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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![as he definitely analyses his process, would mean that he considers the strain sensations accompanying the attention process to be the cause or condition of the attending. We have already had occasion to point out that these sensa- tions can in no sense be regarded as causes, but are rather the signs or the effects of attending. It is undoubtedly implied in the theory that there is an effective force in consciousness which is above the strain sensations and which acts to control the course of ideas, something that is much more positive than any shadowy conscious feeling, and this in spite of the fact that Sully distinctly states that he is making no assumption with respect to an “ active, spiritual principle.” * With Lipps [6] the assumption of the spiritual principle is more definite, although he too endeavours to avoid the much-derided faculty of will. Lipps recognises the fact that the conscious sign of activity has nothing to do with the clearing up of ideas—is not in any sense the effective process in mind—but he states the determination in terms of the “ unconscious self.” As he puts it, attention is not due to the activity of will but to the activity of the mind itself, meaning some unconscious force which lies behind mind in the ordinary sense. By this term the use of the word will is avoided, there is no breaking up of the mind into separate parts ; but it is nevertheless very difficult to assign any definite meaning to the word, or to obtain any clear- cut picture of the way in which the whole mind is active, as has been seen in chapter xm. We have the old ob- jection to oppose here to the use of an unconscious mind, that it is something that must lie entirely beyond the range of our knowledge, and to use it to explain conscious pro- * It must be confessed that as an expression of Sully’s most recent theory this account is unfair. In the “Human Mind, pp. 141 ff., he traces the conditions of attention to events in the earlier history of the individual in a purely empirical way, and gives will but an unimportant part in the control. And even that is always restricted in its action by the earlier developed educational influences or interest. The passage quoted from the earlier work may stand as an instance of the will theory of attention, but not as a fair account of Sully’s most recent position. U](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21523630_0305.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
