Page:Philosophical Review Volume 23.djvu/129

113 the presentations themselves. Both positions err in that they treat presentations as objects, for the presentation is inseparable from the process of apprehending itself. The peculiarities of the facts of attention are only to be understood by reference to the simpler and more primordial processes of mind. Attention arises as a complicated and highly developed modification of the fundamental process of apprehension and is largely of the nature of a habit. The elementary components of mind are acts of apprehension which come later to be distinguished as sense-qualities, as sense-feelings, or as impulses or strivings which find a terminus in bodily movement. In the simplest form of psychic life, some discrimination or comparison is involved. In fact, there are infinitely various specific modes of such discrimination in the course of mental evolution. On this view of attention, we may distinguish in the process three characteristics: (a) a selection of certain features within the field of what is apprehended; (b) the increased clearness and distinctness of the content attended to; (c) experiences in the form of feeling-tone that precede or accompany the attitude of attending. As a result of this last, the content is detained for a time before the mind and an opportunity is given for the establishment of associations between this and other contents and for easy and rapid reproductions of the content in the form of images. Clearness and distinctness are produced, neither by a mere increase of mental energy directed upon a content, nor by a mutual interplay of presentations, conflicting with and reinforcing one another, but by the gradual discrimination within a vague, ill-differentiated whole of certain characteristic marks in a given content. If sense-contents are accompanied by movement, or if they incite pleasurable or painful feelings, they will retain a more prominent place in consciousness. Secondary attention may be accounted for on the same general principles as primary. Secondary attention depends more on the connection of a given content with the past experience of the subject than upon the absolute vividness of presentation. The range of this type of attention varies greatly with the successive stages in the development of mind. The special features that call for explanation in the higher forms of attention, known as voluntary or deliberate, follow naturally from the varying circumstances that appear in the course of mental development. Volition and the consciousness of self arise chiefly through progressively co-ordinated sense-experiences which are concomitants of bodily movements. At the same time, the mental activity involved in feelings of strain or effort is only a part of the whole activity of apprehending.

The neo-positivist school proposes to make of sociology an autonomous and rigorously abstract science, and to revise all the chief sociological terms. The hitherto obscure idea of progress is treated by this school as belonging to the sociology of action. The subject-matter of the sociology of action is