flood-gates of his being would stand wider than before, and let in upon him stronger and deeper currents of inspiration." "It is by spontaneous and not by reflective thought that the mind attains its clearest and most penetrating visions of things.. . . . Almost always there is involved in them the gathered wisdom of long, and varied, and ripened experience; very often there are analyses, more or less refined; generalisations of a narrower or wider scope; and not unfrequently ratiocinations passing so rapidly, that the processes are not only not analysed, they are not even observed." Dr. M'Cosh.

The highest form of memory, as of all the mental powers, is the unconscious-when what we wish to recall comes to us spontaneously, without any conscious thought or search for it. Frequently when we wish to recall something that has previously been in the mind we are unable to do so by any conscious effort of the will; but we turn the attention to something else, and after a time the desired information comes up spontaneously when we are not consciously thinking of it. "There is the working of a mechanism beneath the consciousness which, when once set going, runs on of itself, and which is more likely to evolve the desiderated result when the conscious activity of the mind is exerted in a direction altogether different.” — Dr. Carpenter.

CHAPTER VII.

ATTENTION.

"Memory is very much influenced by attention, or a full and distinct perception of the fact or object, with a view to its being remembered."-Dr. Abercrombie.

"It is a matter of common remark that the permanence of the impression, which anything leaves on the memory, is proportioned to the degree of attention which was originally given to it."-D. Stewart.

66 The experiences most permanently impressed upon consciousness are those upon which the greatest amount of attention has been fixed."-D. G. Thompson.

Attention "is so essentially subservient" to memory, "that without some degree of it the ideas and perceptions which pass through the mind seem to leave no trace behind them".-D. Stewart.

"An act of attention, that is an act of concentration, seems thus necessary to every exertion of consciousness, as a certain contraction of the pupil is requisite to every exertion of vision. Attention, then, is to consciousness what the contrac. tion of the pupil is to sight, or to the eye of the mind what the microscope or telescope is to the bodily eye. It constitutes the better half of all intellectual power."-Sir W. Hamilton.

"It is this, much more than any difference in the abstract power of reasoning, which constitutes the vast difference which exists between minds of different indi. viduals."-Sir B. Brodie.

"The most important intellectual habit that I know of" is "the habit of attending exclusively to the matter in hand. . . . It is commonly said that genius cannot be infused by education, yet this power of concentrated attention, which belongs as a part of his gift to every great discoverer, is unquestionably capable of almost indefinite augmentation by resolute practice."-W. A. Butler. "The force wherewith anything strikes the mind is generally in proportion to the degree of attention bestowed upon it. The great art of memory is attenmemories."-Dr. J. Beattie

tion. . . .

A

Inattentive people have always bad

TTENTION is necessary to memory. The remembrance of anything depends upon the clearness and vividness of the impression originally made by it upon the mind, and this on the degree of attention with which it was regarded.' It is generally held by

"It is a law of mind that the intensity of the present consciousness determines the vivacity of the future memory; memory and consciousness are thus in the direct ratio of each other. Vivid consciousness, long memory; faint consciousness, short memory; no consciousness, no memory."-Sir W. Hamilton.

...

philosophers that without some degree of attention no impression of any duration could be made on the mind or laid up in the memory.1 Impressions may be made on the senses, thoughts may pass through the mind, but unless the attention is directed to them they will be unobserved. The defects of memory, of which most persons complain, are owing more to want of attention than to any other cause.3/ We remember what we attend to, but what we do not attend to we readily forget.

Attention is the fixing of the mind intently upon one particular object, to the exclusion for the time of all

1 "Every phenomenon of consciousness proper must possess in some degree the attributes of clearness and distinctness without which it can leave no trace in the memory, and cannot be compared with other phenomena of the same class; and in order to this it is necessary that the phenomenon in question should have been observed with some degree of attention.". -Dean Mansel. inclined to suppose that it is essential to memory that the perception, or the idea which we would wish to remember, should remain in the mind for a certain space of time, and should be contemplated by it exclusively of everything else."-D. Stewart.

