically) as the conception that she has not. To justify this assertion, let us ask just what the effort to attend would effect if it ivere an original force.

It would deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable ideas which else would fade more quickly away. The delay thus gained might not be more than a second in duration — but that second might be critical ; for in the constant rising and falling of considerations in the mind, where two associated systems of them are nearly in equilibrium it is often a matter of but a second more or less of attention at the outset, whether one system shall gain force to occupy the field and develop itself, and exclude the other, or be excluded itself by the other. When devel oped, it may make us act ; and that act may seal our doom. When we come to the chapter on the Will, we shall see that the whole drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas may receive. But the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago. This appearance, which makes life and history tingle with such a tragic zest, may not be an illusion. As we grant to

the advocate of the mechanical theory that it may be one, so he must grant to us that it may not. And the result is two conceptions of possibility face to face with no facts definitely enough known to stand as arbiter between them. Under these circumstances, one can leave the question open whilst waiting for light, or one can do what most spec ulative minds do, that is, look to one's general philosophy to incline the beam. The believers in mechanism do so without hesitation, and they ought not to refuse a similar privilege to the believers in a spiritual force. I count my self among the latter, but as my reasons are ethical they are hardly suited for introduction into a psychological work.* The last word of psychology here is ignorance, for the ' forces ' engaged are certainly too delicate and numerous to be followed in detail. Meanwhile, in view of the strange arrogance with which the wildest materialistic speculations persist in calling themselves ' science,' it is well to recall just what the reasoning is, by which the effect-theory of attention is confirmed. It is an argument from analogy, drawn from rivers, reflex actions and other material phe nomena where no consciousness appears to exist at all, and extended to cases where consciousness seems the phenom enon's essential feature. The consciousness doesn't count> these reasoners say ; it doesn't exist for science, it is nil ; you mustn't think about it at all. The intensely reckless character of all this needs no comment. It is making the me chanical theory true per fas aut nefas. For the sake of that theory we make inductions from phenomena to others that are startlingly unlike them ; and we assume that a compli cation which Nature has introduced (the presence of feeling and of effort, namely) is not worthy of scientific recognition at all.

Such conduct may conceivably be wise, though I doubt it ; but scientific, as contrasted with metaphysical, it cannot seriously be called, f * More will be said of the matter when we come to the chapter on the Will. f See. for a defence of the notion of inward activity, Mr. J times Ward's searching articles in ' Mind,' xn. 45 ami 564. Having spoken fully of attention, let me add a word about inattention. We do not notice the ticking of the clock, the noise of the city streets, or the roaring of the brook near the house; and even the din of a foundry or factory will not mingle with the thoughts of its workers, if they have been there long enough. When we first put on spectacles, especially if they be of certain curvatures, the bright reflec tions they give of the windows, etc., mixing with the field of view, are very disturbing. In a few days we ignore them altogether. Various entoptic images, muscce volitantes, etc., although constantly present, are hardly ever known. The pressure of our clothes and shoes, the beating of our hearts and arteries, our breathing, certain steadfast bodily pains, habitual odors, tastes in the mouth, etc., are examples from other senses, of the same lapse into unconsciousness of any too unchanging content — a lapse which Hobbes has ex pressed in the well-known phrase, "Semper idem sentire ac non sentire ad idem revertunt."

The cause of the unconsciousness is certainly not the mere blunting of the sense-organs. Were the sensation important, we should notice it well enough ; and we can at any moment notice it by expressly throwing our attention upon it,* provided it have not become so inveterate that in attention to it is ingrained in our very constitution, as in the case of the muscce, volitantes the double retinal images, etc. But even in these cases artificial conditions of observation and patience soon give us command of the impression which we seek. The inattentiveness must then be a habit grounded on higher conditions than mere sensorial fatigue.

* It must be admitted that some little time will often elapse before this effort succeeds. As a child, I slept in a nursery with a very loud-ticking clock, and remember my astonishment more than once, on listening for its tick, to find myself unable to catch it for what seemed a long space of time; then suddenly it would break into my consciousness with an almost startling loudness.— M. Delbceuf somewhere narrates how, sleeping in the country near a mill-dam, he woke in the night and thought the water had ceased to flow, but on looking out of the open window saw it flowing in the moonlight, and then heard it too.

Helmholtz has formulated a general law of inattention which we shall have to study in the next chapter but one. Helmholtz's law is that we leave all impressions un noticed which are valueless to us as signs by which to dis criminate things. At most such impressions fuse with their consorts into an aggregate effect. The upper partial tones which make human voices differ make them differ as wholes only — we cannot dissociate the tones themselves. The odors which form integral parts of the characteristic taste of certain substances, meat, fish, cheese, butter, wine, do not come as odors to our attention. The various muscular and tactile feelings that make up the perception of the attributes * wet,' ' elastic,' ' doughy,' etc., are not singled out separately for what they are. And all this is due to an in veterate habit we have contracted, of passing from them immediately to their import and letting their substantive nature alone. They have formed connections in the mind which it is now difficult to break ; they are constituents of processes which it is hard to arrest, and which differ alto gether from what the processes of catching the attention would be. In the cases Helmholtz has in mind, not only we but our ancestors have formed these habits. In the cases we started from, however, of the mill-wheel, the spectacles, the factory, din, the tight shoes, etc., the habits of inattention are more recent, and the manner of their genesis seems susceptible, hypothetically at least, of being traced.

How can impressions that are not needed by the intel lect be thus shunted off from all relation to the rest of consciousness ? Professor G. E. Miiller has made a plausi ble reply to this question, and most of what follows is borrowed from him.* He begins with the fact that " When we first come out of a mill or factory, in which we have re mained long enough to get wonted to the noise, we feel as if something were lacking. Our total feeling of existence is different from what it was when we were in the mill. ... A friend writes to me : 'I have in my room a little clock which does not run quite twenty-four hours with out winding. In consequence of this, it often stops. So soon as this happens, I notice it, whereas I naturally fail to notice it when going.

