the term attention is, like feeling, a word of extremely doubtful and variable import. like feeling, attention may be used as denominating any stage of consciousness, or it may be restricted to some more or less specific form. as affections of the organism all psychoses are termed feelings; viewed as subjective-objective acts, a content being attained, consciousness as such is termed attention. we are said to be attending when we have any activity of mind, when we have anything in the mind or before the mind. when consciousness has something in it, consciousness is attending, whence attention means consciousness acting. but what is consciousness inactive? nothing. hence consciousness attending, used for consciousness acting, is a pleonasm. consciousness, by virtue of always being conscious of something, does not need the word attention to qualify it.

the attention of consciousness is called, attracted, or engaged, when any mental act occurs, whether a pain, pleasure, perception, or whatever form it may be. when the mind is occupied with anything, i.e., is active, it is thereby attending to the thing. if i am conscious, i am, of course, conscious of something, hence attending to that something. but all these expressions are incompatible with a purely psychological point of view. in psychics, as opposed to physics, the thing exists only as perceived and in perceiving, esse is percipi; the object or content of 226consciousness exists neither beyond consciousness nor in it; it is consciousness and consciousness is it, it is nothing more than objectifying fact. consciousness does not, like a pail, have contents, but it is merely a name for the sum of activities we term conscious. such a phrase, then, as, attending to something, may be radically misleading. we do not have both consciousness and a field of consciousness, a presentation field. a tolerably constant part of human consciousness is an activity which is a constituting a world of external and internal objects. this objectifying activity, which may or may not be object for higher activity—apperception or attention in one sense—does not, however, persist and subsist as a more or less mechanical continuum, as mr. james ward and that school maintain. still the word attention may in a vague and general way denote both the realizing force and will effort therein of every act of consciousness. but yet as thus a general term for certain aspects or general qualities, it is liable to misconstruction, and we do not propose to employ it either as denoting any act of consciousness as such, or any aspect thereof.

attention may also denote dominancy in consciousness. when any one factor is pre-eminent, we say the mind is therewith attentive. when any element has a marked ascendency, so that all others are much feebler and subservient, thereby is constituted a state of attention; as when sight perception monopolizes consciousness in an eagle watching for prey, or hearing commands all the mental powers of a deer listening to a strange sound. however, practically all states are in reality complexes in which some one factor is and must be dominant, and this universal phenomenon of dominancy scarcely deserves the specific name, attention. consciousness is always more or less concentrated in some single channel; the factors in any state of consciousness are never perfectly equal in intensity, and so are never in perfect balance. but attention 227is not this fact of dominancy, but rather that of consciously sustained dominancy, as we shall note later.

if attention is not a proper term to denote simple dominancy, may it not denote that complete form, engrossment, or absorption, where one element predominates to the exclusion of all others, and so occupies all of consciousness—that is, more exactly, is all the consciousness—and also tests the capacity for consciousness to the full? the fixed idea is an instance in point, and in a certain way also preoccupation or absent-mindedness. still, in this last there are manifold elements and often great complexity—e.g., train of thought—hence dominances of different forms, but yet a persistence of a certain mode with consciousness running at its full capacity, and the result being that the general trend is not easily altered. in cases of fixed idea and brown study we say, “his attention is fully occupied,” which means nothing more than his mind or consciousness capacity is fully taken. i do not see that we gain anything by using attention in the same sense as these two general terms, mind and consciousness, which are surely sufficient. further, when one “loses himself in a subject,” the power of self-activity, and hence power of real attention, is lost. mental activity which has slipped beyond the control of will is not in any true and high sense an attending, nor is attention good term for consciousness at saturation point.

again, attention is often used to denote consciousness in its change aspect. when a new consciousness comes in and supplants a former state, we say, in popular but misleading phrase, “it takes or attracts his attention,” as if attention were entity rather than activity. but when we say that change of consciousness is change of attention, we really add nothing; it is an identical proposition. attention does not qualify consciousness, but is merely synonym for it.

