[10] Let us turn from abstract possibilities to concrete cases, and find out just what does take place. 'Mere vital attention' from its very description must be supposed to take place without the attender willing it. It is compulsive in the sense that the attender has no control over its occurrence. Moreover it must also be effortless, since by calling something an effort it is implied that an easier alternative exists, and in the present case there is, by definition, no alternative. An example of such attention would be the case of a sudden movement catching an eye. When that happens one's eyes are drawn to the spot at which the movement was observed, and they fixate it.

The event has our attention. This is a common experience. When it happens, often the first thing we know about it is that we have noticed the movement. That is to say, we may have our attention drawn by a movement without realizing that this has happened. It often happens that it is only after we have been attending for some time that we become aware of attending as opposed to being aware of the object of attention. It may happen that what we notice as a result of attending, itself makes us aware of the fact that our attention has been engaged.

Another possibility is for us not to realize at all that our attention is held. A friend, for instance, may say to me, 'Don't stare', and only then do I realize that I am staring, although I would not have been unaware of the person I was staring at. It is important to recognize that it is quite normal in the situation under discussion for a person to break off his 'mere vital attention', either as soon as he himself realizes that he has been giving it, or as soon as he is told to desist. In either case my act may give rise to feelings of guilt about what I had inadvertently done. The fact that I can be admonished for staring makes even stronger the claim that we are able to disengage 'mere vital attention', since I cannot be required to disengage my attention unless I am able to do so.

Such experiences are not confined to visual attention. One often has the experience of overhearing someone else's conversation and discovering that one has been listening intently in the hope of hearing what is being said. That this may be inadvertent is indicated by the fact that we sometimes stop ourselves from doing it as soon as we realize what we are doing. These very common sorts of cases make it quite clear that on many occasions we do actually disengage our 'mere vital attention'. The fact that such attention begins spontaneously does not mean that it must end spontaneously. And yet if we allowed ourselves to be guided entirely by the concept of a 'mere vital attention' we would conclude that the process was from beginning to end incapable of control by an act of will. Of course it is not the case that we have reason to be ashamed of all of our inadvertent attendings, and so it may happen that we may come to realize that our attention is inadvertently being held and yet not on that account feel any obligation to break it off. Thus it is also possible for 'mere vital attention' to be voluntarily prolonged. We learn from these cases that we engage in many attentive activities - staring, overhearing, etc. - without at the time realizing the fact, and that the entire nature of our attention is altered as

soon as our attending comes to our notice. What may begin as 'mere vital attention' may thus end up as voluntary attention.

This shows that the relation between spontaneous attention and voluntary attention is not a simple one. It is necessary to distinguish two sides to voluntary attention. On one side attention may be said to be voluntary when it can be engaged at will. On the other side attention may be said to be voluntary when it can be broken off at will. This at once gives us three possibilities for voluntary attention: (a) the case in which attention can be engaged and broken off at will; (b) the case in which it can be begun at will, but not broken off at will; (c) the case in which it is not begun at will, but can be broken off at will. Of (a) we might say that attention was wholly voluntary; of (b) that it was voluntary to begin with, but became compulsive; of (c) that spontaneous attention had passed into voluntary attention.

A form of voluntary attention that may easily be confused with non-voluntary attention is obligatory attention. Obligatory attention is the attention it is one's duty to pay. When I am ordered to pay attention, and my attention is thereby made obligatory, it is presupposed that the attention in question is voluntary. I could not, for instance, be ordered to be surprised because surprise is not a voluntary form of attention.

A general fault that may be found with the treatment of attention given by Hamilton, Ribot, and James, is that they discuss attention quite by itself as though it described something that could be done on its own even if we were doing nothing else at the time. ⁷⁶ If it were a sui generis act, then it would be interesting to know whether it could be done voluntarily or not. But if attention is not a special mental operation, and if it cannot be meaningfully divorced from the things we do attentively or otherwise, then there is no separate question of whether or not attention itself is voluntary. The question of the voluntary nature of attention would then depend on the general question of the voluntary nature of our doings in general.

This survey has shown quite clearly that any attempt to distinguish between different types of attention in terms of the presence or absence of effort, the presence or absence of automatic processes, the presence or absence of desires, and the presence or absence of acts of will, must fail. The framework within which attention is paid is almost always too complicated to admit of such compartmentalization. It remains true, nonetheless, that if we want to

assess the circumstances in which attention is paid to an object on a particular occasion it is essential to go into all the factors I have just been considering.

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