Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/308

 IS THERE ANY SPECIAL ACTIVITY OF ATTENTION ? 307 if we here can be said to attend or are active in any sense. I think no one would say that we ourselves produced the tyranny of these assailants. Let us then go on to the states where we are certainly somehow active. When the ears are erected or the eyes opened or moved, and these reflex acts increase the power of one sensation against other mental elements, I do not know if we properly are said to attend. And, though there is a kind of " activity," yet assuredly there is here no active attention. For no psychical activity at all is present, or in any case none which produces the dominance of one mental element. Still, if the reader objects, I will not at present insist. He will agree that these reflexes are but one amongst other sorts of attention, and I will therefore pass on. We come next to a class where the activity is still muscu- lar, a muscular activity exerted upon a percipient organ directly, or indirectly as by turning the body. But in addi- tion we have here a preceding idea and (according to one view) a feeling which moves. A visible object for example suggests, indirectly or directly, ideas and feelings which lead to our fixing it, and that fixation makes the perception of the object predominant and steady. There are many stages in this class, and we shall all agree that in some of them we have an active attention. There is a question in fact whether attention is much more, and to that question we shall be obliged to return. We come next to a number of cases of attention where muscular activity seems not essential. But in all of these an idea must be present and appears to operate. A simple the fact of attention's always strengthening, partly on the ground that in that case it would falsify observation. But, in the first place, since strength of course is relative, the observed relation might for more than one reason remain unaltered. And, in the second place, there is a most important point to be considered, to which it seems to me that Stumpf has hardly done justice. This is the distinction between the strength of a perception as a psychical state and the strength which is perceived by means of the perception. If we consider ideas, it seems hopeless to contend that the idea (e.g.} of a strong or weak pleasure or pain must always itself be a strong or weak state of mind. Such an example as the tranquil recollection of a tooth-drawing would at once confute us. And if this is so with ideas, it will, I think, be so still when we come to perceptions. The difference between the state and its ideal content will hold good there also. It will be possible to have a perception of violence which itself is not violent, and of feebleness which itself is not weak. The degree will be a character distinguishable from and contained in the whole state of percep- tion, which latter mav in some other way vary in strength while the degree remains the same. But how this can be possible is a most difficult ques- tion with which I do not feel myself at present competent to deal.