Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/322

 IS THERE ANY SPECIAL ACTIVITY OF ATTENTION? 321 not show that these elements originate the feeling, and it ignores the distinction between a total emotion and its producing conditions which we mentioned above. I have not said that from self-expansion, however strong the ideas and sensations concerned, and however intense the pleasure and pain, would come the entire emotion of activity, strain, effort and success. Not only do the kinds of the elements involved make important differences, but there is a fresh result of internal sensations. This result, take, for instance, the sense we have of fatigue or elation, is exceedingly hard to decompose. It seems an obscure confusion or blending of organic sensations from a variety of sources, and I confess that at present I should not feel able to discuss it. I have mentioned it to point out that it does not concern us, for it is clearly no more than concomitant with, or sequent on, what we call activity. If we have hitherto found no revelation of energy, we need hardly look for its original message in this residual oracle of organic sensation. I have now said all that within present limits I can say on the psychical origin of our sense of activity, and of the meaning we might give to the term in psychology if so disposed, and I must hasten to bring these remarks to an end. But there is one point as to which I may fear misconstruction. It might possibly be said that physiology proves attention to be active, and that this settles the matter. Now of course I am not competent to speak physiologically. I have the sincerest respect for physio- logists. I believe them to be men as a class superior in ability to psychologists and surpassing them in devotion, and engaged on a subject to whose difficulties (it seems to me), those offered by psychology are in comparison trifling. But such a question as the existence of a psychical activity is a matter which falls outside physiology. We might get from that science instruction valuable and, in some par- ticulars, even necessary; but suppose that we knew (as I pre- sume we do not yet know) the physical side of the psychical process, is it certain that about the main question we should not be precisely where we are now '? For in the first place the existence of this or that feeling could hardly be deduced from physiological premisses if actual observation were unable to find it. And in the second place between a process in the brain and a consciousness of energy there is really a gulf which is not to be filled up. You may know from experi- ence that they are found together, but, given the first, you could never have got to the second, and they remain in the end quite heterogeneous. And so I venture to think that, 22