for more than a few seconds at a time. What is called
sustained voluntary attention is a repetition of successive
efforts which bring back the topic to the mind. The topic
once brought back, if a congenial one, develops; and if its
development is interesting it engages the attention pas-
sively for a time. Dr. Carpenter, a moment back, described
the stream of thought, once entered, as ' bearing him along.'
* Mental Physiol., § 124. The oft-cited case of soldiers in battle
Oct perceiving that they are wounded i.s of an analogous sort
ATTENTION. 225
This passive interest may be short or long. As soon as it
flags, the attention is diverted by some irrelevant thing,
and then a voluntary effort may bring it back to the t()]>ic
again; and so on, under favorable conditions, for hours
together. During all this time, however, note that it is
not an identical object in the psychological sense, but a
succession of mutually related objects forming an identical
topic only, upon which the attention is fixed. No one can
possibly attend continuously to an object that does not
change.
Now there are always some objects that for the time
being will not develop. They simply go out ; and to keep
the mind upon anything related to them requires such in-
eessently renewed effort that tlie most resolute Will ere
long gives out and lets its thought- follow the more etiniu-
latingr solicitations after it has witlistood them for wliat
length of time it can. There are topics known to every
man from which he shies like a frightened horse, and
which to get a glimpse of is to shun. Such are his ebbing
assets to the spendthrift in full career, l^ut why single
out the spendthrift, when to every man actuated by pas-
sion the thought of interests which negate tlie })assion can
hardly for more than a fleeting instant stay before the
mind? It is like 'memento mori ' in the heydey of the
pride of life. Nature rises at such suggestions, and ex-
cludes them from tlie view: — IIow long, healthy reader,
can you now continue thinking of your tomb? — In milder
instances the difliculty is as great, especially when the
brain is fagged. One snatches at any and every passing
pretext, no matter how trivial or external, to escape froni
the odiousness of the matter in hand. 1 know a person,
for example, who will poke the fire, set chairs straight,
jiick dust-spec-ks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch
up tlie newspaper, take down any Ixtok which catclies his
eye, trim his nails, w;i«te tlu; morning anyhow, in short,
and all without premeditation, — simply because the only
ibin^ ho owy/t/ to attend to is ilie nreparation of a noon-
226
PS7GH0L0GT.
day lesson in formal logic which he detests. Anything
but that!
Once more, the object must change. When it is one of
sight, it will actually become invisible; when of hearing,
inaudible, — if we attend to it too unmovingly. Helmholtz,
who has put his sensorial attention to the severest tests, by
using his eyes on objects which in common life are ex-
pressly overlooked, makes some interesting remarks on this
point in his section on retinal rivalry. The phenomenon
called by that name is this, that if we look with each eye
upon a different picture (as in the annexed stereoscopic
slide), sometimes one picture, sometimes the other, or
Fig. 54.
parts of both, will come to consciousness, but hardly ever
both combined. Helmholtz now says:
" I find that I am able to attend voluntarily, now to one
and now to the other system of lines; and that then this
system remains visible alone for a certain time, whilst the
other completely vanishes. This happens, for example,
whenever I try to count the lines first of one and then of
the other system. . . . But it is extremely hard to chain
the attention down to one of the systems for long, unless
we associate with our looking some distinct purpose which
keeps the activity of the attention perpetually renewed.
ATTENTION. '227
Such a one is counting tlie lines, comparing their intervals,
or the like. An equilibrium of the attention, j)ersistent
for any length of time, is under no circumstances attain-
able. The natural tendency of attention when left to
itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as
the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new
is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to
something else. Jf we wish to keep it upon one and the
<tavie object, we must seek constantly to find out something
new about the latter, especially if other powerful impres-
sions are attracting us away.''
These words of llelmholtz are of fundamental impor-
tance. And if true of sensorial attention, how much more
true are they of the intellectual variety! The conditio
sine qud non of sustained attention to a given topic of
thought is that we should roll it over and over incessantly
and consider different aspects and relations of it in turn.
Only in pathological states will a fixed and ever monoto-
nously recurring idea possess the mind.
Genius and Attention, — And now we can see why it is thai
what is called sustained attention is the easier, the richei
in acquisitions and the fresher and more original the mind.