still again, may attention designate intensity, or some 228certain degree of intensity? we may say of one, “he was looking inattentively,” or of a fixed, intense gaze, “he was looking very attentively.” a strong vision is thus opposed to weak as an attention. as all psychoses have some degree of intensity, they are thereby acts of attention, if we reckon from a zero point, or a more or less large number of consciousnesses if we reckon from some fixed degree of intensity. but to call a psychosis, because of its intensity, or because it has reached a certain degree thereof, an attention, seems an unnecessary procedure. nothing is gained by describing an intense psychosis as an attention, and certainly intense pains and pleasures hardly come under the term. nor yet are intense cognitions, merely by reason of the intensity, properly states of attention. fixed ideas are commonly intense, yet there is no true attention, as we have before intimated. cognitions which come as intense must be marked off from those which are intense by reason of a self-determined self-consciousness intensifying. the essence of attention is intensifying act self-regulated. to be sure, intense presentations are given as such only by an heredity momentum, from past ancestral intensifyings; their impetus is on the basis of past cognitive exertions. presentation intensity, and, indeed, all mental intensity, is originally and fundamentally volitional; the act had its force solely in will power; but in late phases psychoses which originally required intense exertion rise spontaneously and have a strength and persistence apart from volition, and so the word attention does not rightly apply to them. thus also we can solve the problem that mr. ward states when he says, “how the intensity that presentations have apart from volition is related to that which they have by means of it—how the objective component is related to the subjective—is a hard problem; still there is no gain in a spurious simplicity that ignores the difference” (mind, xii. p. 65). but “objective component” and “subjective” 229do not enter into the question; cognition does not arise as a given, as forced and determined from without, but it is rather at bottom a mode of volition. still attention is not then cognition intensity in general.

if attention is not any form or quality of mental activity in general or of cognition in particular, we must find its essence in volition—as, indeed, has been intimated in the immediately preceding pages. attention is properly the will side of cognition; it is cognitive effort. considering attentively, looking attentively, listening attentively, mean cognitive efforts in thinking, seeing and hearing. here is a cognitive experience which does not simply happen, but is definitely brought about and held to. there is intensifying act by which the given cognition is held and kept in dominancy. the word attention must, as a psychological term, be extended to denote, not merely modes of cognitive effort prominent in man, but all cognitive exertion of whatever grade. it will include all will-tension in all the senses—olfactory, gustatory, muscular, etc.—as well as visual and auditory.[d] a dog scenting game may be as truly attentive as a waiter listening to your order. so far as the smelling by the dog is merely instinctive, that is, heredity survival, there is no real attention; the mental activities are not efforts of will-attentions—so far as they occur spontaneously and inevitably. but when, as we often see, a dog is somewhat baffled in scenting, it plainly puts forth cognitive effort, it exerts its cognitive powers to the utmost, there is that strain and stretch which the word attention literally and naturally suggests. as soon, in fact, as the labour point is reached in any mode of cognition, here is attention. all toil and work is attention, as a definite exertion of will including some cognitive element. the labour of life is attention, is minding or attending to business. attention is thus will effort in maintaining and intensifying a mode of cognition.

d. see also my remarks in psychological review, ii. p. 53.

230concentration of attention is then, we may now remark, a redundancy, as we make attention equal to concentration. to say his attention was concentrated upon a certain subject, is equivalent to saying his mind was concentrated. sometimes, indeed, concentrated attention may mean intense attention or concentration, but some concentration being always involved in attention, it is a confusing and inaccurate phrase.

in a more restricted sense, attention is not merely any will tension in cognition, but only so far as self-consciousness is involved in all the exertion. we must sharply distinguish between this attention as willed activity and as simple act of will. willed cognitive activity denotes cognition determined upon and consciously accomplished. the willing in the knowing act may not be will to know. willed cognitive activity, when not against the will, when including choice and acquiescence, is in the true sense voluntary attention—attention voluntarily, freely, willingly performed. the term voluntary is not the proper correlative of spontaneous, but rather volitional, while non-voluntary must be set over against voluntary. in self-conscious attention of any kind there must be consciousness of the tension, and consciously exercised effort in delineating and maintaining cognition. in this narrow sense attention is conscious furtherance or hindrance of cognition. effort is consciously put forth in some particular cognitive form; there is a self-limitation by the mind in cognitive process. in short, attention here equals cognition consciously constrained.

as to the relation of attention to subject, we remark that psychology as the science of mental phenomena, rather than science of the soul, is not called upon to imply a subject as in any wise attending. yet we use, and use inevitably, substantive forms and personal pronouns, but while it is impossible for science to desubstantialize language, yet it must be ever on its guard against the 231delusions of language. it is a common impulse to explain activities by referring them to agents, to describe attention and all mental acts as being what they are by reason of the actor, the self, or ego; but science in this, as in so many things, inverts the common order; the agent is made by and of activities, and not the reverse. agent or subject is no more than a congeries of manifold interdependent activities. there is, and can be, no fixing of the mind by the mind: the word, mind, being used in the same sense in both cases. when i say, “i fix the mind upon something,” this means for analytical psychology, that in the complex of consciousnesses which are unified by an ego-sense, there occurs a will effort accomplishing a perception. this purely dynamic interpretation is the method of all science which cannot accept inexplicable essences and agents as explaining anything. attention is not to be explained by an attender, but it is a mode of activity in that collection of activities which we term organic life with conscious process. so even attention, as self-conscious exertion, is not to be interpreted as an agent which is conscious of itself in exerting; but we consider it as volitional activity with consciousness of self as manifold complex of objects vitally connected with will effort. self-consciousness does not necessarily mean a self conscious of itself.

