xlii SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



The range of consciousness at any moment can be worked out experimentally, e.&., for 

 auditorv impressions. It is denned as the clear and distinct ideas apprehended by apperception 

 together with the obscure ideas that are partly discriminated by perception. The perceived 

 ideas lie in the field of consciousness ; the apperceived are situated at its fixation point and 

 proceed pari passu with that of Self-Consciousness. The development of Attention, which is 

 either active or passive. And as in the elementary mental processes, " feelings were found to be 

 invariable forerunners and concomitants of volition," so here " ideas and the feelings that are 

 connected with them serve as motives to the act of apperception, while apperception itself shows 

 all the characteristics of an act of will. More than this, its two fundamental forms, the active 

 and passive, obviously correspond to the two fundamental forms of conative activity, the passive 

 form, the impulsive act, and the active, or act of choice. 



" Now it is plain that these internal acts of will are not only the analogues of the ex- 

 ternal, but at the same time their condition. There can never be an external act save as the 

 result of a previous inner selection, and this holds again both of the impulse and of the act 

 of choice, so that Apperception is the one original act of Will." 



It is difficult to summarise the criticism directed against Wundt's Will and Apperception 

 theories, because no two critics attack the same point, nor do they seem usually to know 

 what it means, or whattheymean by its meaning. Marty, e.g. ("Ueb. sprach Reflex," etc. , Viertel. 

 jhr. schrft. /'. Wiss. Phil., xiii., 1889), finds a confusion between Will and Affective Emotion, 

 protesting that, while emotional were formerly classed under volitional reactions, Will is now 

 proposed as subsidiary to the Emotions. Feeling is indifferently the stimulus of Will, and the 

 reflex excited by it. The fact no doubt is, as Prof. Titchener elsewhere expresses it {Mind, i., 

 n. s., 1892), that in Wundt's psychology, the words "will " and " apperception " have a two- 

 fold meaning: (r) as indicating a primitive mental activity, (2) as expressing the complex 

 states derived from this in different directions. 



The best discussion is that of Kiilpe in Phil. Stud., v., 1889. He groups the rival 

 theories broadly into two classes — negative and positive. The former, or " physiological " 

 school, of which Miinsterberg is the chief exponent, deny that Will is an elementary constituent 

 of Consciousness, and reduce it to a derivative of sensation and feeling : the other, the 

 "psychological" group, headed by Wundt, take the strictly empirical view that Will, 

 like sensation and feeling, is a primitive element. Ktilpe adheres to the latter, and insists that, 

 while some psychologists seem to shrink from reckoning spontaneous activity among the facts 

 of consciousness, there must still remain, when we have separated out ideation, sensation and 

 feeling, an independent qualitative factor which is best described as internal spontaneous activity. 



It is, perhaps, legitimate to ask why this fundamental activity should be termed " Will," 

 unless will is identical with function — as it is in the last resort. But the precise terms must 

 always be ambiguous. The burning point that enforces itself upon us is Wundt's conception of 

 Consciousness as a relation, a synthesis — a summated whole, and not a system of detached 

 compartments, or worse, a " background," as it is still unfortunately described by some writers. 



The same section treats of the rhythm or fluctuation of Attention, which has recently 

 been the subject of so much physiological experiment and argument. Wundt, of course, refers 

 it to a central periodicity of the apperceptive process, to central oscillations of attention, 

 while his opponents regard it as dependent on purely physiological conditions in the peripheral 

 sense-organs and muscles (Miinsterberg, G. E. Midler). 



Reaction-times are discussed as the method for registration and measurement of mental 

 processes ; a more rapid reaction is obtained in the sensorial form (where the sense-organ is 

 attended to) than in the muscular (where attention is directed to the organs of movement) 

 (Titchener, cf. Phil. Stud., viii.). 



Association-times furnish another interesting section. Wundt finds that a single letter 

 takes from ten to twenty seconds more to cognise in German than in Roman type, whereas 

 the entire word can be read with as great facility in the one as in the other. In the same wav 

 one finds on plunging into the life of a foreign town that familiar subjects are understood almost 

 at once, while it takes an immense time to grasp the immediate sense of an unexpected topic. 



Simultaneous Association is the simplest form, in which the associated ideas are not 

 successive, but come into consciousness as a simultaneous ideational complex, connected by 

 their mutual relations in consciousness without any direct implication of memory. 



In Assimilation the memory image takes the lead, and presides over the incoming sen- 

 sations, perhaps forming a wrong concept ; indistinct sounds, e.g., maybe represented by a 

 wrong set of memory ideas. Hence the familiar beaker experiment, and other sense 

 illusions, due to delay in assimilation of new sense impressions by the habitual memory 



