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The Fifth Lesson: The Cultivation of Attention.559
instant presented to consciousness.” Whateley says: “The best philosophers
are agreed that the mind cannot actually attend to more than one thing at a
time, but, when it appears to be doing so it is really shifting with prodigious
rapidity backward and forward from one to the other.”
By giving a concentrated Voluntary Attention to an object, we not only are
able to see and think about it with the greatest possible degree of clearness,
but the mind has a tendency, under such circumstances, to bring into the
field of consciousness all the different ideas associated in our memory with
that object or subject, and to build around the object or subject a mass of
associated facts and information. And at the same time the Attention given
the subject makes more vivid and clear all that we learn about the thing at
the time, and, in fact, all that we may afterwards learn about it. It seems to
cut a channel, through which knowledge flows.
Attention magnifies and increases the powers of perception, and
greatly aids the exercise of the perceptive faculties. By “paying attention”
to something seen or heard, one is enabled to observe the details of the
thing seen or heard, and where the inattentive mind acquires say three
impressions the attentive mind absorbs three times three, or perhaps
three times “three times three,” or twenty-seven. And, as we have just
said, Attention brings into play the powers of association, and gives us the
“loose end” of an almost infinite chain of associated facts, stored away in our
memory, forming new combinations of facts which we had never grouped
together before, and bring out into the field of consciousness all the many
scraps of information regarding the thing to which we are giving attention.
The proof of this is within the experience of everyone. Where is the one
who does not remember sitting down to some writing, painting, reading,
etc., with interest and attention, and finding, much to his surprise, what a
flow of facts regarding the matter in hand was passing through his mind.
Attention seems to focus all the knowledge of a thing that you possess, and
by bringing it to a point enables you to combine, associate, classify, etc., and
thus create new knowledge. Gibbon tells us that after he gave a brief glance