Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE LIMITS OF ATTENTION PSYCHOLOGISTS have demonstrated the fact, which anyone may verify, that attention may be focused upon a given point for but a few seconds. Let the mind be directed to a given object, and it is found that actual attention plays over a multitude of minor aspects or darts away to remote considerations, to return perhaps in a twinkling; but at no time does attention really stick to a given phase of the object for more than a few seconds. When we say that we give perfect attention for an hour, it is not to be inferred that our attention has been unvarying, but it is rather the case that our thoughts have been directed to one large subject with its associated details. 1. Inheritance of Type of Attention Why we possess a nerve apparatus which functions in this type of attention is evident upon a moment's consideration. In the ceaseless war of the lower world the animal that was not alert to every significant stimulus was likely to lose its life. The eye became trained to flit to every point from which danger might arise, and the mind followed the eye. Attention is a mental trait whose character is derived from the nature of the surroundings which have pressed upon the organism during the clockless depths of time. Every quivering leaf in heated jungles now converted into coal, every prowling beast stirring the reeds, every dancing gnat, every rush of wings tended to break into bits the consciousness of our prehuman forbears, and through inheritance to give the average mind a power of attention somewhere between the inconsequential zigzag of the phrase talker and the philosopher's stuck-fast consciousness, miscalled absent-mindedness, but on the whole a distinctly unstable type of attention. Now the fact that the power of human attention, ...