Wundt, commenting on experiences of this sort, says that "The same thing is to be noticed in weak or fugitive visual impressions. Illuminate a drawing by electric sparks separated by considerable intervals, and after the first, and often after the second and third spark, hardly anything will be recognized. But the confused image is held fast in memory; each successive illumination completes it; and so at last we attain to a clearer perception. The primary motive to this inward activity proceeds usually from the outer impression itself. We hear a sound in which, from certain associations, we suspect a certain overtone; the next thing is to recall the overtone in memory; and finally we catch it in the sound we hear. Or perhaps we see some mineral substance we have met before; the impression awakens the memory-image, which again more or less completely melts with the impression itself.... Different qualities of impression require disparate adaptations. And we remark that our feeling of the _strain_ of our inward attentiveness increases with every increase in the strength of the impressions on whose perception we are intent."
The natural way of conceiving all this is under the symbolic form of a brain-cell played upon from two directions. Whilst the object excites it from without, other brain-cells arouse it from within. _The plenary energy of the brain-cell demands the co-operation of both factors_: not when merely present, but when both present and inwardly imagined, is the object fully attended to and perceived.
A few additional experiences will now be perfectly clear. Helmholtz, for instance, adds this observation concerning the stereoscopic pictures lit by the electric spark. "In pictures," he says, "so simple that it is relatively difficult for me to see them double, I can succeed in seeing them double, even when the illumination is only instantaneous, the moment I strive to _imagine in a lively way how they ought then to look_. The influence of attention is here pure; for all eye-movements are shut out."
Again, writing of retinal rivalry, Helmholtz says:
"It is not a trial of strength between two sensations, but depends on our fixing or failing to fix the attention. Indeed, there is scarcely any phenomenon so well fitted for the study of the causes which are capable of determining the attention. It is not enough to form the conscious intention of seeing first with one eye and then with the other; _we must form as clear a notion as possible of what we expect to see. Then it will actually appear._"