it is obvious from our discussion thus far that we do not accept the common division of attention into spontaneous and voluntary, which means for us no more than spontaneous and voluntary—more properly volitional—cognition. so-called spontaneous attention is the displacing of one consciousness element by another without any will effort; there is no displacing or placing as will activity, but cognitions appear, persist and disappear by an inherent force. when in deep study the noise of a whistle may spontaneously “attract my attention,” as the phrase is, but this denotes no more than forcible change of 232state. there is nought in the new act but the sensing the noise of whistle; there is no real attending activity, no will effort at either promotion or inhibition. however, we must grant that most cognition contains a volition element. absolute zero or negative value as to volition is but a momentary and comparatively rare phenomenon in normal consciousness, where self-possession and self-direction in some measure is almost constant. in the case of noise of steam-whistle suddenly breaking in upon a student, there is quickly attention—either positively, as listening to quality, or to detect direction of sound; or negatively—true inattention—as inhibiting and disturbing element. when one is made “wild,” or distracted, by noise, then his mind is occupied unwillingly, indeed, yet there being no real promotion or inhibition, we must term the state unattention. another form is where we give up in despair, and passively suffer the annoying noise. in both cases we neither stimulate nor repress, and so both are emotional unattentions. on account of the pain-pleasure nature of all experience, there is even here, however, some will attitude and tendency, some favouring or retarding act, though it be wholly impotent in effect.

just when a cognition rises to attention point, just when volition with effort becomes prominent factor, this is a difficult and delicate problem. however, according to the relative prominence or obscurity of volition element, we must divide cognitions into attentions and impressions. in the variety of human cognitive activity there is a constant flow of cognitions which are one moment being strengthened to attentions, and another, weakened to impressions. with volatile persons cognitive life is a kaleidoscopic congeries of rapidly experienced impressions and attentions. will darts in and out with marvellous velocity, now vivifying some, now others, in the stream of cognitive activities determined by pleasure and pain interest. with all of us there is a manifold complex continuum 233of cognition, a general non-attention knowing of external world and ego, which we continually carry with us. into this field of exertionless cognitive life will-effort penetrates now to one point, now to another, seizing upon and enlarging the most interesting and significant facts. as i am sitting in my chair, i am dimly aware, without will tension, of a large field of varied objects, any one of which i may emphasize, attend to, when incited by sufficient interest. practically exertionless awareness is a constant substratum for developed consciousness; here, in the world of habit, it is always at home, and moves with great ease and smallest friction; but the process of learning, the work of adding to mental possessions and enlarging the totum objectivum and totum subjectivum, this is attention for complex consciousness.

we must note this, that attention is any general alertness toward cognizing, though no actual cognition be attained. cognitive straining without result is truly a form of attention. a man listening for a sound is equally attentive with a man listening to a sound. it is not necessary for an attention to have something to attend to. attention is effort at cognizing as well as in cognizing. the stupid boy is often the most attentive, the most strenuous in cognitive effort, yet there may be little apprehension. in fact, we must recognise that in cognitive, as in muscular activity, effort may be excessive, and defeat its own end. when suddenly awaking in the night we often strain sense to the utmost, but with no result; nothing is heard or seen. in this, as in some other cases, we must notice that attention is not necessarily delineation. while generally a particularizing effort of cognition, attention may sometimes occur as mere general cognition stress.

if attention consists in cognitive effort, whether successful or not, what is the nature of the effort to attend? a student says, i try to attend, but i cannot; i cannot hold 234my mind down to anything. professor james remarks, “in fact, it is only to the effort to attend, not to the mere attending, that we are seriously tempted to ascribe spontaneous power” (psychology, p. 451). but it is obvious in such phrases attention means simply cognition, and may be substituted for it, whereas we have just pointed out that attention is both the effort toward and in cognizing act. literally interpreted, then, the problem is whether we can make an effort to make an effort at cognizing. in great lassitude or exhaustion we lose control of ourselves, we are unable to exercise volition either as attention or otherwise. we recognise and lament the fact to ourselves, we feel our powerlessness, but i hardly think we do ever really make an effort at effort. at the very first stage of recovery from such state of utter non-volition, the will act is always toward definite sense adjustments, or in holding to and promoting certain thoughts and representations, and we thus have real attention. the utter rout of psychoses, which once possessed us, we now conquer and control for our ends and interests.

