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 clear.  But how we are to account for it, whether it is to be viewed as a mere result of the play of associated fragments of experience, or as something involved in the very process of the association of ideas itself, is a question into which I cannot here enter.

What I am here concerned to show is that the search for consistency and connection in the manifold impressions of the moment is a deeply rooted habit of the mind, and one which is retained in a measure during sleep.  When, in this state, our minds are invaded by a motley crowd of unrelated images, there results a disagreeable sense of confusion; and this feeling acts as a motive to the attention to sift out those products of the dream-fancy which may be made to cohere.  When once the foundations of a dream-action are laid, new images must to some extent fit in with this; and here there is room for the exercise of a distinct impulse