65 



discharge; by similarity, because both of them, through their 

 association with a third, have come to unite in a common 

 discharge." 1 



One more example may be cited, in connection with the 

 phenomena of attention. ''The infant, and the animal which 

 has not that highest engine of accommodation attention- 

 have the reflex, habit-born, organic thing called, it is true, 

 emotion; but its quality is 'rank', unreasonable, urgent, a 

 matter of nerves and instinct. And that is all the infant has 

 except the pleasures and pains which are also sensations, or 

 quales of sensation." 2 Baldwin further states that "attention 

 is simply a form which the 'excess' process, found in our 

 earlier discussions to be the means of all organic accommoda- 

 tion, has taken on in habitual connection with memory, 

 imagination, and thought. The attention process is a motor re- 

 action, involving all the elements of such reactions to a mental 

 content, as those reactions have become, by habit, crystallized 

 in certain fixed forms of vaso-motor change, muscular con- 

 traction, etc." 3 "The attention is essentially an accumulation 

 due to continued selection in racial evolution. In attention 

 we have, undoubtedly, the one selective function of con- 

 sciousness. Now it only gives further strength both to the 

 theory of biological selections of the lower organisms, and 

 to that of the conscious selections of the higher, if we find 

 that one psycho-physical principle such as 'selection from 

 over-produced movements' runs through the entire develop- 

 ment." 4 "To put the whole matter in a nutshell just in so 

 far as the motor ingredient of a mental content of any kind 

 is much, that is, in so far as the sensory ingredient is intense, 

 just to this degree will the direction of attention be secured, 

 and to this degree also will both the ingredients be intensified 

 by this act of attention. The two facts, therefore, that in- 

 tensity draws attention, and attention increases intensity, 

 may be stated in terms of a single principle which I venture to 

 call, in view of the doctrine of association already explained, 

 the 'law of motor association', that is, every mental state is 

 a fusion of sensory and motor elements, and any influence 

 which strengthens the one tends to strengthen the other also." 5 

 And finally, the whole of the process, as in all the previous 

 writers, is governed primarily by the factors of pleasure and 

 pain. "The life history of organisms involves from the start 



'O.C. p. 294. 

 'O.C. p. 224. 

 O.C. p. 221. 

 <O.C. p. 433. 

 'O.C. p. 439. 



