At the beginning of this "Introduction", Merleau-Ponty already pointed us ahead to the present chapter by noting that "the notion of attention … is no more than an auxiliary hypothesis, evolved to save the prejudice in favour of an objective world". In the preceding chapters, Merleau-Ponty criticized that prejudice in his attack on empiricism. Now he proceeds to show that despite its appearance to the contrary, intellectualism shares the same prejudice and is equally incapable of accounting for our perceptual experience.