Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/478

 MB. JAMES WARD'S "PSYCHOLOGY". 477 between immediate and mediate interest ; between the pleasure (or relief from pain) involved in the act itself, and the prospective pleasure or relief operating as a motive. The first is the voluntary impulse in its purest, most primitive and perennial aspect ; to hug a pleasant idea is as purely instinctive and untaught as anything can be ; the higher apparatus of the will as expressed by resolution, deliberation, purpose has no part in it. Now, we may undoubtedly apply the word ' attention ' to this instinctive mode ; but the process is more usually described by such words as ' attraction,' ' arrest,' ' fascination/ ' irresistible charm,' and so forth. It is in the second class of impulses, where a prospective motive is at work, that the word attention is most characteristically employed : the case of a thing that has no charms in itself, and where we are induced to dwell upon it by some extraneous or remote consideration. Such is ' Attention ' in the school and in the army. As to the use that Mr. Ward makes of Attention in his theory of pleasure and pain, a much more lengthened consideration would be necessary than I can give to it here. There is another point to consider before we bring forward a change in scientific nomenclature. We ought first to show that it is wanted, and next, take the measure of our own influence or persuasive power for getting it adopted. A multitude of conflicting renderings of well- known facts is an evil, although, it may be, a necessary evil. As regards the formidable enlargement of the sphere of meaning to be given to the word Attention, we certainly desiderate more reasons for the change than, as far as I am aware, have been as yet supplied. Nevertheless, to speak of the paper as a whole, the author's handling of the topics he has overtaken will reward the most careful study. There is force in everything that he advances ; and, for my own part, I have been always instructed, and often convinced, by the arguments in favour of his positions, whether new or old. The form of the treatise, as it now stands in the Encydopcedia, has obvious disadvantages. When the matters excluded by the narrow limits are filled in, when the illustration of the whole is duly expanded, and when, finally, the exposition of subtleties is transferred from brevier to pica, Mr. Ward will have produced a work entitled to a place among the masterpieces of the philosophy of the human mind.