In such minds, subjects bud and sprout and grow. At
every moment, they please by a new consequence and rivet
the attention afresh, \^\\i an intellect unfurnished with
materials, stagnant, unoriginal, will hardly be likely to
consider any subject long. A glance exhausts its possibili-
ties of interest, (ieniuses are commonly believed to excel
other men in their power of sustained attentio)!. In most
of them, it is to be feared, the so-called 'power' is of the
passive sort. Their ideas coruscate, every subject branches
infinitely before tlicir fertile minds, and so for hours they
may be rapt, lint it is tlirir f/r/ii/is making them atten-
tive, not their at t ml ion making gvniuscs of tlicin. And,
when wc come down to tbe root of tlie nuitter, we see that
they differ from ordinary nu'U less in the cliarac.ter of
their attention than in the nature of the objects upon
228 PSYCHOLOGY.
which it is successively bestowed. In the genius, these
form a concatenated series, suggesting each other mutually
oy some rational law. Therefore we call the attention
'sustained' and the topic of meditation for hours 'the
same.' In the common man the series is for the most part
incoherent, the objects have no rational bond, and we call
the attention wandering and unfixed.
It is probable that genius tends actually to prevent a
man from acquiring habits of voluntary attention, and that
moderate intellectual endowments are the soil in which we
may best expect, here as elsewhere, the virtues of the will.
strictly so called, to thrive. But, whether the attentioi*
come by grace of genius or by dint of will, the longer one
does attend to a tojiic the more mastery of it one has. And
the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering atten-
tion over and over again is the very root of judgment,
character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not.
An education which should improve this faculty would be
the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this
ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it
about. The only general pedagogic maxim bearing on
attention is that the more interests the child has in advance
in the subject, the better he will attend. Induct him
therefore in such a way as to knit each new thing on to some
acquisition already there; and if possible awaken curiosity,
so that the new thing shall seem to come as an answer, or
part of an answer, to a question preexisting in his mind.
The Physiological Conditions of Attention. — These seem
to be the following:
1) The app7~opriafe cortical centre mitst he excited idea-
tionally as well as sensorially, before attention to an object
can take place.
2) Tlie sense-organ must then adapt itself to clearest
reception of the object, by the adjtistment of its muscular
apparatus.
3) In all probability a certain afflux of blood to tfie cor'
tical centre must ensue.
ATTENTION. 229
Of this third condition T will say no more, since we
have no proof of it in detail, and I state it on the faith of
general analogies. Conditions 1) and ~), however, are veri-
fiable; and the best order will be to take the latter first.
The Adaptation of the Sense-organ.— This occurs not
only in sensorial but also in intellectual attention to an
object.
That it is present when we attend to sensible things is
obvious. AVhen we look or listen we accommodate our
eyes and ears involuntarily, and we turn our head and body
as well; when we taste or smell we adjust the tongue, lips,
and respiration to the object; in feeling a surface we move
die palpatory organ in a suitable way; in all these acts,
besides making involuntary muscular contractions of a
positive sort, we inhibit others which might interfere with
the result — we close the eyes in tasting, suspend tlie res-
piration in listening, etc. The result is a more or less
massive organic feeling that attention is going on. This
organic feeling we usually treat as part of the sense of our
otrn (trfiviiij, although it comes in to us from our organs
after they are accommodated. Any object, then, if imme-
diately exciting, causes a reflex accommodation of the
sense-organ, which hiis two results — ^rst, the feeling of
activity in question; and second, the object's increase in
clearness.
Hut in intellectiKd attention similar feelings of activity
occur. Fechner was the first, I believe, to analyze these
feelings, and discriminate them from the stronger ones
just nameii. He writes:
" When we transfer the attention from objects of one
sense to those of another, we have an indescribable feeling
(though at the same time one ju'rfectly determinate, and
reproducible at pleasure), of altered direction or dilTerently
localized tension (S/tannmif/). We feel a strain forward
in the eyes, one directed sidewise in the ears, increasing
with the degree of our attention, .im] changing according
as we look at an object carefn''y, or listen to something
230 P8YGH0L00Y.
attentively; and we speak accordingly of straining th»
atiention. The difference is most plainly felt when the
attention oscillates rapidly between eye and ear; and the
feeling localizes itself with most decided difference in
regard to the various sense-organs, according as we wish to
discriminate a thing delicately by touch, taste, or smell.
" But now I have, when I try to vividly recall a picture
of memory or fancy, a feeling perfectly analogous to that
which I experience when I seek to apprehend a thing
keenly by eye or ear; and this analogous feeling is very
differently localized. While in sharpest possible attention
to real objects (as well as to after-images) the strain is
plainly forwards, and (when the attention changes from
one sense to another) only alters its direction between the
several external sense-orgaus, leaving the rest of the head
free from strain, the case is different in memory or fancy,
for here the feeling withdraws entirely from the external
sense-organs, and seems rather to take refuge in that part
of the head which the brain fills. If I wish, for example,
to recall a place or person, it will arise before me with
vividness, not according as I strain my attention forwards,
but rather in proportion as I, so to speak, retract it back-
wards."
In myself the ' backward retraction ' which is felt during
attention to ideas of memory, etc., seems to be principally
constituted by the feeling of an actual rolling outwards
and upwards of the eyeballs, such as occurs in sleep, and
is the exact opposite of their behavior when we look at a
physical thing.
