It has been said that attention is a power of analysis, and it is true; but it has not been sufficiently shown how an analysis of this kind is possible, nor by what process we are able to discover in a perception that which could not be perceived in it at first. The truth is that this analysis is effected by a series of attempts at a synthesis, i.e. by so many hypotheses: our memory chooses, one after the other, various analogous images which it launches in the direction of the new perception. But the choice is not made at random. What suggests the hypotheses, what presides, even from afar, over the choice is the movement of imitation which continues the perception, and provides for the perception and for the images a common framework.
But, if this be so, the mechanism of distinct perception must be different from what itThus an attentive perception is a reflexion, on the present object, of chosen images from the past. is usually thought to be. Perception does not consist merely in impressions gathered, or even elaborated, by the mind. This is the case, at most, with the perceptions that are dissipated as soon as received, those which we disperse in useful actions. But every attentive perception truly involves a reflexion, in the etymological sense of the word, that is to say the projection, outside ourselves, of an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object on which it comes to mould itself. If, after having gazed at any object, we turn our eyes abruptly
