this increase of intensity and that which is owing to a higher power of the external stimulus: it seems indeed to come from within, and to indicate a certain attitude adopted by the intellect. But just here begins the difficulty, for the idea of an intellectual attitude is not a clear idea. Psychologists will here speak of a 'concentration of the mind,'[1] or again of an 'apperceptive'[2] effort to bring perception into the field of distinct intelligence. Some of them, materializing this idea, will suppose a higher tension of cerebral energy,[3] or even the setting free of a certain amount of central energy which reinforces the stimulation received.[4] But either the fact observed psychologically is merely translated thereby into a physiological symbolism which seems to us even less clear, or else we always come back to a metaphor.
Stage by stage we shall be led on to define attention as an adaptation of the body rather than of the mind, and to see in this attitude of consciousness mainly the consciousness of an attitude. Such is the position assumed by Ribot[5] in the discussion, and, though it has been attacked,[6]
- ↑ Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, vol. i, p. 247.
- ↑ Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, vol. iii, p. 331 et seq.
- ↑ Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, p. 299. Cf. Bastian, Les processus nerveux dans l'attention (Revue Philosophique, vol. xxxiii, p. 360 et seq.).
- ↑ W. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. i, p. 441.
- ↑ Psychologie de l'attention, Paris, 1889.
- ↑ Marillier, op. cit. Cf. J. Sully, The Psycho-physical Process in Attention (Brain, 1890, p. 154).