"I am

"It is clearly not sufficient that an impression should be transmitted to the brain for it to be remembered. An act of the mind itself is necessary for that purpose, and that . . . is attention.”—Sir B. Brodie. "Place yourself in the crowded streets of a city, a thousand objects of vision before your eye, sounds hardly less various coming upon the ear, odours also constantly changing, contact or collision at any moment with some external object. Amidst this multitude of physical objects, and with all the organs of sense seemingly open, one alone will be found at each moment distinctly present to the mind. . . . Or let the mind pass suddenly by will or accident into a train of inward thought .. and all the external objects thus crowded around you utterly disappear, though the physical agents producing, and the organs receiving, sensations remain precisely as before."-Sir H. Holland.

"It is only a small proportion of what we see, or hear, or feel, or imagine, that is not immediately forgotten, simply because there are very few of these things to which we pay more than a momentary attention."-Sir B, Brodie. "The habit of hasty and inexact obser vation . . is necessarily the foundation of a habit of remembering wrongly; and the habit of remembering wrongly is of necessity the cause of an incorrect judgment and erroneous imagination.”—Dr. H. Maudsley.

It is not, strictly

other objects that solicit its notice. speaking, a special faculty of the mind, but is a mode of activity equally applicable to all its states. It is a particular form of consciousness, and acts altogether irrespective of the object to which it is applied, being equally suitable to every occasion for which it is required. Sir W. Hamilton defines it as "consciousness voluntarily applied under its law of limitations to some determinate object". This law of limitations, he says, is" that the intention of our knowledge is in the inverse ratio of its extension,"-in other words, "that the greater the number of objects to which our consciousness is simultaneously extended, the smaller is the intensity with which it is able to consider each, and consequently the less vivid and distinct will be the information it obtains of the several objects. . . . When our interest in any particular object is excited, and when we wish to obtain all the knowledge concerning it in our power, it behoves us to limit our consideration to that object to the exclusion of others.'

The human mind is single, and can only be in one state or engaged in one kind of activity at the same instant of time.1 It can, however, pass with amazing rapidity from one state or from one form of activity to

1 "Whether we have the power of attending to more than one thing at one and the same instant?" The negative opinion "appears to me to be the most reasonable and philosophical that we can form on the subject".-D. Stewart. "A plurality of stimulations of the nerves may coexist, but they can affect the consciousness only by turns, or one at a time."-Prof. Bain. "It is established by experience that we cannot give our attention to two different objects at the same time."-M. Jouffroy. "Two thoughts or acts of memory, however closely related to one another, cannot be presumed to exist at the same instant,-each has its individuality in time."-Sir H. Holland. "The nature of our organism prevents our having more than one aspect of an object at each instant presented to conscious ness."-G. H. Lewis,

another, so as to give the impression that it may be in several states or carry on several operations at once, but this is simply owing to the rapidity with which it can pass from one to another.1 Hence, when taken up with one object others may present themselves to it and be unobserved. Thus, the clock may strike in the room beside us, and, if the mind is otherwise engaged, we may fail to perceive it. In like manner wounds received in the heat of battle may be unfelt for a time, owing to the mind being otherwise occupied.3

When, on the other hand, the attention is unengaged or free, the lightest impressions will be perceived; and it has the power of intensifying or magnifying any impression or thought to which it may be directed." Thus impressions, feeble or insignificant in themselves,

1 "The best philosophers are agreed that the mind cannot actually attend to more than one thing at a time, but, when it so appears, is in reality shifting with prodigious rapidity backwards and forwards from one to the other."-Archbp. Whately. It is "impossible that the mind should be engaged in two topics at the same instant. The expertness which seems to accomplish this feat is, in fact, a highly developed power of glancing from one subject to another with great rapidity-a sort of mental trapeze-flying, wherein the performer often gets an ugly fall, and may be permanently disabled."-Dr. M. Granville. "The fact never to be forgotten is that the human mind can attend to only one thing at a time, although it may shift the attention very rapidly, and thus overtake two or more things by turns."-Prof. Bain.

2" He whose mind is intensely employed in any particular pursuit, may have his eyes open upon an object which he sees not, or he may not hear the sound of a clock striking within two yards of him."-Dr. G. Payne.

3 "It is well known that impressions fail to produce consciousness when the mind is strongly pre-engaged. In the heat of a battle wounds may be for a time unfelt.”—Prof. Bain.

"Those things are . . . best remembered which occur when the mind is at ease and unemployed.”—Dr. J. Beattie.

"Whatever be its relations to the special faculties, attention doubles all their efficiency and affords them a power of which they would otherwise be destitute."- -Sir W. Hamilton.