Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/303

NEW SERIES. No. 47.] []ULY, 1963. MIND A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGYAND PHILOSOPHY I. THE PHYSIOLOGICAL FACTORS OF THE ATTENTION-PROCESS (II.). 1 BY W. MCDOUGALL. THE WAKING STATE AS A CONDITION OF ATTENTION. THE mind is not always equally ready to react to impressions from without or to follow attentively its trains of ideas. From hour to hour and from moment to moment its degree of awakeness and alertness varies widely. At the zero- point of the scale of degrees of awakeness is the state of deep and dreamless sleep in which consciousness and atten- tion are absent or at a minimum. At the other end of the scale stand those rare moments of exaltation when, through some happy conjunction of internal and external conditions, the whole being, senses, intellect and emotions alike, seems to be raised to a higher plane of activity than the normal. 'Tis then we perceive new features in long familiar scenes, and objects long well known to us become strangely beautiful or significant, while the mind seizes with a joyful sense of power and ease the ideas that rise in a free and rapid stream. Between these extremes a large but indefinite number of degrees of awakeness might be distinguished. Very low in the scale stands the state of ordinary dream-consciousness. In my own case a dream usually consists of a series of visual images loosely and somewhat inconsequently grouped and having a certain low degree of emotional colouring. 1 For Part I. cf. MIND, N.S., No. 43. 19