tion with what the picture obviously represents; or indeed in every case where an object is inconspicuous and hard to discern from the background; we may not be able to see it for a long time; but, having once seen it, we can attend to it again whenever we like, on account of the mental dupli

FIG. 55.

FIG. 56.

cate of it which our imagination now bears. In the meaningless French words 'pas de lieu Rhône que nous,' who can recognize immediately the English paddle your own canoe'? But who that has once noticed the identity can fail to have it arrest his attention again? When watching for the distant clock to strike, our mind is so filled with its image that at every moment we think we hear the longedfor or dreaded sound. So of an awaited footstep. Every stir in the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugitive his pursuers. Every bonnet in the street is momentarily taken by the lover to enshroud the head of his idol. The image in the mind is the attention; the preperception is half of the perception of the looked-for thing.

It is for this reason that men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught to di cern. Any one of us can notice a phenomenon after it has once been pointed out, which not one in ten thousand could ever have discovered for himself. Even in poetry and the arts, some one has to come and tell us what

scents to angie ut, and what effects to admire, before ar etnett mature can filate to its full extent and never

he wrong emotion. In kindergarten-instruction de tervises is to make the children see how many FALZ Der al point out in such an object as a flower I They readily name the features they such is leaves, tail. bill, feet. But they may Cars viliout dstinguishing nostrils, claws, seales, Zeiz atention is allel to these details; therenev see them every time. In short, the Parauni see are those which we wi the only things which we preperceive are een lacelled for us, and the labels If we lost our stock of labels medievinally lost in the midst of the world. kaisumsi Carvilaries - First, to strengthen attention wame for the subject they are tre 518 Vool-unering The interes in something that the teacher a punishment if noth emek I a copie awakens n

2

attention to the latter. Experience shows that this is the case. I can keep my wandering mind a great deal more closely upon a conversation or a lecture if I actively re-echo to myself the words than if I simply hear them; and I find a number of my students who report benefit from voluntarily adopting a similar course.

Attention and Free Will.-I have spoken as if our attention were wholly determined by neural conditions. I believe that the array of things we can attend to is so determined. No object can catch our attention except by the neural machinery. But the amount of the attention which an object receives after it has caught our mental eye is another question. It often takes effort to keep the mind upon it. We feel that we can make more or less of the effort as we choose. If this feeling be not deceptive, if our effort be a spiritual force, and an indeterminate one, then of course it contributes coequally with the cerebral conditions to the result. Though it introduce no new idea, it will deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable ideas which else would fade more quickly away. The delay thus gained might not be more than a second in duration-but that second may be critical; for in the constant rising and falling of considerations in the mind, where two associated systems of them are nearly in equilibrium it is often a matter of but a second more or less of attention at the outset, whether one system shall gain force to occupy the field and develop itself, and exclude the other, or be excluded itself by the other. When developed, it may make us act; and that act may seal our doom. When we come to the chapter on the Will, we shall see that the whole drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas may receive. But the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was

aspects to single out, and what e our æsthetic nature candilate' to 'with the wrong emotion.' In one of the exercises is to make i features they can point out in or a stuffed bird. They reac know already, such as leaves,... look for hours without distin. etc., until their attention is after, however, they see t only things which we con preperceive, and the only those which have been stamped into our mind we should be intellectua Educational Corollar in children who care studying and let their here must be 'derive associates with the t ing less internal con spontaneous attent elsewhere. But th always try, in tea rational links on perceptions. T by the mind and Herbartian phr Of course the

CHAPTER XIV.

CONCEPTION.

Different states of mind can mean the same. The funcdion by which we mark off, discriminate, draw a line round, and identify a numerically distinct subject of discourse is called conception. It is plain that whenever one and the same mental state thinks of many things, it must be the vehicle of many conceptions. If it has such a multiple conceptual function, it may be called a state of compound conception.

We may conceive realities supposed to be extra-mental, as steam-engine; fictions, as mermaid; or mere entia rationis, like difference or nonentity. But whatever we do conceive, our conception is of that and nothing else—nothing else, that is, instead of that, though it may be of much else in addition to that. Each act of conception results from our attention's having singled out some one part of the mass of matter-for-thought which the world presents, and from our holding fast to it, without confusion. Confusion occurs when we do not know whether a certain object proposed to us is the same with one of our meanings or not; so that the conceptual function requires, to be complete, that the thought should not only say 'I mean this,' but also say 'I don't mean that.'

Each conception thus eternally remains what it is, and never can become another. The mind may change its states, and its meanings, at different times; may drop one conception and take up another: but the dropped conception itself can in no intelligible sense be said to change into its successor. The paper, a moment ago white, may now see to be scorched black. But my conception 'white'