Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/73

60 j. WARD : Prof. Bain calls motor currents, and not rather of certain afferent excitations. 1 In any case it is not with these pre- sentations, which accompany thinking and acting alike, but with effort in a still narrower sense that we are here con- cerned. It often requires more effort to make a slight exer- tion than a great one, much as it may require more effort to hear a faint sound than to hear a loud one. In this sense of mental effort or concentration, if one might venture a physio- logical guess on the strength of psychological data, it may turn out that both in apperception and in innervation the nerve-currents are what Prof. Bain calls motor, whether their function be comparable to that of accelerator, or to that of inhibitory, nerves, or to those of both. There is one striking fact that brings to light the essential sameness of apperception and innervation which is cited by Wundt 2 for this very purpose. In reaction-time experi- ments it is found that if a signal precedes the impression to be registered by a suitable interval the reaction registering the impression is often instantaneous; the reaction-time, in other words, is nil. In such a case the subject is aware not of three separate acts, (1) apperceiving the impression, (2) reacting to it, (3) apperceiving the effect of the reaction, but is distinctly conscious of one act and one only. The antici- patory idea of the impression to be perceived and the idea of the movement to be executed are so adjusted that, when the preliminary signal is given, the impression is rea- lised and the movement actualised at once and together. Wundt call this relation of the two ideas a " simultaneous association": the expression is scarcely a happy one, but at least the adjustment brought about is like an association, in so far as the two ideas are attended to as one complex. It is a matter of quite secondary importance what name we give to this common element of activity present wherever we find consciousness or sentience. Provided the fact be re- cognised we shall not be long without an appropriate name for it. Meanwhile to call it ' attention ' seems to do least violence to existing usage, and to have most precedents in its favour. The really important question is whether the con- trast of Subject and Object is of such a fundamental character as to justify the resolution of psychological facts into two 1 See on this the classic paper of Prof. W. James in Anniversary Memoirs- of the Boston Society of Natural History, of which a brief summary will be found, MIND, v. 582 ; also Terrier, Functions of the Brain, 2nd ed., pp. 382, ff. 2 Physiologische Psychologic, ii. 239, 391,