ATTENTION. 403 



creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature 

 would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for 

 us even to conceive. Such an empiricist writer as Mr. 

 Spencer, for example, regards the creature as absolutely 

 passive clay, upon which 'experience' rains down. The 

 clay will be impressed most deeply where the drops fall 

 thickest, and so the final shape of the mind is moulded. 

 Give time enough, and all sentient things ought, at this 

 rate, to end by assuming an identical mental constitution — 

 for ' experience,' the sole shaper, is a constant fact, and the 

 order of its items must end by being exactly reflected by 

 the passive mirror which we call the sentient organism. 

 If such an account were true, a race of dogs bred for gen- 

 erations, say in the Vatican, with characters of visual shape, 

 sculptured in marble, presented to their eyes, in every va- 

 riety of form and combination, ought to discriminate be- 

 fore long the finest shades of these j)eculiar characters. 

 In a word, they ought to become, if time were given, ac- 

 complished connoisseurs of sculpture. Anyone may judge 

 of the probability of this consummation. Surely an eternity 

 of experience of the statues would leave the dog as inartistic 

 as he was at first, for the lack of an original interest to knit 

 his discriminations on to. Meanwhile the odors at the bases 

 of the pedestals would have organized themselves in the 

 consciousness of this breed of dogs into a system of * cor- 

 respondences ' to which the most hereditary caste of cils- 

 todi would never approximate, merely because to them, as 

 human beings, the dog's interest in those smells would 

 for ever be an inscrutable mystery. These writers have, 

 then, utterly ignored the glaring fact that subjective inter- 

 est may, by laying its weighty index-finger on particular 

 items of experience, so accent them as to give to the least 

 frequent associations far more power to shape our thought 

 than the most frequent ones possess. The interest itself, 

 though its genesis is doubtless perfectly natural, makes ex- 

 perience more than it is made by it. 



Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking pos- 

 session by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of 

 what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains 



