436 PSYCHOLOGY. 



ing is very differently localized. Wliile in sharpest possible attention to 

 real objects (as well as to after-images) the strain is plainly forwards,, 

 and when the attention changes from one sense to another only alters its 

 direction between the several external sense-organs, leaving the rest of 

 the head free from strain, the case is different in memory or fancy, for 

 here the feeling withdraws entirely from the external sense-organs, and 

 seems rather to take refuge in that part of the head which the brain 

 fills ; if I wish, for example, to recall a place or person it will arise be- 

 fore me with vividness, not according as I strain my attention forwards, 

 but rather in proportion as I, so to speak, retract it backwards." * 



In myself the ' backward retraction ' which is felt during 

 attention to ideas of memory, etc., seems to be principally 

 constituted by the feeling of an actual rolling outwards and 

 upwards of the eyeballs, such as occurs in sleep, and is the 

 exact opposite of their behavior when we look at a physical 

 thing. I have already spoken of this feeling on page 300.f 



* Psychophysik, Bd. ii. pp. 475-6. 



f I must say tliat I am wliolly unconscious of the peculiar feelings in 

 the scalp which Fechuer goes on to describe. " The feeling of strained 

 attention in the different sense-organs seems to be onl}^ a muscular one pro- 

 duced in using these various organs by setting in motion, by a sort of reflex 

 action, the muscles which belong to them. One can ask, then, with what 

 particular muscular contraction the sense of strained attention in the effort 

 to recall something is as.sociated? On this question my own feeling gives 

 me a decided answer; it comes to me distinctly, not as a sensation of ten- 

 sion in the inside of the head, but as a feeling of strain and contraction in 

 the scalp with a pressure from without inwards over the whole cranium, 

 undoubtedly caused by a contraction of the muscles of the scalp. This 

 harmonizes very well with the German popular expression den Kopf zu- 

 sammennelimen, etc., etc. In a former illness, in which I could not endure 

 the slightest effort of continuous thought, and had no theoretical bias on 

 this qviestion, the muscles of the scalp, especially those of the occiput, 

 assumed a fairly morbid degree of sensibility whenever I tried to think." 

 {Ibid. pp. 490-491.) In an early writing by Professor Mach, after speak- 

 ing of the way in which by attention we decompose complex musical 

 sounds into their elements, this investigator continues: "It is more thjin a 

 figure of speech when one says that we '.search ' among the sounds. This 

 hearkening search is very observably a bodily activity, just like attentive 

 looking i:i the case of the eye. If, obeying the drift of physiology, we 

 understand by attention nothing mystical, but a bodily disposition, it is. 

 most natural to seek it in the variable tension of the muscles of the ear. 

 Just so, what common men call attentive looking reduces it.self mainly to 

 accommodating and setting of the optic a.\es. . . . According to this, it 

 seems to me a very plausible view that quite generally Attention has its seat 

 in the mechanism of the body. If nervous work is being done through 

 certain channels, that by itself is a mechanical ground for other channels 

 being closed." (Wien. Sitzungsberichte, Math. Naturw., xlviii. 2. 297, 

 1863) 



