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.
307/372 page 291
![consciousness, or the strain sensations in consciousness, or what Lipps calls the activity of consciousness itself, what Stout calls conation or Wundt, apperception. The first theory, since Herbart’s attack on the “ faculty psych- ology,” has been recognised everywhere as an unfruitful hypothesis. The second we have already shown to be in- consistent with the facts. The third theory, which intro- duces an active mental force, requires more consideration. For the most part it is merely a combination of statements from the two previous theories. For Lipps it is practically identical with personified mind. Professor Stout’s [I0] cona- tion is merely a statement of the fact that there is a felt current in mental processes, while the will or apperception of Wundt is but a claim that it is easier to picture mind in terms of voluntary processes. In last analysis, the first view would amount to the statement that there is a feeling of tendency in mind, an unanalysable feeling, but its causal efficacy is implied rather than demonstrated. It could be met just as well by a recognition of the subjective factors upon which we have put so much emphasis throughout the entire discussion. Stout’s “ tendency toward an end ” means nothing more than that there is a change in consciousness and that some of the changes are foreshadowed in earlier states. We can only know that there is a tendency toward an end from the fact that the end is finally reached. This is merely to say that mental states succeed each other and that many of the conditions of the succession are to be found in earlier mental processes. The view that consciousness is itself active must be either another personification or a reference to strain sensations as an explanation of the changes. In each form of the theory we are dealing with a metaphor of one sort or another, and in most cases the metaphor serves rather to cloud the facts than to explain them. If we leave metaphor out of consideration, all that can be asserted is that the experience of one moment is different from what it would have been had the previous history of the individual and of his ancestors been different.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21523630_0307.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
