d of clear
consciousness. I have already spoken of a selective action brought about
by the ruling emotion. In this case, the attention is held captive by
the particular feeling of the moment. Also a selective process goes on
in the case of the action of those associative dispositions just
referred to. But in each of these cases the action of selective
attention is comparatively involuntary, passive, and even unconscious,
not having anything of the character of a conscious striving to compass
some end. Besides this comparatively passive play of selective
attention, there is an active play, in which there is a conscious wish
to gain an end; in other words, the operation of a definite motive. This
motive may be described as an intellectual impulse to connect and
harmonize what is present to the mind. The voluntary kind of selection
includes and transcends each of the involuntary kinds. It has as its
result an imitation of that order which is brought about by what I have
called the associative dispositions, only it consciously aims at this
result. And it is a process controlled by a feeling, namely, the
intellectual sentiment of consistency, which is not a mode of emotional
excitement enthralling the will, but a calm motive, guiding the
activities of attention. It thus bears somewhat the same relation to the
emotional selection already spoken of, as dramatic creation bears to
lyrical composition.

This process of striving to seize some connecting link, or thread of
order, is illustrated whenever, in waking life, we are suddenly brought
face to face with an unfamiliar scene. When taken into a factory, we
strive to arrange the bewildering chaos of visual impressions under some
scheme, by help of which we are said to understand the scene. So, if on
entering a room we are plunged in _medias res_ of a lively conversation,
we strive to find a clue to the discussion. Whenever the meaning of a
scene is not at once clear, and especially whenever there is an
appearance of confusion in it, we are conscious of a painful feeling of
perplexity, which acts as a strong motive to ever-renewed attention.[97]

In touching on this intellectual impulse to connect the disconnected, we
are, it is plain, approaching the question of the very foundations of
our intellectual structure. That there is this impulse firmly rooted in
the mature mind nobody can doubt; and that it manifests itself in early
life in the child's recurring "Why?" is equally cl