attention to attention is obviously distinctively different from this phase. we can and do attend to attention as psychic fact. an act of attention cannot, indeed, attend to itself, but the volition act in consciousness of consciousness, as consciousness of some attention act, is very properly an attention to attention. if i am looking attentively at a man, i cannot, by the very nature of attention, be simultaneously volitionally introspective of, i.e., attentive to the looking attentively. when actively sensing light, i cannot at the same moment attend to this attention, because attention is always concentrative of will. to be volitionally conscious of light is one moment, and to be volitionally conscious of this light consciousness is another moment. the attention attended to is not in process at the same moment as the attention. this does not deny that we have simultaneous spontaneous introspection 235of attentions. introspection, like sensation, perception, ideation, is attention only so far as it is effortful.

in his recent treatise on psychology professor james discusses in an interesting and suggestive way the relation of ideation to attention, maintaining that “ideational preparation ... is concerned in all attentive acts.” attention is “anticipatory imagination” or “preperception” which prepares the mind for what it is to experience. thus the schoolboy, listening for the clock to strike twelve, anticipates in imagination and is prepared to hear perfectly the very first sound of the striking.

it is undoubtedly true that in the form of attention we term expectant, where we are awaiting some given impression, there is a representing, antedating experience, which may be a preparatory preperception. but with a wrong imaging of what is to be experienced there is hindrance, as when in a dark, quiet room we are led to expect sensation of light but actually receive sensation of sound. very often, indeed, our anticipations make us unprepared for experience. further, the experiments adduced by professor james from wundt and helmholtz are in the single form of expectant attention, and we must remark that in these experiments the reagent is also experimenter, and this introduces a new attention, consciousness of consciousness, and that of a peculiar kind, which complicates an already complex consciousness. in general we may say that experimentally incited consciousness is artificial, at least as far as it feels itself as such, and for certain points like simple attention this tends to vitiate results. self-experimentation or experiment on those conscious of it as such may mislead in certain cases, and must, so far as this element of consciousness of experiment is not allowed for. in physical science things always act naturally, whether with observation or experiment, but in psychology observation, other things being equal, is more trustworthy than experiment.

236in all cases of expectant or experimentally expectant attention, the attention does not, however, lie in the expectancy or in the imaging as such, but it is merely the will effort concerned in these operations. yet as we may expect without effort, and preconceive without volition, attention is necessarily involved in neither. a perception or a preperception is an attention only as accomplished by will with effort, but only an unattention when purely involuntary. professor james’s use of attention as preperception brings us back to the common idea of attention, as any consciousness which cognizes something. this is so inbred in thought and language that it is most difficult to avoid using the term in this sense. many psychologists, like mr. james and mr. sully, frequently mention attention as a will phenomenon, but they do not treat it under will, and they constantly return to the cognition meaning. h?ffding, however, treats attention under psychology of will. attention as the exercise of will in building up and maintaining cognitive activity, is naturally treated under cognition; but it is on the whole safer and better to discuss attention under will so as to keep it sharply distinguished from the presentation form which it vitalizes. i have endeavoured to hold the term strictly to this sense, yet it is not unlikely i may sometimes unwittingly countenance the common confusion, but trust the instances will be few.

when we have, then, a case of expectant attention, we must distinguish the attention in the imaging from the attention in the actual cognizing. it is, indeed, true for us almost invariably that cognitive strain without immediate realization is incentive to ideating. in listening in the night in vain for a sound we hear in imagination many sounds, and we form preparatory ideas of what we are to hear. sense-adjustments call up a train of sensations in ideal form. but it is obvious that low intelligences which have no power of expectancy or ideation do yet 237really attend. the very first cognitions and all early cognitions by their very newness and difficulty were attentions long before ideation was evolved. with low organisms, as cognitive power extends only to the present in time and space, immediacy of reaction is imperatively demanded, and every tension of cognitive apparatus is immediately directive of motor apparatus, so that suitable motion is at once accomplished. the cognition, though dim and evanescent factor, is yet powerfully energized, and so a true attention. always with lowest sentiencies, and often with higher, pain is suddenly realized without anticipation, followed quickly by attention as strong effort to cognize the nature and quality of the pain-giver and so to effectually get rid of pain-giver and pain.

preliminary idea, then, cannot occur in early attentions and in late attentions, it is by no means necessary. it is said that we see only what we look for, but it must be answered that seeing commonly happens without any looking for. the kindergarten child, professor james to the contrary notwithstanding, is not confined in his seeing to merely those things which he has been told to see and whose names have been given him. a child continually asks, what is that? and is quick to discern the new and strange. he accomplishes a wide variety of attentions without ideas and gives himself almost entirely to immediate presentations.

