Husserl’s refutation of the empiricist theory of abstraction in the Second of his Logical Investigations required him to develop his own account of attention, since the empiricist theory explained abstraction as an achievement of attention. Nevertheless, when Husserl poses a fundamental question “what is attention?” towards the empiricist theories, he admits that phenomenology at the early stage is also incapable of giving a plausible answer. The lack of a unified sense of attention is described as a fundamental deficiency in his theory of attention. This article is an analysis of Husserl’s polemic against the empiricist theory of abstraction in the Second Investigation. Four main arguments are revealed: the confusion of empirical and theoretical interests, the mistaken emphasis on the intensity of attention, the confusion of different stages and types of thematization in perceptual and conceptual levels, and the lack of a unified sense of the concept of attention.