Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/70

PSYCHOLOGICAL PKINCIPLES. (ill.) 57 times, it barely observes the train of ideas that succeed in the under- standing without directing and pursuing any of them ; and at other times, it lets them pass almost quite unregarded, as faint shadows that make no impression." Essay concerning Human Understanding, ii. 19, sec. 3. The last sentences of the next paragraph (sec. 4) are also interesting : " Since the mind can sensibly put on, at several times, several degrees of thinking [obviously here equivalent to attention in the section above], and be sometimes, even in a waking man, so remiss as to have thoughts dim and obscure to that degree that they are very little removed from none at all, and at last, in the dark retirement of sound sleep, loses the sight per- fectly of all ideas whatsoever ... I ask, whether it be not probable that thinking is the action, and not the essence of the soul ? Since the opera- tion of agents will easily admit of intention and remission ; but the essences of things are not conceived capable of any such variation." Locke then came very near indeed to a full and explicit recognition of attention in the sense which Prof. Bain scouts as an unwarranted change of nomenclature. But Hamilton comes nearer still ; and could he but have freed himself from the trammels of the old Scottish psychology the change of nomenclature which is here defended might have been made under better auspices and long ago. The following passages from his Lectures on Metaphysics may be put in as evidence : " But to view attention as a special act of intelligence, and to distinguish it from consciousness, is utterly inept ... we might, with equal justice, distinguish in the eye the adjustment of the pupil from the general organ of vision, as, in the mind, distinguish attention from consciousness as separate faculties. Attention is consciousness and something more ... it is consciousness concentrated (i. p. 237). ... It therefore appears to me the more correct doctrine to hold that there is no consciousness without attention without concentration but that attention is of three degrees or kinds. The first, a mere vital and irresistible act ; the second, an act de- termined by desire, which, though involuntary, may be resisted by our will ; the third, an act determined by a deliberate volition. An act of attention . . . seems thus necessary to every exertion of consciousness . . . [but] the mere vital or automatic act of attention has been refused the name ; and attention, in contradistinction to this mere automatic contraction, given to the two other degrees, of which however Reid only recognises the third. . . . The faculty of attention is not, therefore, a special faculty, but merely consciousness acting under the law of limitation to which it is subjected " (i. 248). That a writer for whom attention is only consciousness contracted or limited, and consciousness without such con- traction or limitation is consciousness no longer, should find it needful to talk both of acts of attention and exertions of consciousness, is but one more proof of the perturbing influence of a bad terminology. Locke, who wrote before consciousness had been allowed to run wild over the whole