Education then, is a process of stimulating desire, of leading to ambitions and aspirations. As what is imposed on consciousness without desire is a hurtful burden, the true pedagogic method is always to awaken the wish for knowledge and power before it is granted. Desire as interest is assimilating power, and without it there is no mental growth. The art of education is the art of stimulating intellectual, æsthetic, moral and religious desires, and of providing for their progressive gratification with the best arranged and most suggestive material.
CHAPTER XIV
SOME REMARKS ON ATTENTION
The term attention is, like feeling, a word of extremely doubtful and variable import. Like feeling, attention may be used as denominating any stage of consciousness, or it may be restricted to some more or less specific form. As affections of the organism all psychoses are termed feelings; viewed as subjective-objective acts, a content being attained, consciousness as such is termed attention. We are said to be attending when we have any activity of mind, when we have anything in the mind or before the mind. When consciousness has something in it, consciousness is attending, whence attention means consciousness acting. But what is consciousness inactive? Nothing. Hence consciousness attending, used for consciousness acting, is a pleonasm. Consciousness, by virtue of always being conscious of something, does not need the word attention to qualify it.
The attention of consciousness is called, attracted, or engaged, when any mental act occurs, whether a pain,[pain,] pleasure, perception, or whatever form it may be. When the mind is occupied with anything, i.e., is active, it is thereby attending to the thing. If I am conscious, I am, of course, conscious of something, hence attending to that something. But all these expressions are incompatible with a purely psychological point of view. In psychics, as opposed to physics, the thing exists only as perceived and in perceiving, esse is percipi; the object or content of consciousness exists neither beyond consciousness nor in it; it is consciousness and consciousness is it, it is nothing more than objectifying fact. Consciousness does not, like a pail, have contents, but it is merely a name for the sum of activities we term conscious. Such a phrase, then, as, attending to something, may be radically misleading. We do not have both consciousness and a field of consciousness, a presentation field. A tolerably constant part of human consciousness is an activity which is a constituting a world of external and internal objects. This objectifying activity, which may or may not be object for higher activity—apperception or attention in one sense—does not, however, persist and subsist as a more or less mechanical continuum, as Mr. James Ward and that school maintain. Still the word attention may in a vague and general way denote both the realizing force and will effort therein of every act of consciousness. But yet as thus a general term for certain aspects or general qualities, it is liable to misconstruction, and we do not propose to employ it either as denoting any act of consciousness as such, or any aspect thereof.
Attention may also denote dominancy in consciousness. When any one factor is pre-eminent, we say the mind is therewith attentive. When any element has a marked ascendency, so that all others are much feebler and subservient, thereby is constituted a state of attention; as when sight perception monopolizes consciousness in an eagle watching for prey, or hearing commands all the mental powers of a deer listening to a strange sound. However, practically all states are in reality complexes in which some one factor is and must be dominant, and this universal phenomenon of dominancy scarcely deserves the specific name, attention. Consciousness is always more or less concentrated in some single channel; the factors in any state of consciousness are never perfectly equal in intensity, and so are never in perfect balance. But attention is not this fact of dominancy, but rather that of consciously sustained dominancy, as we shall note later.
If attention is not a proper term to denote simple dominancy, may it not denote that complete form, engrossment, or absorption, where one element predominates to the exclusion of all others, and so occupies all of consciousness—that is, more exactly, is all the consciousness—and also tests the capacity for consciousness to the full? The fixed idea is an instance in point, and in a certain way also preoccupation or absent-mindedness. Still, in this last there are manifold elements and often great complexity—e.g., train of thought—hence dominances of different forms, but yet a persistence of a certain mode with consciousness running at its full capacity, and the result being that the general trend is not easily altered. In cases of fixed idea and brown study we say, “his attention is fully occupied,” which means nothing more than his mind or consciousness capacity is fully taken. I do not see that we gain anything by using attention in the same sense as these two general terms, mind and consciousness, which are surely sufficient. Further, when one “loses himself in a subject,” the power of self-activity, and hence power of real attention, is lost. Mental activity which has slipped beyond the control of will is not in any true and high sense an attending, nor is attention good term for consciousness at saturation point.
Again, attention is often used to denote consciousness in its change aspect. When a new consciousness comes in and supplants a former state, we say, in popular but misleading phrase, “it takes or attracts his attention,” as if attention were entity rather than activity. But when we say that change of consciousness is change of attention, we really add nothing; it is an identical proposition. Attention does not qualify consciousness, but is merely synonym for it.
Still again, may attention designate intensity, or some certain degree of intensity? We may say of one, “he was looking inattentively,” or of a fixed, intense gaze, “he was looking very attentively.” A strong vision is thus opposed to weak as an attention. As all psychoses have some degree of intensity, they are thereby acts of attention, if we reckon from a zero point, or a more or less large number of consciousnesses if we reckon from some fixed degree of intensity. But to call a psychosis, because of its intensity, or because it has reached a certain degree thereof, an attention, seems an unnecessary procedure. Nothing is gained by describing an intense psychosis as an attention, and certainly intense pains and pleasures hardly come under the term. Nor yet are intense cognitions, merely by reason of the intensity, properly states of attention. Fixed ideas are commonly intense, yet there is no true attention, as we have before intimated. Cognitions which come as intense must be marked off from those which are intense by reason of a self-determined self-consciousness intensifying. The essence of attention is intensifying act self-regulated. To be sure, intense presentations are given as such only by an heredity momentum, from past ancestral intensifyings; their impetus is on the basis of past cognitive exertions. Presentation intensity, and, indeed, all mental intensity, is originally and fundamentally volitional; the act had its force solely in will power; but in late phases psychoses which originally required intense exertion rise spontaneously and have a strength and persistence apart from volition, and so the word attention does not rightly apply to them. Thus also we can solve the problem that Mr. Ward states when he says, “How the intensity that presentations have apart from volition is related to that which they have by means of it—how the objective component is related to the subjective—is a hard problem; still there is no gain in a spurious simplicity that ignores the difference” (Mind, xii. p. 65). But “objective component” and “subjective” do not enter into the question; cognition does not arise as a given, as forced and determined from without, but it is rather at bottom a mode of volition. Still attention is not then cognition intensity in general.
If attention is not any form or quality of mental activity in general or of cognition in particular, we must find its essence in volition—as, indeed, has been intimated in the immediately preceding pages. Attention is properly the will side of cognition; it is cognitive effort. Considering attentively, looking attentively, listening attentively, mean cognitive efforts in thinking, seeing and hearing. Here is a cognitive experience which does not simply happen, but is definitely brought about and held to. There is intensifying act by which the given cognition is held and kept in dominancy. The word attention must, as a psychological term, be extended to denote, not merely modes of cognitive effort prominent in man, but all cognitive exertion of whatever grade. It will include all will-tension in all the senses—olfactory, gustatory, muscular, etc.—as well as visual and auditory.[[D]] A dog scenting game may be as truly attentive as a waiter listening to your order. So far as the smelling by the dog is merely instinctive, that is, heredity survival, there is no real attention; the mental activities are not efforts of will-attentions—so far as they occur spontaneously and inevitably. But when, as we often see, a dog is somewhat baffled in scenting, it plainly puts forth cognitive effort, it exerts its cognitive powers to the utmost, there is that strain and stretch which the word attention literally and naturally suggests. As soon, in fact, as the labour point is reached in any mode of cognition, here is attention. All toil and work is attention, as a definite exertion of will including some cognitive element. The labour of life is attention, is minding or attending to business. Attention is thus will effort in maintaining and intensifying a mode of cognition.