LITMIR.BIZ

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There must be strength of will to take command of the mental faculties, and make them subservient to its purpose. There must be determination to succeed, and a wise discipline and exercise of the mind with reference to the end in view. This faculty, like every other, requires education in order to its due development.

      Whether certain Acts are performed without any Degree of Attention.—It is a question somewhat discussed among philosophers, whether those acts which from habit we have learned to perform with great facility, and, as we say, almost without thinking, are strictly voluntary; whether they do or do not involve an exercise of attention. Every one is aware of the facility acquired by practice in many manual and mechanical operations, as well as in those more properly intellectual. A musician sits at his instrument, scarcely conscious of what he is doing, his attention absorbed, it may be, with some engrossing topic of thought or conversation, while his fingers wander ad libitum among the keys and strike the notes of some familiar tune. Is there in such a case a special act of volition and attention preceding each movement of the fingers as they glide over the keys? And in more rapid playing, even when the attention is in general directed to the act performed, i. e., the execution of the piece, is there still a special act of attention to the production of each note as they follow each other with almost inconceivable rapidity? Dr. Stahl, Dr. Reid and others, especially many able physiologists, have answered this question in the negative, pronouncing the acts in question to be merely automatic and mechanical, and not properly involving any activity of mind. The mind, they would say, forms the general purpose to execute the given piece, but the particular movements and muscular contractions requisite to produce the individual notes, are, for the most part, involuntary, the result of habit, not of special attention or volition.

      The opposite View.—On the other hand, Mr. Stewart maintains that all such acts, however easily and rapidly performed, do involve mental activity, some degree of attention, some special volition to produce them, although we may not be able to recollect those volitions afterward. The different steps of the process are, by the association of ideas, so connected, that they present themselves successively to the mind without any effort to recall them, without any hesitation or reflection on our part, and with a rapidity proportioned to our experience. The attention and the volition are instantaneous, and therefore not subsequently recollected. Still, he would say, the fact that we do not recollect them is no proof that we did not exercise them. The musician can, at will, perform the piece so slowly, as to be able to observe and recall the special act of attention to each note, and of volition to produce it. The difference in the two cases lies in the rapidity of the movement, not in the nature of the operation.

      Objection to this View.—The only objection to this view, of much weight, is the extreme rapidity of mental action, which this view supposes. An accomplished speaker will pronounce, it is said, from two to four hundred words, or from one to two thousand letters in a minute, and each letter requires a distinct contraction of the muscles, many of them, indeed, several contractions. Shall we suppose then so many thousand acts of attention and volition in a minute?

      Reply to this Objection.—To this it may be replied that the very objection carries with it its own answer, since if it be true that the muscles of the body move with such wonderful rapidity, it is surely not incredible that the mind should be at least equally rapid in its movements with the body. To show that both mind and body often do act with great rapidity, Mr. Stewart cites the case of the equilibrist, who balances himself on the slack rope, and at the same time balances a number of rods or balls upon his chin, his position every instant changing, according to the accidental and ever varying motions of the several objects whose equilibrium he is to preserve, which motions he must therefore constantly and closely watch. Now to do this, the closest attention, both of the eye and of the mind, to each of these instantaneous movements, is absolutely necessary, since the movements do not follow each other in any regular order, as do the notes of the musician, and cannot, therefore, by any association of ideas, be linked together, or laid up in the mind.

      The Question undecided.—The question is a curious one, and with the arguments on either side, as now presented, I leave it to the reader's individual judgment and decision. Mr. Stewart is doubtless correct as to the rapidity of mental and muscular action. At the same time it seems to me there are actions, whatever may be true in the cases supposed, that are purely automatic and mechanical.

      Whether we attend to more than one thing at once.—Analogous to the question already discussed, is the inquiry whether the mind ever attends or can attend to more than one thing at one and the same time; as when I read an author, my attention meanwhile being directed to some other object than the train of thought presented by the page before me, so that at the end of a paragraph or a chapter I find that I have no idea of what I have been reading, and yet I have followed with the eye, and perhaps pronounced aloud, every word and line of the entire passage. To do this must have required some attention. Have I then the power of attending to two things at once? So, when the musician carelessly strikes up a familiar air while engaged in animated conversation, and when the equilibrist balances both his own body upon the rope, and also a number of bodies upon different parts of his body, each movement of each requiring constant and instant attention, the same question arises.

      Opinion of Mr. Stewart.—Mr. Stewart, in accordance with the view already expressed of the rapidity of the mind's action, maintains that we do not under any circumstances attend at one and the same time to two objects of thought, but that the mind passes with such rapidity from one to another object in the cases supposed, that we are unconscious of the transition, and seem to ourselves to be attending to both objects at once.

      Illustration of this View.—An illustration of this we find in the case of vision. Only one point of the surface of any external object is at any one instant in the direct line of vision, yet so rapidly does the eye pass from point to point, that we seem to perceive at a glance the whole surface.

      How it is possible to compare different Objects.—It may be asked, How is it that we are able to compare one object with another, if we are unable to bring both before the mind at once? If, while I am thinking of A, I have no longer any thought whatever of B, how is it possible ever to bring together A and B before the mind so as to compare them?

      The answer I conceive to be this, that the mind passes with such rapidity from the one to the other object, as to produce the same effect that would be produced were both objects actually before it at the same instant. The transition is not usually a matter of consciousness; yet if any one will observe closely the action of his own mind in the exercise of comparison, he will detect the passing of his thoughts back and forth from one object to the other many times before the conclusion is reached, and the comparison is complete.

      CHAPTER III.

      CONCEPTION.

      Character of this Power.—This term has been employed in various senses by different writers. It does not denote properly a distinct faculty of the mind. I conceive of a thing when I make it a distinct object of thought, when I apprehend it, when I construe it to myself as a possible thing, and as being thus and thus. This form of mental activity enters more or less into all our mental operations; it is involved in perception, memory, imagination, abstraction, judgment, reasoning, etc. For this reason it is not to be ranked as one of, and correlate with, these several specific faculties. Like the power of thought, and hardly even more limited than that, it underlies all the special faculties, and is essential to them all. Such at least is the ordinary acceptation of the term; and when we employ it to denote some specific form of mental activity, we employ it in a sense aside from its usual and established meaning.

      Objects of Conception.—I conceive of an absent object of sight, as, e. g., the appearance of an absent friend, or of a foreign city, of the march of an army, or the eruption of a volcano. I conceive also of a mathematical truth, or a problem in astronomy. My conceptions are not limited to former perceptions or sensations, nor even to objects of sensible perception. They are not limited to material and sensible objects. They embrace the past and the future, the actual and the ideal, the sensible and the super-sensible.

      Conceptions neither true nor false.—Our conceptions

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