or if excluded at all, they return ever and anon, and produce more or less unsteadiness and confusion of thought. It is difficult to pursue regular trains of thought, and to attend closely to particular objects, for any considerable time, in the midst of noise, conversation, and business. Hence the advantage of seclusion and retirement to students.

§ 65. The power of exclusive attention to particular objects is like other voluntary powers capable of being greatly improved and extended by discreet exercise. Men who accustom themselves to attend to one thing at a time, to the exclusion of every thing else, will experience a continual improvement of this power. Persons on the other hand, who do not accustom themselves to attend exclusively, for any considerable time, to any thing, but allow their minds to be perpetually diverted from serious pursuits by trifles, will not only fail of acquiring any considerable powers of attention, but will often be the subjects of contemptible weakness and imbecility in this respect. Habits of steady, patient, resolute, and long continued attention, are the essential conditions of extraordinary intellectual powers. An unsteady mind is always a weak mind. Cæsar and Napoleon were men of remarkable powers of attention. Every important object to them was individualized and insulated from every thing else, and grasped with the utmost force and energy of the thinking powers. That easy, rambling, aimless thinking, which occupies a large portion of the time of many men, occupied them but little. Their thoughts flowed in strong currents, deepened and impelled by great interests, and directed by high and firm resolves. So it has always been with the truly great and the greatly good. Great men are thinking men. They are men who think of objects which task their powers to the utmost, and who prosecute thinking as a business, not merely as a pastime.

§ 66. Men's habits of attention are generally more or less limited, and are influenced, to a considerable extent, by their habits, business, and pleasures. Some degree of attention is necessary to learn any business, and continues to be necessary in the prosecution of business after it is learned. Habits of inattention to one's business constitute habitual carelessness, and result in accidents and irregularities, which are incompatible with any great success.

Persons who have never attended much to any particular class of objects, will at first often find attention laborious and difficult. Slight attractions, and ideas introduced by casual associations, will divert them. Their feelings will be at variance with their endeavors, and their progress will be often hindered in modes that they cannot account for. But persevering and determined effort will soon overcome those obstacles, and what was begun as a task, and accomplished imperfectly, and with difficulty, will after a while, be prosecuted with the greatest pleasure and success.

§ 67. The first practical rule in respect to attention, is to attend to one thing at a time. To attend properly to several things at once, is impossible.

The second rule is to attend to each thing during a period of time sufficient to attain a perfect knowledge of it, so far as that knowledge may be requisite for our purposes. Much labor is often lost by not devoting sufficient time to important objects of thought. Reading books in a hurry is generally of little use, and when it becomes a common practice, is highly injurious. Valuable ideas are worth too much to be instantly dismissed as soon as they are attained. Having attained them, we ought to keep them in view for a sufficient time to become familiar with them. One week spent in study, getting valuable ideas, retaining them, becoming familiar with them, and considering them in all important points of view, is of more use in the improvement of the mind, and in the acquisition of real and permanent knowledge, than years of literary dissipation spent in rambling from field to field, and from object to object, without thoroughly considering any thing.

§ 68. The control which we have over our affections and dispositions, depends, to a great extent, on the degree to which we attend to particular objects. Men who attend very much to flowers, will love flowers; those who attend much to birds, will love birds; and those who attend much to their fellow men, with a view to appreciate their virtues and necessities, will be interested in them. Those who attend exclusively to secular business, will have their feelings deeply interested in business pursuits and transactions; those who attend much to the consideration of moral and scientific subjects, will be proportionably interested in morality and science; and those who attend much to religion, will usually be interested in it. It appears, therefore, that

attention exercises a controlling office in the formation and modification of every variety of human character. By attending to particular objects, we secure the development of emotions and affections corresponding to those objects.

All rational plans for the education of youth, and for the improvement of adult persons in morals, religion, arts, sciences, and domestic habits, involve the exercise of attention to objects adapted to secure those results.

§ 69. The third rule for the exercise of attention, is to attend to particular objects at the proper times, and according to their relative importance. It is a pitiful error to be attending to trifles, when we ought to attend to serious and weighty matters; to attend to things affecting the interests of the day only, when we ought to attend to things affecting our whole lives; and to attend to things affecting this life only, when we ought to attend to those affecting our destinies for eternity.

