The Study of Consciousness and Behavior 17 



conscious relations or connections, knowledge of which 

 informs us of the result to come from the action of a given 

 situation on a given animal, may be expected to be fully 

 half of the subject-matter of mental science. 



As was noted in the early pages of this chapter, the psy- 

 chologist commonly does adopt the attitude of treating mind 

 as a system of connections long enough to give some account 

 of the facts of instinct, habit, memory, and the like. But 

 the dogma that psychology deals exclusively with the inner 

 stream of mind-stufT has made these accounts needlessly 

 scanty and vague. 



One may appreciate fully the importance of rinding out 

 whether the attention-consciousness is clearness or is some- 

 thing else, and whether it exists in two or three discrete 

 degrees or in a continuous series of gradations, and still 

 insist upon the equal importance of finding out to what 

 facts and for what reasons human beings do attend. There 

 would appear, for example, to be an unfortunate limitation 

 to the study of human nature by the examination of its 

 consciousnesses, when two eminent psychologists, writing 

 elaborate accounts of attention from that point of view, 

 tell us almost nothing whereby we can predict what any 

 given animal will attend to in any given situation, or can 

 cause in any given animal a state of attention to any given 

 fact. 



One may enjoy the effort to define the kind of mind-stuff 

 in which one thinks of classes of facts, relations between 

 facts and judgments about facts, and still protest that a 

 proper balance in the study of intellect demands equal or 

 greater attention to the problems of why any given animal 

 thinks of any given fact, class or relation in any given 

 situation and why he makes this or that judgment about it. 



In the case of the so-called action-consciousness the 



