Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/78

 PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES, (ill.) 65 this change brings about bodily movements, whereby, sooner or later and more or less indirectly, pleasurable sensations are reinforced or prolonged ; at a later stage such change seems to lead directly to an increase in the intensity and fixation of some selected portion of the ideational train. As to the bodily movements, these, wherever observation is possible, seem to result from a concentration of attention upon the idea of the movement, or generally upon what the writer has ventured to speak of as the motor continuum. As to the intellectual movements, these seem with equal certainty to result from a concentration of attention upon the second variety of what Mr. Bradley calls the idea of an idea viz., that "the reality of which is my psychical state as I have this idea" (MiND, xi. 313). But such an idea it is contended is also, psychologically, a motor idea, though its physiological counterpart is almost certainly not in any sense a muscular movement. But changes in the distribution of attention, it may be objected, are just what we have in non-voluntary attention : these are just the changes that the ordinary psychological law will explain. Precisely ; but the distinctive peculiarity of voluntary attention is a change in the distribution of attention as regards motor presentations, the effect of which change is a change in the intensity of what were the objects of non- voluntary attention. Unless then it can be said that pleasure and pain are a species of idea, and unless, further, it can be shown that the sequence of movement on feeling is like the sequence of (say) thunder and lightning, a merely physical fact, we must look beyond the psycho-dynamical laws of association, fusion, &c., for an explanation of what the writer has called subjective selection or interest. And if this be so, it is not enough for psychology to recognise no kind of " activity at all beyond the common processes of redintegration and, blending " (MiND, xi. 316). L How the intensity that presentations have apart from volition is- related to that which they have by means of it how the objective component is related to the subjective, is a hard problem ; still there is no gain in a spurious simplicity that ignores the difference. But there is still one point raised by Mr. Bradley's very acute criticisms which ought not to be left unnoticed. He seems to allow the possibility that a psychical event which 1 Of course it must not be forgotten that the state of integration and coalition, in which given presentations may exist at a certain stage, is- largely the result of previous acts of voluntary attention, though afterwards- independent of such acts. 5