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aspect of effort is desire, and that which is commonly called a sensation is always, if not a simple
cluster of instinctive judgments as Wundt tries to show, at least a mixture of a weak sensitive element
and a tangle of extremely rapid judgments and even conclusions. The horse that we say we see in the
distance and judge to exist, actually, we infer its reality even without looking at it, as painters know
very well. Our “seeing” the horse is a result of our instinctively assigning to a retinal impression, the
possibility, the conditional certainty of the tactile, olfactory, and aural sensations that we connect with
the horse. It is a judgment of localizing, a judgment of simultaneous coexistence with other
impressions, a classificatory judgment which enables us to anticipate vaguely what will follow or
makes us reflect on what has just preceded our impression. As the sensation supposedly becomes
clearer, these judgments multiply and become the object of a firmer belief.
If, then, attention is the desire to specify the incipient sensation, this amounts to saying that it is the
desire for an increase of present belief. Consequently, by showing the important role of attention,
psychophysics has proved the great interest attached to the study of the two distinct elements of this
complex quantity as well as the necessity to break it down into them. Almost the same definition
could be applied to the source of hypotheses, the question, because the attentive mind is essentially
inquisitive. A similar analysis can explain this singular faculty of saying if, which, no less than the
faculty of saying yes or no, contributes to the formation of all our ideas (since all scientific laws are
only verified hypotheses encompassing basically the vast array of facts adjudged possible). Before
hypothesizing, the child questions. Before thinking of saying to himself, “If this rock falls, it will
crush me,” the child begins by asking himself implicitly, “Will this rock fall?” Let us analyse the
question. The image of a rock (or the sight of that rock) and the image of its falling motion occur
together in the mind of the child; and by exception (since thesis and antithesis are ordinarily the rule),
the child’s mind does not establish any bond of positive or negative belief between these two ideas.
Yet he desires, he needs to know, to affirm or to deny. This desire, whose object is a future belief, is
interrogation.
One might ask in passing, just what is belief, what is desire? I admit my inability to define them.
Others have failed at it. In his Treatise on Human Nature, after giving belief a definition which
cannot be supported and which, like all the definitions put forth since, would be equally applicable to
desire (belief as an active idea attached to or associated with a current impression), Hume recognizes
in his appendix, and with his usual frankness, that it is not possible for him to explain belief
perfectly. More important than making a definition of this type is to note that belief, no more than
desire, is neither logically nor psychologically subsequent to sensation; that, far from arising out of an
aggregation of sensations, belief is indispensable both to their formation and their arrangement; that
no one knows what remains of sensation once judgment is removed; and that in the most elementary
sound, in the most indivisible colored point, there is already a duration and a succession, a
multiplicity of points and contiguous moments whose integration is an enigma. Through what power
do successive aural moments combine themselves when one has already ended by the time the next
has begun? What makes possible this productive coupling of the living and the dead? The image? But
the image is memory—then explain memory, the fait ultime according to a discouraged John Stuart
Mill. The alternatives: either explain belief (and desire as well) by the sensations everyone knows,
that is, veritable clumps of preexisting propositions—thereby presupposing what you claim to explain
—or else have recourse to conjectural, elementary, mathematically instantaneous sensations—and
these sensitive elements turn out to be the zeros of sensation with which you must construct a
quantity. . . .
It is not, unfortunately, the increases and decreases of belief such as they are which determine the