Licence: In copyright
Credit: Attention / by W.B. Pillsbury. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.
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![The first and simplest which we need to consider owes its first satisfactory formulation to James Mill.p] It makes the intensity of the stimulus for the sensation and the strength of the association for the idea the only condition of its coming to consciousness and of its clearness when it becomes conscious. If an idea is intense or interesting— and interesting is for Mill the equivalent of being strong— it will succeed in getting into mind. In his formulation, attending to the idea and having it are identical. This is to make what we classified as the objective conditions of attention the only ones which need to be considered. If it were necessary to refute Mill’s theory at this stage in the history of psychology, it could be done most simply by point- ing to the fact that weak ideas are frequently preferred to strong ones. If more emphasis is placed upon the statement that the interest of the idea is responsible for its entrance, and interest is interpreted in the ordinary sense and not as being another name for the intensity of the stimulus, as Mill seems to take it, we have again not furthered our explanation very much. As we saw in a preceding chapter, interest is not an independent attribute of an idea, but is simply another way of saying that a sensation is likely to be attended to. It does not at best help us out in explaining the attention process. In short, Mill has raised an occasional and even unusual condition of attention to the rank of a general explanation. Ribot [9] is the most important representative of the view that attention is fundamentally a motor phenomenon. He enumerates the list of movements and the changes in movement which accompany every act of attention, and finally concludes from the frequency of the appearance that it is movement which is the ultimate cause of attention. He divides these movements into three classes : effects upon the vaso-motor system, respiratory effects, and changes in the voluntary muscles. Attention, he says, consists very largely in the accurate adaptation of the sense organ, in a checking of breathing and of all other movements](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21523630_0297.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