§ 70. The fourth rule for the exercise of attention, is to exercise our minds in attention, with an intensity and energy proportioned to the dignity and value of the objects to be accomplished by powerful thinking. We have our powers of thought, limited at best, but capable of being indefinitely extended and enlarged by judicious and vigorous exercise. For the employment of these powers, we have the universe spread out like a map to be studied. We have the boundless fields of science and religion to explore; and we have a part to bear in conducting the affairs of the state, the church, and the world, by which we may bless millions, and be ourselves blessed in all the blessedness we create for others.

CHAPTER IV.

CONSCIOUSNESS.

§ 71. Consciousness considered as a faculty of the mind, is a department of the general Faculty of Ideas. It denotes the power of the mind to perceive directly its own sensations, ideas, emotions, affections, desires, and acts of will. Some philosophers have denied the existence of consciousness as different from the states of mind to which it relates. But the contrary is evidently the fact; for we have ideas of our sensations at the time of having sensations; but a sensation is one thing, and an idea of it is another. We experience pain, and have ideas of it at the same time. By and by our pain subsides, but we still remember it. The idea of memory does not involve the sensation, but exists without it. But if the idea of pain exists in the mind without any sensation of pain at the time, then it is a different thing from the sensation to which it relates. The consciousness of pain, therefore, is an idea, and is not pain itself nor any part of it. The same is true of every other act of consciousness. Our mental exercises are themselves the direct objects of our consciousness. We experience pain and are conscious of it; we judge that the evening is far spent, and are conscious of this judgment; we love God and our neighbor, and are conscious of loving them; we exercise choices and form purposes and volitions, and are conscious of them. As soon as

our states of mind pass by we remember them, our ideas of memory bearing the same relation to those of consciousness, which similar ideas of material objects bear to perceptions. Exercises of consciousness, therefore, give us ideas of the same nature and the same validity as exercises of perception.

§ 72. The exercise of consciousness is not necessary except to a limited extent. The objects of consciousness are sensations, ideas and other mental exercises. When these objects occur, we may always be conscious of them, if we attend to them. But if our minds are intensely occupied with other objects, these will be proportionably unnoticed. In the exercises of sight and touch, our minds are so habitually and fully occupied with forming ideas of visible and

tangible objects, that we seldom think of the sensations; and in our ordinary trains of thought, we seldom think of our thoughts, or have any distinct consciousness of them. They are present to our minds. If our attention is called to them, we think of them; otherwise they are suffered in multitudes of cases to pass without the least notice.

The idea that thoughts must be objects of actual consciousness, because they are in the mind, is without foundation in reason, and is contrary to facts in human experience. The representation of consciousness, therefore, as a necessary effect of sensations and ideas, is erroneous. Actual consciousness is not necessary in all the cases in which it is possible, any more than actual perceptions or any other class of actual judgments are always necessary, when they are possible. Consciousness is, to some extent, voluntary and not necessary. Some degree of the exercise of this power is universal, but the highest and most perfect exercises of it are restricted to few.

§ 73. We are conscious of mental exercises, not of the mind itself. Consciousness gives us no more knowledge of the mind, than sensations do of matter; and a knowledge of ourselves is not the immediate effect of consciousness, but of judgment. What is called by some self-consciousness, is self-judgment. We are conscious of pain, pleasure, and other sensations, also of ideas, affections, and acts of will. This consciousness is an intuitive knowledge of those mental exercises, and of nothing more. Having sensations, ideas, affections, and other mental exercises, we naturally begin to compare them with one another, and to reason from them. The effects of this reasoning are ideas both of ourselves, and of external objects. Ideas of ourselves are not given in acts of consciousness, as some suppose, but are inferred from them. In this respect they are analogous to ideas of external objects, which are inferred from sensations, but are not given in them. From sensations we commence our reasonsngs respecting material objects; from consciousness of sensations and of other mental exercises, we commence our reasonings respecting spiritual objects. The whole theory of the natural world is built on sensations; and the whole theory of the spiritual world, on consciousness.

§ 74. The mind's natural capacity for the exercise of consciousness, is similar to that for the exercise of judgment in the perception of material objects, but it is not usually de