to be sure, every one sees only what he is prepared to see, only what is made possible for him by his mental constitution as determined by his own pre-experience and the experience of his ancestors, but this does not signify ideation. every cognizing is conditioned by the past, but this does not call for a reawakening and projecting in ideal form at every instance of cognitive effort before any real cognition is reached.

in fact many, if not the most of our attentions, are merely intensifyings of some present cognition, of some 238cognitive psychosis which has simply come or happened. take the instance of attention to marginal and retinal images; this certainly does not always imply pre-perception, the forming of an idea of what we are to see, though in the cases mentioned by professor james it may. for example, i was writing the above seated with my profile to the window when i became suddenly aware, through the physiological agency of a marginal image, of a moving object to my right. this perception of bare, undefined object was spontaneous, a pure given; i exercised no will in attaining it, and so the state of cognition was not an attention. however, by attending, by intensifying the cognition by will effort, i perceive that the indefinite object is a man walking on the sidewalk, who is of a certain height, clothed in a certain way, etc. i do not trace the least ideation in the whole process; the slight attending as act of will did not imply any anterior or posterior idea or representation. the reason for the will act was the intrinsic interest of movement, and this intrinsic interest arises in the fact that moving objects have had for all life a special pleasure-pain significance; the moving object is the most dangerous, and so motion perceived has become ingrained in mind as a special stimulant of attention. this habit of attentiveness to things in motion survives and continues for cases where it is of no use and even of harm; thus, in the present instance, it diverts me from my work. it is obvious that attention often occurs in the same way for other senses without preliminary idea.

is there such a state as negative attention or active inattention? is will activity in cognition always positive merely, and never existing as direct repression or weakening of acts? to some psychologists negative attention means only that certain elements in a consciousness are overshadowed by the dominancy of some single factor; that, owing to the limited capacity of mind, many elements can exist only in enfeebled form beside their stronger 239neighbours. if the life blood of mind, will, is largely absorbed by some particular form or mode, all other forms must suffer in consequence.

it is, of course, obvious that the amount of will force which is put into some given cognition is potentially or actually withdrawn from other factors which then, however, are more justly termed unattentions than inattentions. but is the withdrawal of energy attained only by transference? may it not be attained by direct repression and suppression? when we wish to weaken some particular cognition, is it to be done only by specially energizing some other cognition? it would seem on general principles rather strange that we can, under stimulus of interest, increase our energizing of any given cognition but cannot reduce it except indirectly by transference. this would mean that the sum total of actual will force remains constant as far as subject to voluntary control, and it is only by subdivision into many channels that any actual diversion is secured. will force may be withdrawn and transferred, but not an atom of it can be directly suppressed. but can i not directly repress a troublesome thought or a painful sight? if by a great effort of will i keep my eyes closed to some horrible but fascinating sight, this is a true active inattention, the exactly opposite exertion to holding my eyes open and fixed upon my book for reading when very sleepy, which process is always termed attention. when our energy is going in some comparatively undesirable way we often do simply switch on to another track, but often also we shut off steam and reverse. instead of direct promotion or indirect inhibition there is direct inhibition or often both forms of inhibition combined. we may, under pressure of interest, directly weaken any cognition, untensify, check and reduce the will effort involved by immediate relaxation. in putting ourselves to sleep we relax with effort, we reduce and stop all attentions. in awaking we often go through a reverse process. the 240attitude of any cognition is either by and through will, or with comparative indifference and no intervention of will or with will directly against it, which three states we term attention, unattention, inattention.

negative attention is then, i think, a real activity, a will force which directly hinders and crushes out the unwelcome in consciousness, while positive attention is will force vitalizing and strengthening the pleasant. in conflict of interests these forms are complementary, and attention is here a double will-effort, both the effort at withdrawing energy from one point, and the effort at applying it in a new point. in most cases attention is both resistance and insistance. even in simple forms the natural tendency to inertia constitutes a constant counter interest to any particular activity-interest. attention then is always resistance to this natural inertia plus the direct energy in effecting the particular activity. but in advanced consciousness there is always a multitude of difficulties in the way of specializing cognition, a great variety of distractions to be resisted, all which, added to the definite exertion required in the special work, makes the ordinary attention in human consciousness a very complex affair. a student engaged on a mathematical problem is incessantly driving out distracting thoughts and positively fixing his mind upon the problem. resistance is manifold, according to the speciality of the task—the more special, the more distractions—and the direct concentration is also a real and direct activity.

