Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/544

532 highly developed, abundantly illustrate this fact. For example when E's attention, during the last days of experimentation, wandered too far away from the process the writing stopped. The inability to continue the writing was not, however, due to "any less attention to the details" but to "lack of attention to the general situation." R reports that all that is required to keep up the proper movements is a certain general "direction of attention" or "general attitude," and that if this is maintained the details take care of themselves.

But if the details as such receive no attention how is it that mistakes are recognized immediately after they occur, a fact which was often noticed? If a wrong movement is recognized, it must rise to the level of consciousness as a distinct movement, and this is precisely what happens. When the movements run off correctly and smoothly we have a condition which Hobhouse well describes when he says that the "crude sensation has assimilated certain characteristics which, if disentangled, form the contents of ideas, but which are not disentangled as long as they are assimilated. Prominent among these are motor-impulses. We may call them acquired sense impulses, and say that the present stage of assimilated experience postulates sensations and feelings as its data and produces acquired sense impulses passing into habit as its result." (Mind in Evolution, p. 101.) But the sensations from wrong movements have not acquired the idea 'characters' and the 'motor impulses' that characterize the sensations from correct movements and hence at once rise to the level of distinct consciousness. They are instantly disentangled from the other contents of the "set," for they never really belonged to the "set," and being alien to it, at once attract attention when they appear. It is therefore clear that the muscular sensation or after-image of the correct movement is quite a different thing from the muscular sensation or after-image of the wrong movement. The former is reacted to as a sensation in peripheral consciousness, if conscious at all, the latter gives rise to a focal idea which calls for a special reaction. The former appears as an unnoticed element in a consciousness acting as an accompaniment or mere spectator, while the latter immediately gives rise to a consciousness acting as a "guide" for each detail.

Attention to details invariably made the writing more difficult after the "set" was established. The general principle seems therefore to hold, so far as voluntary movement is concerned, that consciousness exists only to get rid of itself, and that when once rid of itself the adjusted movement runs