l combination. I have no right whatever to say that the idea of a
certain solution excludes there in my mind the consideration of the
books which I have read and of the discussions which I have heard.
Emotions may be superadded. In short, a world of mental states may be
held together by one act of attention. And new and ever new thoughts
are shooting in, and all still find place there in the field attended
to, while on the other hand my slight headache is inhibited and an
appointment is forgotten. At a gay banquet, my attention may be given to
the whole hall with all its color effects and its flowers, and to all
that the table offers and to the music from the orchestra and to the
jokes of my neighbors. It is not true that any one of those parts
suppresses the vividness of the others, they seem rather to maintain and
to help one another; and yet in the next moment, my neighbor may bring
me news which absorbs my mind entirely and leaves no room for the
flowers and the music and the meal. How far can psychology do justice to
these characteristics of attention?

There seems to be but one way. The attended-to idea does not exclude
every other idea, but it does exclude the opposite idea, and opposite to
each other is here again that pair of ideas which lead to opposite
actions, to opposite psychophysical attitudes. We must remember here the
psychomotor character of our brain processes which we so fully
discussed. We recognized the fundamental truth that there is no
sensorial state which is not at the same time the starting-point for
motor reaction. We recognized that the brain is by its whole
psychological development a great switchboard which transfers incoming
currents into outgoing ones and that its biological meaning lies in the
fact that it is the center piece of an arc which leads from the sense
organs to the muscles. We cannot conceive of those relations as complex
enough; we know, of course, that millions of nerve fibers lead from the
periphery to the highest psychophysical apparatus in the cortex of the
brain and that millions of fibers bring about the interrelation between
these central stations, but we must never forget that millions of fibers
also represent the outgoing paths and that they too lead down to lower
central motor instruments which are again in numberless corelations. Any
impression is thus a starting point for attitudes and reactions and it
is an empty abstraction to consider it otherwise. An idea is n