ATTENTION. 435 



The two points must now be proved in more detail. 

 First, as respects the sensorial adjustment. 



That it is present when we attend to sensible things is 

 obvious. When we look or listen w^e accommodate our 

 eyes and ears involuntarily, and we turn our head and body 

 as w^ell ; when we taste or smell we adjust the tongue, lips, 

 and respiration to the object : in feeling a surface we move 

 the palpatory organ in a suitable way ; in all these acts, be- 

 sides making involuntaiy muscular contractions of a pos- 

 itive sort, we inhibit others which might interfere wath the 

 result — we close the eyes in tasting, suspend the respiration 

 in listening, etc. The result is a more or less massive or- 

 ganic feeling that attention is going on. This organic feel- 

 ing comes, m the way described on page 302, to be con- 

 trasted with that of the objects which it accompanies, and 

 regarded as peculiarly ours, whilst the objects form the not- 

 me. We treat it as a sense of our oivn activity, although 

 it comes in to us from our organs after they are accommo- 

 dated, just as the feeling of any object does. Any object, 

 if immediately exciting, causes a reflex accommodation of 

 the sense-organ, and this has two results — first, the object's 

 increase in clearness ; and second, the feeling of activity in 

 question. Both are sensations of an ' afferent ' sort. 



But in intellectual attention, as we have already' seen, 

 (p. 300), similar feelings of activity occur. Fechner was the 

 first, I believe, to analyze these feelings, and discriminate 

 them from the stronger ones just named. He writes : 



" When we transfer the attention from objects of one sense to those 

 of another, we have an indescribable feeling (though at the same time 

 one perfectly determinate, and reproducible at pleasure), of altered 

 direction or differently localized tension (iSpannung). We feel a strain 

 forward in the eyes, one directed sidewise in the ears, increasing with 

 the degree of our attention, and changing according as we look at an 

 object carefully, or listen to something attentively ; and we sjjcak ac- 

 cordingly of straining the attention. The difference is most plainly 

 felt when the attention oscillates rapidly between eye and ear ; and the 

 feeling localizes itself with most decided difference in regard to the 

 various sense-organs, according as we wish to discriminate a thing deli- 

 cately by touch, taste, or smell. 



" But now I have, when I try to vividly recall a picture of memory 

 or fancy, a feeling perfectly analogous to that which I experience when I 

 seek to apprehend a tiling keenly by eye or ear; and this analogous feel- 



