Chapter XVIII

). Confident expectation of a certain intensity or quality of impression will often make us sensibly see or hear it in an object which really falls far short of it. In face of such facts it is rash to say that attention cannot make a sense-impression more intense.

But, on the other hand, the intensification which may be brought about seems never to lead the judgment astray. As we rightly perceive and name the same color under various lights, the same sound at various distances; so we seem to make an analogous sort of allowance for the varying amounts of attention with which objects are viewed; and whatever changes of feeling the attention may bring we charge, as it were, to the attention's account, and still perceive and conceive the object as the same.

"A gray paper appears to us no lighter, the pendulum-beat of a clock no louder, no matter how much we increase the strain of our attention upon them. No one, by doing this, can make the gray paper look white, or the stroke of the pendulum sound like the blow of a strong hammer,--everyone, on the contrary, feels the increase as that of his own conscious activity turned upon the thing."[346]

Were it otherwise, we should not be able to note _intensities_ by attending to them. Weak impressions would, as Stumpf says,[347] become stronger by the very fact of being observed.

"I should not be able to observe faint sounds at all, but only such as appeared to me of maximal strength, or at least of a strength that increased with the amount of my observation. In reality, however, I can, with steadily increasing attention, follow a diminuendo perfectly well."

The subject is one which would well repay exact experiment, if methods could be devised. Meanwhile there is no question whatever that attention augments the _clearness_ of all that we perceive or conceive by its aid. But what is meant by clearness here?

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_c. Clearness_, so far as attention produces it, _means distinction from other things_ and _internal analysis or subdivision_. These are essentially products of intellectual _discrimination_, involving comparison, memory, and perception of various relations. The attention _per se_ does not distinguish and analyze and relate. The most we can say is that it is a condition of our doing so. And as these processes are to be described later, the clearness they produce had better not be farther discussed here. The important point to notice here is that it is not attention's _immediate_ fruit.[348]

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_d._ Whatever future conclusion we may reach as to this, we cannot deny that _an object once attended to will remain in the memory_, whilst one inattentively allowed to pass will leave no traces behind. Already in