This accommodation of the sense-organ is not. however,
the essential process, even in sensorial attention. It is a
secondary result which may be prevented from occurring,
as certain observations show. Usually, it is true that no
object lying in the marginal portions of the field of vision
can catch our attention without at the same time ' catch-
ing our eye '—that is, fatally provoking such movements
of rotation and accoTiimodation as will focus its image
ATTENTION. 231
on the fovea, or point of greatest sensibility. Practice,
however, enables us, witJi effort, to attend to a marginal
object whilst keeping the eyes innnovable. The object
under these circumstances never becomes perfectly distinct
— the place of its image on the retina makes distinctness
impossible — but (as anyone can satisfy himself by trying)
we become more vividly conscious of it than we were be-
fore the effort was made. Teachers thus notice the acts
of children in the sciiool-room at whom they appear not
to be looking. Women in general train their peripheral
visual attention more than men. Ilelmholtz states the
fact so strikingly that I will quote his observation in full.
He was trying to combine in a single solid percept pairs
of stereoscopic pictures illuminated instantaneously by
the electric sj)ark. 'i'he pictures were in a dark box
which the spark from time to time lighted up; and, to
keep the eyes from wandering betweenwhiles, a pin-hole
was pricked through the middle of each picture, through
which the light of the room came, so that each eye had
presented to it during the dark intervals a single bright
point. With parallel optical axes these points combined
into a single image; and the slightest movement of the
eyeballs was betrayed by this inuige at once becoming
double. Ilelmholtz now found that simple linear figures
could, when the eyes were thus kejjt immovable, be per-
ceived as solids at a single flash of the spark. But when
the figures were comi»licated })li()t()gra})hs, many successive
flashes were required to grasp their totality.
"Now it is interesting," he says, "to find that, although
we keep steadily fixating the pin-holes and never allow
their combined image to break into two, we can neverthe-
less, before the spark comes, keep our attention voluntarily
turned to any particular j)ortion we jjlease of the dark
field, so as then, when the sj)ark comes, to receive an im-
pression oidy from such parts of the picture as lie in this
region. In this respect, then. <iiir attention is quite in<lc-
peadent of the ])osition and arconmiodatinn of tlu; eyes.
232 PSYCnOLOQY.
and of any Known alteration in these organs, and free to
direct itself by a conscious and voluntary effort upon any
selected portion of a dark and undifferenced field of view.
This is one of the most important observations for a future
theory of attention." *
The Ideational Excitement of the Centre. — But if the
peripheral part of the picture in this experiment be not
physically accommodated for, what is meant by its sharing
our attention? What happens when wc 'distribute' or
* disperse ' the latter upon a thing for which we remain
unwilling to ' adjust ' ? This leads us to that second feat-
ure in the process, the ' ideational exciietrieni ' of which we
spoke. The effort to attend to t^>e ynarginal region of the
picture consists in nothing more nor less than the effort to
form as clear an idea as is possible of ivliat is there por-
trayed. The idea is to come to the help of the sensation
and make it more distinct. It may come with effort, and
such a mode of coming is the remaining part of what we
know as our attention's ' strain ' under the circumstances.
Let us show how universally present in our acts of atten-
tion is this anticipatory thinking of the thing to which we
attend. Mr. Lewes's name of preperception seems the best
possible designation for this imagining of an experience
before it occurs.
It must as a matter of course be present when the atten •
tion is of the intellectual variety, for the thing attended to
then is nothing but an idea, an inward reproduction or
conception. If then we prove ideal construction of the
object to be present in sensorial attention, it will be
present everywhere. When, however, sensorial attention
is at its height, it is impossible to tell how much of the
percept comes from without and how much from within;
but if we find that the preparation we make for it always
partly consists of the creation of an imaginary duplicate
of the object in the mind, that will be enough to establish
the point in dispute.
~ ~~ *• Physiol. Optik. p. 741.
ATTEMIOJS. 233
In reaction-time experiments, keeping our mind intent
upon the motion about to be made shortens the time.
This shortening we ascribed in Ciiap. VIII to the fact
that the signal when it comes finds the motor-centre already
charged almost to the explosion-point in advance. Ex-
pectant attention to a reaction thus goes with sub-excite-
ment of the centre concerned.
Where the impression to be caught is very weak, the way
not to miss it is to sharpen our attention for it by prelimi-
nary contact with it in a stronger form. Helmholtz says:
" If we wish to begin to observe overtones, it is advisable,
just before the sound which is to be analyzed, to sound
very softly the note of which we are in search. ... If you
place the resonator which corresponds to a certain over-
tone, for example g' of the sound c, against your ear, and
then make the note c sound, you will hear g' much strength-
ened by the resonator. . . . This strengthening by the reso-
nator can be used to make the naked ear attentive to the
sound which it is to catch. For when the resonator is
gradually removed, the g' grows weaker; but the atten-
tion, once directed to it, holds it now more easily fast, and
the observer hears the tone g' now in the natural unaltered
sound of the note with his unaided ear."
