ATTENTION. 427 



condition of our doing so. And as these j)i'ocesses are to 

 be described later, the clearness they produce had better 

 not be farther discussed here. The important point to no- 

 tice here is that it is not attention's immediate fruit* 



d. Whatever future conclusion we may reach as to 

 this, we cannot deny that an object once attended to ivill re- 

 main in the memory, whilst one inattentiveh' allowed to pass 

 will leave no traces behind. Already in Chapter VI (see 

 pp. 163 ff.) w^e discussed whether certain states of mind 

 were 'unconscious,' or whether they w^ere not rather states 

 to Avhich no attention had been paid, and of whose passage 

 recollection could afterwards find no vestiges. Dugald 

 Stewart says : t " The connection between attention and 

 memory has been remarked by many authors." He quotes 

 Quintilian, Locke, and Helvetius ; and goes on at great 

 length to explain the phenomena of 'secondary automa- 

 tism ' (see above, p. 114 ff.) by the presence of a mental action 

 grown so inattentive as to preserve no memory of itself. 

 In our chapter on Memory, later on, the point will come 

 uj) again. 



e) Under this head, the shortening of reaction-time, there 

 is a good deal to be said of Attention's effects. Since 

 "Wundt has probably worked over the subject more thor- 

 oughly than any other investigator and made it peculiarly 

 his own, what follows had better, as far as jjossible, be in 

 his words. The reader will remember the method and re- 

 sults of experimentation on ' reaction-time,' as given in 

 Chapter III. 



The facts I proceed to quote may also be taken as a 

 supplement to that chapter. Wundt writes : 



" When we wait with strained attention for a stimulus, it will often 

 happen that instead of registering the stimulus, we react upon some 

 entirely different impression, — and this not through confounding the 

 one with the other. On the contrary, we ai'e perfectly well aware at 

 the moment of making the movement that we respond to the wrong 

 stimulus. Sometimes even, though not so often, the latter may be an- 



* Compare, on clearness as the essential fruit of attention, Lotze's Meta- 

 physic, g 273. 



f Elements, part i. chap. ii. 



