ATTENTION. 423 



just as little can we carry out our purpose to keep our attention steadily 

 fixed upon a certain object, when our interest in the object is exhausted, 

 and the purpose is inwardly formulated in this abstract way. But we 

 can set ourselves new questions about the object, so that a new interest 

 in it arises, and then the attention will remain riveted. The relation 

 of attention to will is, then, less one of immediate than of mediate 

 control." 



These words of Helmlioltz are of fundamental impor- 

 tance. And if true of sensorial attention, liow much more 

 true are they of the intellectual variety ! The conditio sine 

 qua non of sustained attention to a given topic of thought 

 is that we should roll it over and over incessantly and con- 

 sider different aspects and relations of it in turn. Only in 

 pathological states will a fixed and ever monotonoush' re- 

 curring idea jjossess the mind. 



And now we can see Avhy it is that what is called sus- 

 tained attention is the easier, the richer in acquisitions and 

 the fresher and more original the mind. In such minds, 

 subjects bud and sprout and groAv. At every moment, they 

 please by a new consequence and rivet the attention afresh. 

 But an intellect unfurnished with materials, stagnant, un- 

 original, will hardly be likely to consider any subject long. 

 A glance exhausts its possibilities of interest. Geniuses 

 are commonly believed to excel other men in their power 

 of sustained attention.* In most of them, it is to be feared, 

 the so-called 'power' is of the passive sort. Their ideas 

 coruscate, every subject branches infinitely before their 

 fertile minds, and so for hours they may be rapt. But it 

 is their genius making them attentive, not their attention 

 making geniuses of them. And, when we come down to 

 the root of the matter, we see that they differ from ordinary 

 men less in the character of their attention than in the 

 nature of the objects upon which it is successively bestowed. 

 In the genius, these form a concatenated series, suggesting 



* " ' Genius,' says Helvetius, ' is nothing but a continued attention (une 

 atmntion suivie).' ' Genius,' says Buffon, 'is only a protracted patience 

 {une tongue patience).' 'In the exact sciences, at least,' says Cuvier, 'it 

 is the patience of a sound intellect, when invincible, which truly consti- 

 tutes genius.' And Chesterfield has also observed that ' the power of ap- 

 plying an attention, steady and iindissipated, to a single object, is the sure 

 mark of a superior genius." (Hamilton : Lect. on Metaph., lecture xiv.) 