we may then, i think, see the importance of both positive and negative acts in attention. as counter to the theory that positive attention is the only real form, we might plausibly argue the opposite, that it is only the reverse side of negative attention. if we shut out all but one element from consciousness, do we not thereby bring that one into bolder relief and so indirectly strengthen it? may not all intensification of cognition be thus but an 241indirect result of negative attention? no, for even when all distractions are kept away, there is the inherent difficulty of the act plus the inertia, the general disinclination to effort. positive attention may rarely appear as practically pure, and rarely also negative attention. consciousness may sometimes consist of merely pure will tension as keeping off all defined activities; and persons of great will power sometimes achieve this in putting themselves to sleep. consciousness is a blank field, tensely kept, but perfectly so only for a very brief time.

as to the origin of attention, it must arise with cognition itself. the past act of cognition was, as we have seen (p. 61), a powerful will act, an achievement through struggle, and therefore an attention. the history of cognition and of its ultimate development into the highest forms is a story of incessant and fierce competition in the struggle of life. man’s power of sense, perception and thought is an inheritance from an immense deal of will effort by untold millions of ancestors. the necessities of existence compelled an alertness, a general cognitive strain, which effected progress and discovery, the attainment and integration of new and most valuable forms of experience which have been handed down to later generations. the earliest cognitive life is then almost entirely attentive; cognition does not come, it must be attained. gradually, however, some low form like general sensation is so integrated, and requires less and less attention, till it comes, is given, with comparatively no effort, and a state of unattention thus appears in consciousness. the child repeats quickly, easily, without attention, the evolution of the past, and this spontaneous re-enactment continues up to the full point of hereditary integration. without effort the child is carried on at the incitement of instinctive inherent interest up to a certain comparatively high grade of experience. but heredity momentum gradually ceases, and if there is to be individual progress, attention must come in. thus, 242intellectual education is fundamentally a developing of attention. conscious control of cognition, both positively and negatively, becomes more and more efficient, and the progress of the race is dependent on exceptional attention in exceptional individuals—geniuses. attention becomes more and more limited and specialized, and a minute subdivision of labour results.

now, primitive attention is not as mr. ward, for example, would make it, a primordial fact of mind, but as a cognitive form of will or will form of cognition—it is essentially secondary. however, mr. ward, in his article in the encyclop?dia britannica, makes a peculiarly advanced form of attention the initial fact of consciousness, namely, by the non-voluntary act of mind being conscious of changes in itself. but mind is not at first a something which is inevitably cognizant of its own experience, but it merely is a state, does not have states, and is not consciously aware of them as such. there is, for instance, pain, but no consciousness of the pain as fact of experience. mind is not primitively a something acted on, reacting, and cognizant of these self-movements, but merely effortful will activity attaining snatches of cognition at the pressure of pain and pleasure. it seems, indeed, tolerably plain that apperception is not necessary to consciousness as such, and the general law of evolution from simple to complex leads us to suppose that consciousness was not at first with any apperceptive process. changes, whether as occurring or as being brought about, did not imply an apperception taking cognizance of them. but however this may be, certain it is that apperception, as consciousness of self-change or as consciousness of consciousness, must as a form of cognition arise in will effort like any other forms, must be a real attention, not a so-called non-voluntary attention. we do not see any reason why this form of cognition should be an exception to the general law that every step of consciousness 243is an acquirement and achievement determined by the struggle for existence.

the relation of attention to feeling has already been touched upon, especially as related to interest. attention, like other volitions, is aroused by feeling, primarily as direct pleasures and pains, secondarily by the ideal forms of these, that is, interest. low organisms are incited to attentions as simple sensation-cognitions only by present or immediately impending pain or pleasure. direct pain does not interest or include interest in itself. there must be, not merely pain, but cognition of it as element in experience, before there is interest, which is always in something. interest implies representation, the sense of the value for experience of any given thing. what pleases or pains interests only so far as perceived as pleasurable-painful; the thing perceived as source of feeling, or as in any wise related to it, arouses interest. “i am pleased or pained,” does not equal, “i am interested”; but only so far as i have cognizance of the object, pleasing or paining, am i interested in it. the interesting is what touches my interests, what affects my experience, what potentially reaches or touches me. it is obviously to the great advantage of the organism that pleasure-pain object merely perceived should move, excite, or interest, which brings in attention to the thing, and so fuller knowledge and preparedness for action. interest, then, is practically equivalent to emotion. “it interests me,” is equal to, “it arouses my emotion.” the interesting picture, book, man, animal, etc., is that which awakens emotion, and thus incites attention. what affects me or moves me, interests me. interest is generally used to denote favourable emotion of rather low intensity, as when i say, “he interests me”; but as a psychological term it may well be used in the broad sense to denote any emotion so far as it stimulates attention. the function of interest lies wholly in its effect upon attention, it is always a feeling stimulant to the will act of cognition. i do not 244exert my cognitive powers unless i have some interest at stake.

