416 PSYCHOLOGY. 



This is all I have to say about the difficulty of having 

 two discrepant concepts together, and about the number of 

 things to which we can simultaneously attend. 



THE VARIETIES OF ATTENTION. 



The things to which we attend are said to interest usr 

 Our interest in them is supposed to be the cause of our at- 

 tending. What makes an object interesting we shall see 

 presently ; and later inquire in what sense interest may 

 cause attention. Meanwhile 



Attention may be divided into kinds in various ways. 

 It is either to 



a) Objects of sense (sensorial attention) ; or to 



h) Ideal or represented objects (intellectual attention). 

 It is either 



c) Immediate ; or 



d) Derived : immediate, when the topic or stimulus is 

 interesting in itself, without relation to anything else ; de- 

 rived, when it owes its interest to association with some 

 other immediately interesting thing. What I call derived 

 attention has been named ' apperceptive ' attention. Fur- 

 thermore, Attention may be either 



e) Passive, reflex, non-voluntary, effortless ; or 

 /) Active and voluntary. 



Voluntary attention is always derived; we never make an 

 eff'ort to attend to an object except for the sake of some remote 

 interest which the effort wdll serve. But both sensorial and 

 intellectual attention may be either passive or voluntary. 



In passive immediate sensorial attention the stimulus is a 

 sense-impression, either very intense, voluminous, or sud- 

 den, — in which case it makes no difi"erence what its nature 



tation tallies with facts recognized elsewhere ; but Wundt's explanation (if 

 I understand it) of the experiments requires us to believe that an observer 

 like V. Tschisch shall steadily and without exception get an hallucination 

 of a hell-stroke before the latter occurs, and not hear the real hell-stroke after- 

 wards. I doubt whether this is possible, and I can think of no analogue 

 to it in the rest of our experience. The whole subject deserves to be gone 

 over again. To Wundt is due the highest credit for his patience in work- 

 ing out the facts. His explanation of them in liis earlier work (Vorlesungen 

 ab. Menschen und Thierseele, i. 37-42, 865-371) con.sisted merely in the 

 appeal to the unity of consciousness, and may be considered quite crude. 



