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may be called instinctive interests; the acquired tendencies to attend may be called acquired interests.

Instinctive Attention.-Some of the more important instinctive tendencies are to attend, other things being equal, to:

(1) Moving objects rather than still objects.

(2) Other human beings and living animals rather than plants or inanimate objects.

(3) Clear rather than obscure or indefinite objects. (4) Intense rather than weak stimuli.

(5) Novel rather than familiar objects (unless the latter have special advantages).

(6) Pleasurable rather than painful stimuli.

(7) Expected rather than unexpected stimuli.

These tendencies are fairly common to all human beings, though individual differences exist with respect to the amount of strength of each.

Like instincts in general, these instinctive interests may be delayed. Obvious illustrations are the interest in living animals and the interest in the opposite sex. Little is known of the exact time of maturing of instinctive tendencies to attend, because in actual life the influence of original nature is often inextricably conjoined with that of experience. No one can say for instance how far the tendency to attend to the number aspect of any stimulus, to count objects,—is a delayed instinct and how far it is an acquired habit.

Acquired Attention.-In habits of attention there is amongst individuals a tremendous diversity due to the moderate differences in the instinctive tendencies from which the habits develop, the greater differences in capacities, and the still greater differences in the experiences which life affords to different individuals. We all come to attend in general to spoken words more than to

coughs, laughs, sneezes and the like; to facial expression more than to movements of the chest; to the weather more than to the character of the soil. In these cases experience teaches all much the same lessons. But on the whole each individual acquires interests in a special circle of friends, special divisions of knowledge, a special profession or trade, a special locality, and so with the many objects of modern civilized life.

The forces in forming habits of attention, and in deciding what thing or feature out of several will in any given situation be attended to, are the frequency, recency and intensity of attention to the thing on previous occasions, resultant pleasure, and harmony with the general set of the mind. Of these, resultant pleasure is by far the most important. Mere frequency and recency of attention will in fact produce inattention or disregard if the consequences are unsatisfactory or even indifferent; for frequency breeds familiarity and monotony and by original nature the familiar and monotonous is disregarded in favor of the novel. In the long run attention is more and more given to those things attention to which produces felt satisfaction.

Voluntary Attention.-So-called voluntary attention,-i.e., attending with effort and deliberately neglecting the thing which appeals to instinctive interests or pleasurable habits of attention,-seems unexplainable by the laws of instinct and association. Why, for instance, does a boy attend with effort to the words of his spelling lesson when the sound of a band and the vision through the window of a circus parade invite him? As a matter of fact he usually does not. When he does, it is because some idea or feeling in connection with the situation makes the attending to the spelling words more satisfactory to him than attending to the parade. In and of

themselves the spelling words would speedily give way to the parade. But the situation is: 'spelling words to look at and think of-please father-show my grit-I'm weak if I don't do it-of course they must be learned first, and the like,' and if these ideals of duty and achievement are highly enough esteemed, the spelling words are clothed with an attractiveness derived from remote aims and enjoyments which is stronger and wins. It is not that the unsatisfying conquers the desirable; but that what is undesirable in itself may be so suffused by the desirability of its connections as to seem the more desirable to the total frame of mind. It is not that men attend, some only to the attractive and others, of a firmer fibre, to the repugnant. The real difference is that some feel satisfaction only in the directly pleasurable, the selfish rewards, the narrow and immediate outcome; whereas others feel satisfaction in the prospects of far off benefits, in the welfare of others, and in the general and eventual outcome which their entire system of ideas and purposes holds in view. The thing to be accounted for is not a difference in the laws of attention but a difference in taste or preference. Whether the proverbial, "There is no accounting for tastes' be true or not will be seen in a later section. The fact of moment here is the fortunate one that men may have a preference for the eventually useful, the abstractly good and the eternally right as well as for beer and skittles.

The case of voluntary attention, attention against resistance, is one case of the general fact of derived attention. Any thing may gain attention not only from its intrinsic qualities (immediate attention), but also from its associations. Derived attention may or may not imply effort, may minister to higher or lower impulses. Attention to a dollar bill is derived but commonly implies

no feeling of effort. Fagin's attention to Oliver Twist, derived from the idea of making him a thief, was of course in the service of a distinctly low motive.

One more fact of the development of tendencies to attend deserves notice,—namely, that an object which originally is attended to with effort so often comes after a time to be attended to without effort. To look at the printed words in a story book and to think of '4 and 7 are II' and the like in doing sums in addition, imply effort in the 7 year old child in school, but none in the practiced reader and accountant.

Getting rid of the feeling of effort is due to getting rid of irrelevant impulses or ideas which need checking or inhibition, and to the strengthening of the relevant impulses or ideas by their repetition and resulting satisfaction. Just as a person could free life as a whole from the feeling of effort, if the tendencies to do every thing that he had to do were made a hundred times as strong and the tendencies to do everything that he must not do were reduced ninety-nine per cent. in strength; so in a single process of life like reading, effort vanishes in proportion as the tendencies to do what must be done in reading (e.g., to move the eyes to a point on the line) are strengthened and the tendencies to do what must not be done (e.g., to move the eyes away from the point before the words are perceived) are weakened. There is no mysterious law that effort decreases with repetition. It does not except in so far as the need for inhibition decreases.

Neglect. Selecting one thing implies the disregard of other things. For one feature of a mental state to be focal, others must be kept in the margin. Attention has, as its corollary or negative aspect, neglect.1 The same

1 The term inhibition is the one commonly used for this process

process is, from the point of view of the thing selected, attention, and, from that of the thing disregarded, neglect. The account just given is then as applicable to the latter as to the former. Tendencies to neglect, like tendencies to attend, are partly inborn and partly acquired. The laws of their acquisition are the same; discomfort being the rejecting and dissociating force as satisfaction is the emphasizing and associating force.

Neglect may be intrinsic or derived, according as the object is in itself unattractive or repellent, or has grafted upon it the unattractiveness or repulsiveness of its mental associates. Neglect may be with or without a feeling of strain or effort.

§ 60. Satisfaction and Discomfort

Two facts, resulting satisfaction and resulting discomfort, have been constantly invoked as causes of changes in the life of thought and action. The reader is acquainted with these facts in his own experience but certain knowledge about their presence and causation needs statement here. To explain fully why any human being thinks and feels and acts as he does, it is necessary to know what circumstances will give him the feelings of satisfaction and of discomfort. Having learned that connections productive of satisfaction are selected for survival and that connections productive of discomfort are eliminated, the final step is to learn what sort of result is satisfying.

of disregard or neglect. The word inhibition is however used also to mean the prevention of any tendency, of tendencies to move, to perceive, to associate ideas and the like as well as the prevention of tendencies to attend to an object. It is best to avoid ambiguity by using rejection or neglect to refer to the negative aspect of attention and keeping inhibition for the more general fact of prevention.

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