CHAPTER XI. 

 ATTENTION. 



^Strange to say, so patent a fact as the perpetual pres- 

 ence of selective attention has received hardly any notice 

 from psychologists of the English empiricist school. The 

 Germans have explicitly treated of it, either as a faculty or 

 as a resultant, but in the pages of such writers as Locke, 

 Hume, Hartley, the Mills, and Spencer the word hardly 

 occurs, or if it does so, it is parenthetically and as if by inad- 

 vertence.* The motive of this ignoring of the phenomenon 

 of attention is obvious enough. These writers are bent on 

 showing how the higher faculties of the mind are pure 

 products of ' experience ; ' and experience is supposed to be 

 of something simply given. Attention, implying a degree 

 of reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through the 

 circle of pure receptivity which constitutes ' experience,' 

 and hence must not be spoken of under j)enalty of inter- 

 fering with the smoothness of the tale. 



But the moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how 

 false a notion of experience that is which would make it 

 tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an out- 

 ward order. Millions of items of the outward order are 

 present to my senses which never properly enter into my 

 experience. Why ? Because they have no interest for me. 

 My experience is ichat I agree to attend to. Only those items 

 which I notice shape my mind — without selective interest, 

 experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent 

 and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground 

 —intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every 



* Bain mentions attention in the Senses and the Intellect, p. 558, and 

 even gives a theory of it on pp. 370-374 of the Emotions of the Will. I 

 shall recur to this theory later on. 



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