ATTENTION. 455 



INATTENTION. 



Having spoken fully of attention, let me add a word 

 about inattention. 



We do not notice the ticking of the clock, the noise of 

 the city streets, or the roaring of the brook near the 

 house ; and even the din of a foundry or factory will 

 not mingle with the thoughts of its workers, if they hava 

 been there long enough. When we first put on spectacles, 

 especially if they be of certain curvatures, the bright reflec- 

 tions they give of the windows, etc, mixing with the field 

 of view, are very disturbing. In a few days we ignore them 

 altogether. Various entoptic images, muscce volitantes, etc., 

 although constantly present, are hardly ever known. The 

 pressure of our clothes and shoes, the beating of our hearts 

 and arteries, our breathing, certain steadfast bodily jDains, 

 habitual odors, tastes in the mouth, etc., are examples from 

 other senses, of the same lapse into unconsciousness of any 

 too unchanging content — a lapse which Hobbes has ex- 

 pressed in the well-known phrase, " Semper idem sentire 

 ac non sentire ad idem revertunf." 



The cause of the unconsciousness is certainly not the 

 mere blunting of the sense-organs. Were the sensation 

 important, we should notice it well enough ; and we can at 

 any moment notice it by expressly throwing our attention 

 upon it,* provided it have not become so inveterate that in- 

 attention to it is ingrained in our very constitution, as "in the 

 case of the muscce volitantes the double retinal images, etc. 

 But even in these cases artificial conditions of observation 

 and patience soon give us command of the imjDression 

 which we seek. The inattentiveness must then be a habit 

 grounded on higher conditions than mere sensorial fatigue. 



* It must be admitted that some little time will often elapse before this 

 effort succeeds. As a child, I slept in a uurser}' with a very loud-ticking 

 clock, and remember my astonishment more than once, on listening for its 

 tick, to find myself unable to catch it for what seemed a long space of 

 time; then suddenly it would break into my consciousness with an almost 

 startling loudness. — M. Delboeuf somewhere narrates how, sleeping in tlie 

 country near a mill-dam, he woke in the night and thought the water had 

 ceased to tlow, but on looking out of the open window saw it Mowing in the 

 moonlight, and then heard it too. 



