444 PSYCHOLOGY. 



a stuffed bird. Tliey readily name the features they know 

 already, such as leaves, tail, bill, feet. But they may look 

 for hours without distiuguishiug nostrils, claws, scales, etc., 

 until their attention is called to these details ; thereafter, 

 however, they see them every time. In short, the only 

 things ivhicli ice commonly see are those lohich ive preperceive. 

 and the only things which we preperceive are those which 

 have been labelled for us, and the labels stamped into our 

 mind. If we lost our stock of labels we should be intellect- 

 ually lost in the midst of the world. 



Organic adjustment, then, and ideational preparation or 

 preperception are concerned in all attentive acts. An interest- 

 ing theory is defended by no less authorities than Professors 

 Bain * and Kibot,t aud still more ably advocated by Mr. N. 

 Lange,:}: who will have it that the ideational preparation 

 itself is a consequence of muscular adjr.stment, so that the 

 latter may be called the essence of the attentive jjrocesa 

 throughout. This at least is what the theory of these 

 authors practically amounts to, though the former two do 

 not state it in just these terms. The proof consists in the 

 exhibition of cases of intellectual attention which organic 

 adjustment accompanies, or of objects in thinking which we 

 have to execute a movement. Thus Lange says that when 

 he tries to imagine a certain colored circle, he finds himself 

 first making with his eyes the movement to which the circle 

 corresponds, and then imagining the color, etc., as a conse- 

 quence of the movement. 



" Let my reader," he adds, " close his eyes and think of an extended 

 object, for instance a peticil. He will easily notice that he first makes 

 a slight movement [of the eyes] corresponding to the straight line, and 

 that he often gets a weak feeling of innervation of the hand as if touch- 

 ing the pencil's surface. So, in thinking of a certain sound, we turn 

 towards its direction or repeat muscularly its rhythm, or articulate an 

 imitation of it. " S 



* The Emotions and the Will, 3d ed. p. 370. 

 f Psychologie de I'Attention (1889), p. 32 ff. 

 X Philosophische Studien, iv. 413 ff. 



§ See Lange, loc. cit. p. 417, for another proof of hit view, drawn from 

 the phenomenon of retinal rivalry. 



