hold on A, the more we must relax our hold on B; but between the intension and the remission there is perfect continuity, and not a difference of kind. The activity of attention, we therefore conclude, is one. It is only in its relation to A and B that we are tempted to resolve it into a plurality of faculties, as, e.g., when the one is a sensation, the other a movement; or the one an 'impression,' the other an 'idea'; or again the one a relation of presentations inter se, the other their relation to the subject as pleasurable or painful; and so on.

'Attention' and Presentations: Presentationism.

§ 2. Of course as we have had repeatedly to urge, in disclaiming the Cartesian idealism-we do not attribute such diversities among objects to subjective activity. That will not account for the differences between sensation and movement, between presentation and re-presentation, nor for the revivability and associability of the latter; nor yet for the relations of presentations to each other or their worth for the subject itself. All objects-no matter what-must be 'there,' for, or be given to, the subject; they cannot be 'posited' by it—in other words they must be 'presented.' Such presentation affects the subject: herein lies its one primitive capacity-that of feeling. Feeling again implies but one primitive faculty-that of being conscious or attending. This is the subjective side of our 'irreducible minimum.' It is, however, not enough to stop here.

To produce conviction it is also desirable to shew directly that all the other 'faculties' with which a subject may be credited are resolvable into attention to as many classes or states or relations of the objects which are presented. The most striking difference that here confronts us is probably that between sensory and motor objects, which we have already noted as underlying the older, bi-partite division of mental 'powers' as respectively cognitive or receptive and conative or reactive. It will be well, then, to consider first of all, how far our position holds good here. This has been attempted already in the course of the preceding analysis; but perhaps a restatement in a somewhat different form may conduce to clearness. In as far as conation implies not merely action, overt or intended, but also motives, in so far also it contains an

element not resolvable into attention to motor presentations. This farther element, due to what is called 'the volitional character of feeling,' we may here leave aside. Apart from feeling as the direct spring of action, the question, then, is simply whether action in process is anything more than attention to a special class of objects.

To depart as little as may be from current usage and to avoid, as far as possible, the charge of presumptuous meddling with the sacred ark of words, the question may be put in this fashion: Are 'apperception' and 'innervation,' as they are sometimes called, in other words, are the receptive and reactive factors in consciousness-reducible to one (attention)? First of all, it is noteworthy that they have the same characteristics. Thus what Hamilton has called the law of limitation holds of each alike and of either with respect to the other; and it holds too not only of the number of presentations but also of the intensity. We can be absorbed in action just as much as in perception or thought; also movements, unless mechanical, inhibit ideas, and vice versâ ideas, other than associated trains, arrest movements. It is as impossible to lift a heavy weight and go on thinking as it is to scrutinise the dot on an i and go on thinking. Intoxication, hypnotism or insanity, rest or exhaustion, tell on apperception as well as on innervation. The control of thoughts equally with the control of movements requires 'effort'; and, as there is a 'strain' peculiar to intently listening or gazing, which is known to have a muscular concomitant, so too there is a strain equally characteristic of recollection and intellection, which probably has what is functionally equivalent to one. When movements have to be associated the same continuous attention is called for as is found requisite to associate sensory impressions: when such associations have become very intimate, dissociation is about equally difficult in both cases. The process of control is also, so far as we yet know, much the same: it is a process of direct repression in one direction, of alternative intensification in another, or a combination of both. One real difference there is, no doubt: movement may ensue through a concentration of attention on the idea of the movement. The like, it need hardly be said, does not hold of sensations; though in abnormal cases there is often a close approach to it. "If ifs and ans were pots and pans there'd be no trade for tinkers".

nay, more, there'd be no trade for movements of any sort, except so far as these were pleasurable in themselves. It is just this difference in the objects that makes all the difference in our attitude, but it is not a difference in the psychical activity concerned with them.

There is one striking fact that brings to light the underlying unity of apperception and innervation (i.e. of receptive and reactive consciousness) which was cited by Wundt for this very purpose. In what are called 'simple reaction-time' experiments it is found that if a warning signal precedes by a suitable interval the impression to be registered the reaction registering the impression is often instantaneous: the reaction-time, in other words, is nil. In such a case the subject is aware not of three separate acts, (1) apperceiving the impression, (2) reacting to it, (3) apperceiving the effect of the reaction it is distinctly conscious of one act and one only. The anticipatory idea of the impression to be perceived and the idea of the movement to be executed are so adjusted that, when the preliminary signal is given, the impression is realised and the movement actualised at once and together. Wundt called this relation of the two ideas a 'simultaneous association': the expression is scarcely a happy one, but at least the adjustment brought about is like an association, in so far as the two ideas are attended to as one complex. But that the two attitudes, the receptive and the reactive, whatever their fundamental sameness, are now at any rate-normally distinct though still ultimately identical is shewn by certain complex reaction' experiments, where, that is to say, the subject has to discriminate between different impressions and react in a prescribed but distinct manner to each. The time of the entire process was found approximately constant for the several persons reacting, but some discriminated quickly and responded slowly while others discriminated slowly and responded quickly. The expectant attitude in the one being primarily sensory in the other primarily motor, so that the one was less prepared for the second half of the trial and the other for the first2.