there are, of course, many degrees of interest. often interest is so slight as not to rouse attention, being too weak to overcome natural inertia to will effort or unable to deflect will as bent by some conflicting interest. a lesson is to be learned, but the interest, often extrinsic, does not rise to attention point till possibly a few minutes before recitation. the interest, fear of failure, may then be sufficiently strong to induce very vigorous attention, and within a certain range the stronger the interest, the stronger the attention. yet at a certain point of intensity emotion begins to derange will activity and to hinder and even destroy attention. fear which has become fright extinguishes attention. self-controlling power of attention is lost in a flood of emotion. yet ungovernably intense emotion is no longer properly termed interest, which always implies cognitive power. interest is properly comparatively mild emotion state, which includes definite cognitive element. but interest may be not only at or below attention point, but it may be of such an intensity and kind as to do away with need of attention, securing a spontaneous, or practically spontaneous, cognition. thus, my interest in a book may at first be insufficient, i.e., practically nil, to constrain attention in any degree; it may become so strong that i make constant cognitive effort, and finally, as it becomes profound and absorbing, i cognize without any attention. when anything becomes sufficiently interesting, interest acts of itself directly upon cognition, which is then performed without attention. interest frequently increases to the spontaneous cognition point, carries cognition in it; but we must remember, nevertheless, that all cognition had its origin in attention. interest acquired and become habitual demands less and less force of attention, so that our customary interests finally awake cognition without any attention act. if given cognitions always required the 245original will effort,—attention,—intellect could not progress, delicate and far-reaching reactions could not be initiated, for they could have no basis. the force of inherent hereditary interests makes itself felt throughout all advanced psychic life. a survey of the cognitions of any single day would show us that by far the greater number are by this type and degree of interest. the common cognitions and adjustments of every-day life in walking, sitting down, and in matters of routine, are mostly of this type.

it is tolerably plain that the relation of feeling to cognition cannot be expressed by any single formula, and it is certainly far from true that sensation or other cognition is inversely as the intensity of feeling. if feeling, either as simple pleasure-pain or as interest, is the incentive of attention, which is the primary measure of cognition; then intensity of cognition is directly as intensity of feeling for a certain range, and this is also true where attention has lapsed. the law of inverse ratio applies only when feeling has risen beyond the point of highest efficiency, when there is over pressure, and mind runs wild beyond self-control and attention. then we should, of course, find at a certain point, if we could make exact measurement, geometrical decrease in cognition for arithmetical increase in feeling, but ratio would constantly change. the centre and spring of any high psychic life is interest, and as interest increases intellection and volition increases pari passu. in cases of decline, where interest or capacity for emotion is lost, psychic life as a whole dissolves and disappears. on the contrary, the progress of mind is in the strengthening and extension of interest.

interest leads to attention in the forms mentioned, but it seems also a mode of attention when, at the bidding of interest, we not only promote or inhibit some cognition, but some particular feeling. in a fit of anger we may be prompted by prudence or conscience to forcibly and directly restrain and abate it. i may similarly maintain 246an amiable frame of mind as opposed to crossness. to repel a fit of anger of course implies repelling the representations which enter into the angry emotion, and so it is that the repressing or stimulating all emotions, by reason of their representative nature, necessitates a will effort with reference to the cognitive element, and thus an attention.

it is commonly believed that attention to a feeling intensifies it—that the more we attend to our feelings the stronger they are, and the less attention we pay to them the weaker they are. a soldier wounded on the field of battle heeds not the pain in the excitement of the conflict. but the truth is in this case that he has no pain so long as he feels none, and that he does not attend to the pain signifies simply that pain does not become a psychic fact, but is wholly physiological, and so not a subject for psychological discussion. this is a case of the confusing use of attention for consciousness in general which we have before criticised. very often, indeed, such an expression as, “the more he attends to his pain the more he has,” means simply, the more pain he has the more he feels, an identical proposition. but we must also discriminate between attention in a feeling and attention to a feeling. i work myself up into a passion by strenuously dwelling on representations involved in anger—this is an attention in a feeling; but attention to anger would be self-observational effort. the former does not involve consciousness of the feeling, the latter is nothing more than strenuous consciousness of the feeling. men are often angry without being conscious of it or but dimly so, and attention to the feeling would consist in intensifying by will effort this consciousness. when a person says, “i was mad and i knew it,” he asserts the distinctness of the acts and that the first does not always imply the second. this cognition originally, like all cognition, required volition, and it is still subject to volitional control and emphasis, that is attention, even in advanced consciousness. attention to a feeling is cognitive 247effort in attaining or strengthening consciousness of feeling, hence is but a mode of apperceptive or introspective effort.