When this first began to happen, there was this modification : I sud denly felt an undefined uneasiness or sort of void, without being able to say what was the matter ; and only after some consideration did I find the cause in the stopping of the clock.' " That the stopping of an unfelt stimulus may itself be felt is a well-known fact : the sleeper in church who wakes when the sermon ends ; the miller who does the same when his wheel stands still, are stock examples. ISow (since every impression falling on the nervous system must propa gate itself somewhither), Miiller suggests that impressions which come to us when the thought-centres are preoccupied with other matters may thereby be blocked or inhibited from invading these centres, and may then overflow into lower paths of discharge. And he farther suggests that if this process recur often enough, the side-track thus created will grow so permeable as to be used, no matter what may be going on in the centres above. In the acquired inat tention mentioned, the constant stimulus always caused disturbance at first ; and consciousness of it was extruded successfully only when the brain was strongly excited about other things. Gradually the extrusion became easier, and at last automatic.

The side-tracks which thus learn to draft off the stimu lations that interfere with thought cannot be assigned with any precision. They probably terminate in organic pro cesses, or insignificant muscular contractions which, when stopped by the cessation of their instigating cause, immedi ately give us the feeling that something is gone from our existence (as Miiller says), or (as his friend puts it) tlie feel ing of a void.* Miiller's suggestion awakens another. It is a wellknown fact that persons striving to keep their attention on a difficult subject will resort to movements of various un meaning kinds, such as pacing the room, drumming with the fingers, playing with keys or watch-chain, scratching

* I have begun to inquire experimentally whether any of the measurable functions of the workmen change after the din of machinery stops at a workshop. So fur I have found no constant results as regards either pulse, breathing, or strength of squeeze by the hand. I hope to prosecute the in quiry farther (May, 1890). head, pulling mustache, vibrating foot, or what not, accord ing to the individual. There is an anecdote of Sir W. Scott, when a boy, rising to the head of his class by cutting off from the jacket of the usual head-boy a button which the latter was in the habit of twirling in his fingers during the lesson. The button gone, its owner's power of reciting also departed. — Now much of this activity is unquestionably due to the overflow of emotional excitement during anxious and concentrated thought. It drains away nervecurrents which if pent up within the thought-centres would very likely make the confusion there worse confounded. But may it not also be a means of drafting off all the irrelevant sensations of the moment, and so keeping the attention more exclusively concentrated upon its inner task ? Each individual usually has his own peculiar habitual movement of this sort. A downward nerve-path is thus kept con stantly open during concentrated thought ; and as it seems to be a law of frequent (if not of universal) application, that incidental stimuli tend to discharge through paths that are already discharging rather than through others, the whole arrangement might protect the thought-centres from inter ference from without. Were this the true rationale of these peculiar movements, we should have to suppose that the sensations produced by each phase of the movement itself are also drafted off immediately by the next phase and help to keep the circular process agoing. I offer the suggestion for what it is worth ; the connection of the movements them selves with the continued effort of attention is certainly a genuine and curious fact.

IN Chapter VIII, p. 221, tlie distinction was drawn be tween two kinds of knowledge of things, bare acquaintance with them and knowledge about them. The possibility of two such knowledges depends on a fundamental psychical peculiarity which may be entitled " the principle of constancy in the mind's meanings" and which may be thus expressed : " The same matters can be thought of in successive portions of the mental stream, and some of these portions can know that they mean the same matters which the other portions meant." One might put it otherwise by saying that " the mind can always intend, and know ivhen it intends, to think of the Same."

This sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking. We saw in Chapter X how the conscious ness of personal identity reposed on it, the present thought finding in its memories a warmth and intimacy which it recognizes as the same warmth and intimacy it now feels. This sense of identity of the knowing subject is held by some philosophers to be the only vehicle by which the world hangs together. It seems hardly necessary to say that a sense of identity of the known object would perform exactly the same unifying function, even if the sense of subjective identity were lost. And without the intention to think of the same outer things over and over again, and the sense that we were doing so, our sense of our own personal sameness would carry us but a little way towards making a universe of our experience.

Note, however, that we are in the first instance speak ing of the sense of sameness from the point of view of the mind's structure alone, and not from the point of view of the universe. We are psychologizing, not philosophizing, That is, we do not care whether there be any real sameness in things or not, or whether the mind be true or false in its assumptions of it. Our principle only lays it down that the mind makes continual use of the notion of sameness, and if deprived of it, would have a different structure from what it has. In a word, the principle that the mind can mean the Same is true of its meanings, but not necessarily of aught besides.* The mind must conceive as possible that the Same should be before it, for our experience to be the sort of thing it is. Without the psychological sense of identity, sameness might rain down upon us from the outer world for ever and we be none the wiser. With the psy chological sense, on the other hand, the outer world might be an unbroken flux, and yet we should perceive a repeated experience. Even now, the world may be a place in which the same thing never did and never will come twice. The thing we mean to point at may change from top to bottom and we be ignorant of the fact. But in our meaning itself we are not deceived ; our intention is to think of the same. The name which I have given to the principle, in calling it the law of constancy in our meanings, accentuates its sub jective character, and justifies us in laying it down as the most important of all the features of our mental structure. Not all psychic life need be assumed to have the sense of sameness developed in this way. In the consciousness of worms and polyps, though the same realities may fre quently impress it, the feeling of sameness may seldom emerge. We, however, running back and forth, like spiders on the web they weave, feel ourselves to be working over identical materials and thinking them in different ways. And the man who identifies the materials most is held to have the most philosophic human mind.