Wundt, commenting on experiences of this sort, says
that "The same thing is to be noticed in weak or fugi-
tive 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 com-
pletes it; and so at last we attain to a clearer jierception.
The primary motive to this inward activity proceects ufu-
ally from the outer impression itself. We hear a sound in
which, from certain associai iotis. we suspect a certain over-
tone; tlic 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
234 PSYCHOLOGY.
impression awakens the memory-image, which again more
or less completely melts with the impression itself. . . .
Different qualties of impression require disparate adapta-
tions. 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 sym-
bolic form of a brain-cell played uj)on from two directions.
Whilst the object excites it from without, other brain-cells
arouse it from within. The plenary energy of the brain-
cell detnands the co-operation of both factors : not when
merely present, but when both present and inwardly imag-
ined, 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
doable, 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; lue must form as clear a notion as possible of what
we expect to see. Then it will actually apjjear."
In Figs. 55 and 56, where the result is ambiguous, we can
make the change from one apparent form to the other by
imagining strongly in advance the form we wish to see.
Similarly in those puzzles where certain lines in a picture
form by their combination an object that has no connec-
ATTENTION.
235
tion with what the picture obviously represents; or indeed
in every case where an object is inconspicuous and hard to
discern from the background; we may not be able to see it
for a long time; but, having once seen it, we can attend to
it again whenever we like, on account of the mental dupli-
Fio. 56.
Tia. 56.
cate of it which our imagination now bears. In the mean-
ingless French words ';jrt.s de lieu Rhone que nous,' who
can recognize immediately the English 'paddle your own
canoe' ? But who that has once noticed the identity can
fail to have it arrest his attention again ? When watching
for the distant clock to strike, our mind is so filled with its
image that at every moment we tiiink we hear the longed-
for or dreaded sound. So of an awaited footstep. Every
stir in the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugi-
tive his pursuers. Every bonnet in the street is momen-
tarily taken by the lover to enshroud the head of his idol.
The image in the mind is the attention; the preperception
is half of the perception of the looked-for thing.
It is for this reason that men have no eyes but for thost,
afipects of things which they have already been taught to
diicern. Any one of us can notice a j)henomenon after it
has once been pointed out, which not one in ten thousand
could ever have discovered for himself. Even in poetry
and the arts, some one has to cou.e and tell us what
236 P87CH0L0GY.
aspects to single out, and what effects to admire, before
our aesthetic nature can 'dilate' to its full extent and never
*with the wrong emotion.' In kindergarten-instruction
one of the exercises is to make the children see how many
features they can point out in such an object as a flower
or a stuffed bird. They readily name the features they
know already, such as leaves, tail, bill, feet. But they maj
look for hours without distinguishing nostrils, claws, scales,
etc., until their attention is called to these details; there-
after, however, they see them every time. In short, the
only tilings luMch ive commonly see «re those ivhich we
preperceive, and the only things which we preperceive are
those which have been labelled for us, and the labels
stamped into our mind. If we lost our stock of labels
we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world.
Educational Corollaries. — First, to st7'engtheii attention
in children who care nothing for the subject they ar»i!
studying and let their v/its go wool-gathering. The interes'!
here must be 'derived' from something that the teacher
associates with the task, a reward or a punishment if noth
ing less internal comes to mind. If a topic awakens no
spontaneous attention it must borrow an interest froni
elsewhere. But the best interest is internal, and we musi!
always try, in teaching a class, to knit our novelties by
rational links on to things of which they already have pre-
perceptions. The old and familiar is readily attended tc
by the mind and helps to hold in turn the new, forming, ir
Herbartian phraseology, an ' Apperceptionsmasse' for it.
Of course the teacher's talent is best shown by knowing
what ' Apperceptionsmasse ' to use. Psychology can only
lay down the general rule.
Second, take that mind-wandering which at a later age
may trouble us lohilst reading or listening to a. discourse.
If attention be the reproduction of the sensation from
within, the habit of reading not merely with the eye, and
of listening not merely with the ear, but of articulating to
one's self the words seen or heard, ought to deepen one'e*
ATTENTION. 237
attention to the latter. Experience shows that this is tlie
case. I can keep my wandering mind a great deal more
closely upon a conversation or a lecture if I actively re-eclio
to myself the words than if I simply hear them; and 1 tind
a number of my students who report benefit from volun-
tarily adopting a similar course.
Atteution and Free "Will. — I have spoken as if our at-
tention were wholly determined by neural conditions. I