ATTENTION. 417 



may be, whether sight, sound, smell, blow, or inner pain, — 

 or else it is an instinctive stimulus, a perception which, by 

 reason of its nature rather than its mere force, appeals to 

 some one of our normal congenital impulses and has a 

 directly exciting qualit}-. In the chapter on Instinct we 

 shall see how these stimuli diiier from one animal to another, 

 and what most c^ them are in man: strange things, moviag 

 things, wild animals, bright things, pretty things, metallic 

 things, words, blows, blood, etc., etc., etc. 



Sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli 

 characterizes the attention of childhood and youth. In 

 mature age we have generally selected those stimuli which 

 are connected with one or more so-called permanent inter- 

 ests, and our attention has grown irresponsive to the rest.* 

 But childhood is characterized bj' great active energy, and 

 has few organized interests by which to meet new impres- 

 sions and decide whether they are worth}- of notice or not, 

 and the consequence is that extreme mobility of the atten- 

 tion with which we are all familiar in children, and which 

 makes their first lessons such rough aft'airs. Any strong 

 sensation whatever produces accommodation of the organs 

 which perceive it, and absolute oblivion, for the time being, 

 of the task in hand. This reflex and passive character of 

 the attention which, as a French writer says, makes the 

 child seem to belong less to himself than to every object 

 which happens to catch his notice, is the first thing which 

 the teacher must overcome. It never is overcome in some 

 people, whose work, to the end of life, gets done in the 

 interstices of their mind-wandering. 



The passive sensorial attention is derived when the 

 imjDression, without being either strong or of an instinctively 

 exciting nature, is connected by previous experience and 

 education with things that are so. These things may be 

 called the motives of the attention. The impression draws 

 an interest from them, or perhaps it even fuses into a single 

 complex object with them ; the result is that it is brought 

 into the focus of the mind. A faint tap per se is not an 

 interesting sound ; it may well escape being discriminated 



* Note that the permanent interests are themselves grounded in certain 

 objects and relations in which our interest is immediate and instinctive. 



