efficiency of mental life that many habits should be made thus self-controlling, should be practiced until they make no demands upon mental life proper. Indeed in general we think about things so as eventually to do them without thought. It should be the fate of every connection to progress toward automatic behavior. It is extravagant to waste attention on minor connections which do not deserve it. A student who was forced by circumstances to spend much time in the society of some stupid people, found that by making automatic the habit of responding to a certain general tone by 'Exactly' or 'Certainly,' to another tone by 'Indeed!' or 'Well! Well!' and to still another by, 'Your own judgment on that question would be better than mine,' she could carry on her own meditations almost as well as if by herself. One reason perhaps for the absent-mindedness of gifted men is that they have learned to leave all the small matters of life to take care of themselves and so occasionally blunder by making an automatic response at an improper time. It is better to occasionally enter a neighbor's house, or try to light the gas with a pencil or greet your wife on the street with a pleasant 'And how is your husband's health?', than to think all day long about trifles.

Exercises

I. Name six instinctive automatic connections.

2. What name is given in § 4 to the instinctive automatic connections?

3. Observe by looking in a glass what happens to the pupils of your eyes when you come into a bright room after eight or ten minutes in a very dark room. Would you know what happened to them from direct feeling alone?

4. Name six acquired connections which you make automatically or nearly so.

5. The conjurer Houdin is reported to have been able to keep four balls in the air quite automatically, in fact to do so

while steadily reading a book. Give similar instances showing the degree of complexity possible in automatic connections.

6. Which would be harder, to learn to walk and sew at the same time or to read and sew at the same time?

7. Why is to learn to talk and sew at the same time easier than either?

§ 58. Movements as Antecedents

Movements, though they do not directly arouse, do indirectly react on mental states. Any movement serves as a stimulus to the sense organs,—of the eye, if it is seen; of the skin, if it causes tension or folding; of the joints, if a bone is moved; of the muscle itself in any case. Every turn of the eyes, every change of facial expression, every contraction of the vocal chords, every posture of the body, every extension of flexion of a finger, thus plays a part in determining the course of the stream of thought. Just as a multitude of sights and sounds sets at work the forces of sensation and produces new mental states, so the multiplicity of bodily movements produces a crop of secondarily caused sensations, which feature in later thought.

Just what and how great a part movements play as stimuli to sensations, is not known. But it is surely not unimportant. The images of words in which thought is carried on are often motor images of the movements made in speech. The feelings of strain, irritation and perplexity, are very probably due to conditions of general muscle tension. One theory of the fusion of sensations into percepts is that we feel as one thing whatever combination of sensations is responded to by a single movement or a connected series of movements. Some thinkers assert that without bodily movement, controlled thought cannot even take place. The feeling of self or personality, which is one element of almost all mental states, is in large measure due to the ever present stimuli from the

muscular tension of the body, the unnoticed movements of breathing, and the like. The feelings of the distances of objects arise in part from feelings of the movements of the eyes made in converging for near and diverging for far objects. General satisfaction and dissatisfaction are, by one theory, explained as the feelings caused by movements of extension or approach and of flexion or withdrawal respectively.

From these and similar facts and theories, it is certain that the indirect contribution of movements to thoughts and feelings is a large one, and one upon which man relies for the material for some of his most important judg

ments.

I.

Exercises

Which looks longer in Fig. 84, the vertical or the horizontal line? Measure the lines. What fact, in addition to the fact that it is harder to move the eyes in a vertical than a horizontal direction, is needed to explain the appearance?

FIG. 84.

2. Can you discover in yourself feelings due to movements of the sort described in the following passages?—

"In consenting and negating, and in making a mental effort, the movements seem more complex, and I find them harder to describe. The opening and closing of the glottis play a great part in these operations, and, less distinctly, the movements of the soft palate, etc., shutting off the posterior nares from the mouth. My glottis is like a sensitive valve, intercepting my breath instantaneously at every mental hesitation or felt aversion to the objects of my thought, and as quickly opening, to let the air pass through my throat and nose, the moment the repugnance is overcome. The feeling of the movement of this air is, in me, one strong ingredient of the feeling of assent. The movements of the muscles of the brow and eyelids also respond very sensitively to every fluctuation in the agreeableness or disagreeableness of what comes before my mind.

In effort of any sort, contractions of the jaw-muscles and of those of respiration are added to those of the brow and glottis, and thus the feeling passes out of the head properly so called." James, Principles, I., 301.

Experiment 30. Movements as Stimuli to Mental States.— Lie down and let all your muscles relax until you are perfectly limp and easy and without any tension anywhere. Let the muscles of the face relax as well as those of the rest of the body. Rest thus for ten minutes or more. Then jump up, frown, set your teeth, clinch your fists and stalk back and forth with quick, vigorous and jerky movements. How did you feel in the two cases?

References

A. James, Briefer Course, XXIII., X.

Stout, Manual, 99-102.

B. Ebbinghaus, Grundzüge, § 65.

James, Principles, XXIII., IV.

Wundt, Physiologische Psychologie, XIII., § 3.

CHAPTER XX

SELECTIVE PROCESSES

§ 59. Attention and Neglect

Attention. In the last seven chapters are frequent references to the facts of attention, the fact (1) that of any mental state some one portion is predominant,-is more likely than others to be operative in causing the sequent mental state or act ; and the fact (2) that of many feelings felt, only a few are noticed, dwelt upon, allowed to play leading parts in influencing the future course of thought and action. Chapter VII contained a brief description of the facts of attention. It is now necessary to study their causation; to answer the questions: 'What determines which part of a mental state will be focal? Which mental states will be selected, dwelt upon, allowed to weigh heavily in mental life and conduct?'

Here as elsewhere (1) original nature, (2) the influence of experience and (3) accidental causes share in producing the result. What will be felt as clear, emphatic and focal, what will be selected and dwelt upon, what in short will be attended to, by any individual, will be that mental state or that feature of a mental state which is attractive because of (1) the original tendencies to attend with which nature endows us, because of (2) the habits of attention which have been found by the individual in question to be desirable or because of (3) some accidental cause. The original tendencies to attend