On Herbart’s view, rather than thinking of Vorstellungen as static, image-like things or products of an antecedent act of  representing,[12]  we should instead think of them as individual conscious activities, i.e., atomic  represent-ings.[13]  Thus he can speak of the representation’s “activity” persisting even when its “effect”—i.e., my awareness of it—“is held back by something alien to it”. Now when an activity is held back or inhibited from expressing itself, we call it a “striving” (Streben). Therefore, since the many competing representations striving one against the others are all ultimately the self-preservings of one consciousness, one psyche, he groups them all together as single manifold within the same subject, as “one striving-to-represent [ein Streben, vorzustellen]” (PsW: 130; cf. LPs: 370; SW V: 274, f.). Herbart’s theory seems to be confirmed by the common experience of our ideas brightening (Erhellen: SW V: 279; cf. Boudewijnse, et al. 1999: 170) and dimming (Verdunkeln, lit., “darkening”, PsW: 130; cf. Boudewijnse, et al. 1999: 170), waning, vanishing, and suddenly returning. But experience does not reveal the laws according to which representations come and go in the mind. How can they be rendered calculable, and thus susceptible to scientific understanding?