Attention
I have presupposed throughout one function which it will be well to now recognize explicitly, attention. As usual, attention emphasizes and facilitates the process which it accompanies. Unless the sense-impression is focussed by attention, it will not be associated with the act which comes later. Unless two differing boxes are attended to, there will be no difference in the reactions to them. The really effective part of animal consciousness, then, as of human, is the part which is attended to; attention is the ruler of animal as well as human mind.
But in giving attention its deserts we need not forget that it is not here comparable to the whole of human attention. Our attention to the other player and the ball in a game of tennis is like the animal’s attention, but our attention to a passage in Hegel, or the memory which flits through our mind, or the song we hear, or the player we idly watch, is not. There ought, I think, to be a separate name for attention when working for immediate practical associations. It is a different species from that which holds objects so that we may define them, think about them, remember them, etc., and the difference is, as our previous sentence shows, not that between voluntary and involuntary attention. The cat watching me for signs of my walking to the cage with fish is not in the condition of the man watching a ball game, but in that of the player watching the ball speeding toward him. There is a notable difference in the permanence of the impression. The man watching the game can remember just how that fly was hit and how the fielder ran for it, though he bestowed only a slight quantity of attention on the matter, while the fielder may attend to the utmost to the ball and yet not remember at all how it came or how he ran for it. The one sort of attention leads you to think about a thing, the other to act with reference to it. We must be careful to remember that when we say that the cat attended to what was said, we do not mean that he thereby established an idea of it. Animals are not proved to form separate ideas of sense-impressions because they attend to them, for the kind of attention they give is the kind which, when given by men, results in practical associations, not in establishing ideas of objects. If attention rendered clear the idea, we should not have the phenomena of incomplete forgetfulness lately mentioned. The animal would get a definite idea of just the exact thing done and would do it or nothing. The human development of attention is in closest connection with the acquisition of a stock of free ideas.