The Erolutioii of Jlind. 183 



psychic state, to which he immediately turned attention. 

 Should all the watches and clocks in a jeweler's store sud- 

 denly stop, the jeweler would know nothing of it, if it did 

 not change the condition of his awareness. Years of habit 

 made him indifferent to the sound, so that he did not observe 

 it ; but the instant it stopped he was aware of the change. 

 Let lis next suppose it to be Christmas, and that Bert}' has 

 received a long coveted toy which he is intently studying. 

 In his abstraction he fails to observe our approach. 

 " Berty ! " He does not hear. We repeat the name and he 

 slightly moves. Calling in a louder tone, he hears and 

 comes forward with his, " What is it, papa ? " His attention 

 was in the tlirall of an intense pleasurable sensation. Men- 

 tal abstraction and sleep are here seen to be analogous. In 

 both, attention is riveted upon a pleasurable experience. 

 " God bless the man that first invented sleep," is an expression 

 acknowledging the pleasure it affords. Awakened often, an 

 unsatished sleepiness is always present. The intensity of 

 slumber is directly proportioned to its degree, just as the 

 intensity of abstraction is proportional to the mind's interest 

 in the topic contemplated. Waking abstraction allows 

 many elements to enter, so that it is much less perfect than 

 that condition of sleep where a single feeling sways. Coma 

 has a feeling peculiar to itself, and the persistence of this 

 feeling, if attention is turned upon it, is the persistence of 

 the faint. Soldiers in the excitement of battle forget 

 serious wounds, but as soon as attention is turned upon them 

 they faint. Consciousness in each of these cases alters its 

 state, becoming what might be called sub- or infra-conscious- 

 ness. The knowledge acquired in such a state would be 

 such as that which Mr. T. Davidson has called anoetic* It 

 is an awareness of which we are not fully aware until we 

 have another kind of feeling with which to contrast it. 

 . The ])hysiologist has found in the amoeba the solution of 

 all the problems of his science, since that lowly organism, 

 like a white blood corpuscle, contains in the simplest form 

 every property of all the higher organic tissues. f Nerves 

 and muscles, bones and ligaments, are composed of cells, 

 each of which through generations of differentiation has 

 heightened some one of that creature's qualities in itself, t 

 Bodily development became possible tlirough a division of 



♦Mind, Vol. 7, p. 505. 



t Reichert's Foster's Physiolgy, p. 14-lC. % II)i(l, pp. 18-22. 



