294 The Animal Mind 



of vitally important stimulation. On the other hand, the 

 further characteristic of attention, namely, that it is a state 

 of suspended reaction involving careful discrimination of 

 stimuli, suggests that its functioning is connected rather with 

 the refining and modifying influence of individual experience 

 acting on instinct, since here alone do we find delayed re- 

 action and accurate stimulus discrimination. 



The highest grade of attention, the final triumph of vital 

 importance over mere intensity of stimulation, is to be found 

 where the focus of attention is occupied by an idea or train 

 of ideas. When a process purely centrally excited holds the 

 field and makes the individual deaf and blind to powerful 

 external stimuli pouring in upon his sense organs, then he 

 is superior to the immediate environment at least. This 

 form of attention occurs, probably, only when the vital im- 

 portance of the idea attended to has been learned through 

 that most rapid form of individual acquisition of experience 

 which involves the revival of the past in idea. It has been 

 called derived attention. The ideas attended to are held 

 in the focus of consciousness and analyzed through the power 

 of associated ideas. The inventor holds to his problem, the 

 student to his task, in spite of distractions, because of the 

 consequences which he thinks of as likely to result. It 

 seems unlikely that attention in this final form occurs among 

 the lower animals. While ideas are probably present to 

 some extent in the minds of the higher mammals, they are 

 hardly so far freed from connection with external stimuli that 

 the animal can shut out the world of sense from its conscious- 

 ness and dwell in a world of ideas. 



