Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/502

 490 EDMUND GUENEY : answer ' nothing,' and soon passes into the deeper stage with closed eyes, in which, though still able for a brief period to respond to questions, he is insensible to any ordinary tactile stimuli. It would surely be irrational to refer that insensibility to the strong concentration in some unknown direction of an attention which, even in the previous ' alert state ' with open eyes, there was no ground for supposing to be active. I do not urge the cases of obvious reflex action (on which Prof. Stanley Hall has made some good re- marks in the paper already referred to), since on a theory like that of Herr Schneider, in which the lower centres, so far as they distinguish stimuli, are credited with an em- bryonic consciousness, the question might there be a mere question of words. The cases which I have in view are those where the results observed cannot, by any stretch of the meaning of attention, be reasonably connected either with the ' positive field ' i.e., with unusual absorption of the attention in the line of the result, whether as immedi- ately producing it or as inhibiting its opposite l or with the ' negative field,' where insensibility and irrational con- duct are the result of an unusual draining-off of attention from the ordinary sensory or ideational tracts into some other line. They are cases where, if we wish still to hypos- tatise attention, we must just say that it is paralysed or has fallen asleep. But such a mode of expression is not to be commended. For the sleep and paralysis may invade 1 I gather from some expressions of Prof. Stanley Hall on the subject of positive field may be further subdivided that the actual direction of con- centration may be not only towards the production, but towards the inhi- bition, of a particular mental phenomenon. This direct action of inhibition is hard to picture. The activity of active inhibition appears to me always to lie in a determined setting of the mind in some new direction: I mitigate a pain not by attending either to the pain or to an imagined absence of the pain, but by clenching my teeth and thinking of something else, i.e., by opening quite new channels of nervous energy. So when Prof. Stanley Hall inquires whether when a hand is made insensitive to pain, it is ' due to abnormally intense inhibition of sensation or motion by con- sciousness, or is better conceived as an entire detachment and vagrancy of attention from consciousness, of which it is conceived only as a concentra- tion,' I find a difficulty in admitting the possibility of the first alternative, as also, I must confess, in catching the meaning of the second. In the proposed case, at any rate, I should not myself see the necessity of having recourse to either. If the hand is rendered insensible in the ordinary by faint sensory stimuli, it is surely a case where the theory of direct physical inhibition of the lower sensory centre is exactly in place. The very different case where the manipulations employed do not produce any sensory stimuli at all, as where no contact is used and the arm is thickly enveloped in clothes, is one on which I shall have a word to say later.
 * active inhibition,' that he holds that the condition of the attention in this