1 Physiologische Psychologie, 2nd edn., 1880, ii. p. 391. He now (cf. 6th edn., 1911, iii. 391) calls it a ‘brain-reflex,' which is hardly an improvement.

2 Cf. E. Tischer, Wundt's Philosophische Studien, i. (1883), pp. 537 f.; A. Pilzecker, Die Lehre v. d. sinnlichen Aufmerksamkeit, Diss. 1889, pp. 77 f.

Sensory attention we have described as primarily nonvoluntary and so far passive: attention here is not subjectively directed but objectively diverted. To be noticed or specially attended to, an impression-when not expected-must then, as we have already remarked, have more intensity the more attention is concentrated elsewhere, and in any case more intensity than would insure its recognition, if it were expected. The minimal-or, as it is technically called, the liminal-intensity that suffices in the latter case has to be exceeded, often greatly exceeded, in the former. What we may call 'the effective intensity' of a sensation then depends in part upon the attention it receives, and is not wholly determined by what we may perhaps call its 'inherent intensity' meaning by this the psychical concomitant of the neural excitation which immediately concerns the physiologist. This inherent intensity however sets an upper limit beyond which the effective intensity cannot increase1. And in this fact, that the effective intensity is, so to say, a function of two variables, we have, by the way, a further proof-if further proof were wanted-of the inadequacy of the doctrine that presentations are nothing but subjective modifications.

In like manner we have allowed that the retentiveness and associability of 'ideas' in the narrower sense, or re-presentations, pertain primarily to the objective factor in experience. Nevertheless in their actual, 'effective,' revival and association, attention, the subjective factor in experience, is all-essential : to quote Hamilton again, "it doubles all their efficiency and affords them a power of which they would otherwise be destitute." What we effectively retain and combine is just what we have attended to and no more.

Such combination or 'synthesis' is, as Kant was the first clearly to see, 'the indispensable condition, without which we should have no experience whatever.' Its recognition meant -and has proved to be the revolution of psychology.

It

1 Under the mistaken assumption that such increase is implied according to the view here maintained, which the majority of psychologists in fact accept, not a few have been led to call it in question. We shall return to the question later on. Cf. ch. v, § 4.

2 Cf. Critique, 1st edn., pp. 77 f. Max Müller's trans., pp. 68 f.

3 "The synthesizing principle, that for Hume had been the stone of stumbling impressed Kant as the fundamental principle of all knowledge-from the perceptior

dispenses us also at this stage from any further examination of faculties in detail; for synthesis underlies them all and attention is essential to effective synthesis.

But it is a matter of quite secondary importance what name we give to this common element of activity supposed to be present wherever we find psychical life. Provided the fact be recognised we shall not be long without an appropriate name for it. Meanwhile to call it 'attention' seems to do least violence to existing usage, and to have most precedents in its favour. The really important question is whether the contrast of Subject and Object is of such a fundamental character as to justify the resolution of psychological facts into two entirely distinct categories-the one subjective faculty or function of Action-under-Feeling or Consciousness on the one side, and a Field of Consciousness, consisting of Objects, Ideas or Presentations, on the other. The older psychologies, with their legion of faculties, were no doubt unscientific, just as were the older physics with their legion of forces or inherent powers. But modern physicists have not abandoned the older concept of 'forces' entirely they have merely substituted in their stead the exacter concept of energy. Some modern psychologists, however, have not been equally guarded; for they have rejected the concept of subjective activity altogether. They hold the doctrine here called Presentationism, and to this we must now turn for a moment; for, if this doctrine be true, our theory of attention will not hold.

The most important generalisations in psychology-as probably everybody will allow-are those included together as the Laws of Association. Now it was the Associationist psychology which in England gave the death-blow to the Scottish school with its interminable faculties; and a like fate befel the 'alte Vermögenstheorie' at the hands of the Herbartians in Germany. In the new psychology of presentations—' Psychologie ohne Seele,' as Lange called it-thus brought into vogue, we are asked to recognise only interaction of presentations inter se. Ideas, it was said, tend to attract or repel each other; they

of sense onwards up to the highest insight of the understanding." Höffding, Geschichte des neueren Philosophie, 1896, ii. p. 50. Cf. also the same writer's Psychologie, 3rd edn., 1901, pp. 90 f.

1 Geschichte des Materialismus, 11. Absch. iii, 3rd edn., p. 381.