Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/306

No. 43.] QULY, 1886. MIND A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. I. IS THEEE ANY SPECIAL ACTIVITY OF ATTENTION ? By F. H. BRADLEY. THE question I have placed at the head of this article may serve to define its subject-matter. Is Attention, so far as it is psychical activity, an original element, and is there any specific function of attention ? The strict result of the English analytical school would give a negative answer to both these questions. With that denial I agree, and I have not been able to find sufficient reason to doubt its truth. Active attention is not primary, either as being there from the first or as supervening, but is a derivative product. Nor again, I should add, is there any one special activity at all, but various activities, if they lead to one result, are called attending. This is the doctrine which the paper is written to defend, or rather to press upon the reader's notice. The whole subject is so difficult and is so impli- cated with other branches of psychology, that to treat of it fully is not possible here, even if in my case it were possible anywhere. My chief object is to record a kind of protest. I observe a tendency to break up the life of the soul, to divide it into active and passive factors, or to suppose a passive beginning with a supervening activity, the latter by 21