Principles of mental physiology : with their applications to the training of the mind, and the study of its morbid conditions / by William B. Carpenter.

  • Carpenter, William Benjamin, 1813-1885.
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Principles of mental physiology : with their applications to the training of the mind, and the study of its morbid conditions / by William B. Carpenter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    37/810 (page 33)
    And a further reflection on our own mental experi- ences will satisfy us, that these variations in the relative strength of Motives mainly arise from the degree of Atten- tion that we give to each respectively. An excited Feeling which would soon die-out if left to itself, will retain its potency, or even gain augmented force, if we allow ourselves to brood over it; whilst, on the other hand, the power of those remoter considerations which deliberation suggests, increases in proportion as they are dwelt on. And just as, in the case of the two magnets, we may reverse their relative attractions by changing their respective distances from the iron between them, so can each Ego who has acquired the power of directing his own course of Thought and Feeling, alter the relative potency of different motives or sets of motives, by determinately directing his attention to those which would draw him in one direction, and by partially or completely excluding those of an opposite tendency from his mental view. If it be urged by the Automatist that this fixation of the Ego’s attention on one set of motives to the exclusion of the other, is really due to the superior strength of the motive (supplied by his previously-formed character) which leads him to desire so to fix it, I reply that no experience of which I am conscious is more real to me, than that if I did not make an ejfort to keep my attention fixed, the desire alone would fail to do it. I am further conscious that a great deal more is u taken out of me ” (to use an expressive colloquialism) by the prolongation of such a struggle, than by a far larger measure of undistracted mental action. c