we must distinguish sharply then between the observing act and the observed feeling, between a cognition of consciousness of pain and a pain consciousness, and we must note that attention may be either, neither, or both. apperception has become such a habit with higher human consciousness that it is commonly exercised without attention, and so has seemed to some as a necessary fact of all consciousness, an anthropomorphism, which seems to us erroneous. when we are conscious we are generally conscious that we are conscious; when a man has toothache there is not only pain, ache, toothache, but consciousness of this as fact of experience; but this does not establish apperception as fact of all consciousness.

is it true now that the more we are conscious of a consciousness the less we have of the latter? certainly the more conscious we are of it does not imply having the more of it, though we may say with truth that within a limited range the greater and intenser the consciousness, the greater the facility for consciousness of consciousness. a mental fact must have a certain definiteness and prominence before it is clearly and easily cognizable. however, speaking of the effect of apperception upon the consciousness apperceived, it must be evident that it is always a minifying and not a magnifying. consciousness is self-divided when there is both experience and consciousness of experience, hence a loss of force for the consciousness cognized. a feeling self-consciously felt is weakened thereby. the feelings we are most conscious of are of comparatively low intensities. in very intense feelings we lose or forget ourselves: we do not know what we are doing or feeling.

if now we make the consciousness of consciousness effortful, it is plain that we diminish the consciousness 248cognized in still greater measure. a consciousness of consciousness cannot be forwarded except at expense of general mental capacity, and so as diverting force from the act observed, whatever this be. attention to a feeling must then on general principles diminish the feeling, and that in a marked measure. the psychologist who is always twigging his own consciousness to find out what is going on there must often be surprised to find nothing there. it is astonishing how fast feeling disappears when we begin to examine and analyse it. the emotion fades the moment we turn attention to it. we find that in psychological matters as elsewhere that we cannot have our cake and eat it too. we murder to dissect. apperceptive effort is never intensification in the consciousness cognized, but cognition and pleasure-pain feeling as a consciousness cognized lose in force, just as in the body, an undue exaltation of one function is always a depressing of others by withdrawal of force. the more conscious i am of my fear the less i fear. while this law of withdrawal of force is obviously the case when consciousness is at its fullest capacity, yet it may be said that apperception in other phases acts as stimulant to waken latent forces, just as in the body stimulus of one function is often stimulus of all, though we doubt that apperception is original and permanent function in consciousness. but still in such cases it is a new consciousness which is stimulated and strengthened and not the consciousness which is being cognized, and still more then is there decrease in the latter. a given feeling is never increased by attentive consciousness of it. when a feeling is said to be intensified by attention to it, we may suspect either inaccurate analysis or misuse of terms. this, of course, does not deny that within a certain range immanent attention increases pleasure, etc., for example, the more actively we taste an orange the more taste pleasure we get.

we note in passing the very interesting psychological 249paradox that the more we view ourselves the less we have to view, the principle of which has been set forth above. we know well that the very reflective and self-conscious have little personal force and individual quality. moreover the self-conscious stage in youth is precisely the period when there is the least real self to be conscious of. a strong multiplex mind is rarely very self-observant.

finally we have to remark upon the way in which attention may be divisive of cognition. boswell makes dr. johnson to say, “if we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so that there is but one half to be employed on what we read.” but admitting the necessity of intrinsic interest, this does not do away with attention. attention hinders rather than helps cognition only when it becomes wearing strain, as in reading when much fatigued. but attention as fulness of vigorous normal will activity gives a force and value to cognition which it would not otherwise have, and often makes its very existence possible. the greatest, most significant cognitions in the mental life of any individual are those which are achieved at the top of endeavour. real knowledge as advancement and acquirement is always the fruit of long training and attention.

the act of attention is painful and therefore is not exercised by lower organisms, at least, only under absolute necessity. often the pain from attention is so great that the individual prefers to suffer than to exert himself cognitively and so help to remove pain-giver. it is only under the greatest pressure that new knowledge and new ideas are acquired, and the history of mind shows a series of tours de force achieved only in moments of direst need. the strengthening and the holding of cognitive powers to a given point by effort of will is peculiarly distasteful and painful activity. all minds tend toward inaction or toward the regions of effortless action where overwhelming interest carries them freely along. attention, while the 250most advantageous of actions, is yet most irksome and painful. it would seem to us at first blush that if pleasure and not pain had attached to the attentive act from the beginning, the evolution of mind would have been accomplished in the merest fraction of the time actually required. it would have been the difference between going down a steep incline rather than up. why progress should only be realized through painful effort and struggle is a problem which has vexed the thought of man throughout history but upon which psychology has little light to throw. our present concern is to simply emphasize the fact that cognitive act as attention is always painful, and if the act of cognition is performed without pain we may promptly deny this to be an attention. this is, of course, far from asserting that all cognizings with pain are attentions.