WHAT SEEST THOU? The gracious light, in semi-sphere The vault of heaven, gemmed and deep, And so the world within the flesh The larger gains, and grows apace To Truth's ideal and Beauty's grace With understanding ever fresh. Yet must the Wider Life emerge What seest thou? Thy self alone: -THE AUTHOR 66 CHAPTER XVIII. EXERCISES IN ATTENTION. T IS subject to the superior authority of the Ego. I yield it or I withhold it as I please; I direct it in turn to several points; I concentrate it upon each point as long as my Will can stand the effort."-Dictionaire Philosophique. THEORY OF CHAPTER. Attention, become habituated, involves constant and strong action of Will; The idea of Will-power, always present in the effort to habituate attention, will come to possess and dominate the mind; Such domination, by a psychic law, develops the func tion which it concerns. The preceding chapters have had in view the development of Will by means of physical exercises. If the suggestions hitherto given have been followed, self-culture has resulted with marked growth in this direction. While our work has been physical, the mind has nevertheless been directly involved, for always the Will has thrust itself forward, both as ruler and as object. We are now to enter more particularly the mental field, with the same end in view. PRELIMINARY. The value to the Will of perseverance in this work would seem to be evident. A determined effort to develop the volitional power must certainly result in its growth. But mental activity having this end in view will generate unconscious processes making for the same goal. Doctor Holmes has said: "I was told, within a week, of a business man in Boston, who, having an important question under consideration, had given it up for the time as too much for him. But he was conscious of an action going on in his brain which was so unusual and painful as to excite his apprehensions that he was threatened with palsy, or something of that sort. After some hours of this uneasiness, his perplexity was all at once cleared up by the natural solution of his doubt coming to him— worked out, as he believed, in that obscure and troubled interval." "We are constantly finding results of unperceived mental processes in our consciousness. Here is a striking instance, which I borrow from a recent number of an English journal. It relates to what is considered the most interesting period of incubation in Sir William Rowan Hamilton's discovery of quaternions. The time was the 15th of October, 1843. On that day, he says in a letter to a friend, he was walking from his observatory to Dublin with Lady Hamilton, when, on reaching Brougham Bridge, he 'felt the galvanic circle of thought close;' and the sparks that fell from it were the fundamental relations between i,j, k, just as he used them ever afterwards." If, then, the brain may unconsciously work out specific results of thought under the influence of a desired end, the idea of a mighty Will, kept constantly before the mind and directing given and continuous mental exercises, will undoubtedly generate a process always tending to build up the volitional powers. And as the Will is located throughout the entire mind, the latter must be wholly brought into action for the Will's training and development. The secret of our future labor will be found in that which has been absolutely indispensable all along, to wit: ATTENTION. But attention is hereafter to be confined to the intellect. Its direction is not so much outward as inward; its subject is not so truly the senses as the mind and its extension, so to speak, by means of the senses. "The essential achievement of the Will," says Prof. William James, "when it is most voluntary, is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind." "Effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of Will." But what do we mean by the word Attention? Professor James Sully says: "Attention may be roughly defined as the active self-direction (this involves Will) of the mind to any object which presents itself to it at the moment." He refers to the make-up of the word: ad tendere, to stretch towards. "It is somewhat the same as the mind's 'consciousness' of what is present to it. The field of consciousness, however, is wider than that of attention. Consciousness admits of many degrees of distinctness. I may be very vaguely or indistinctly conscious of some bodily sensation, of some haunting recollection, and so on. To attend is to intensify consciousness by concentrating or narrowing it on some definite or restricted area. It is to force the mind or consciousness in a particular direction so as to make the objects as distinct as possible." Now, Dr. Scripture remarks on the same subject: "The innumerable psychologies attempt to define it, but when they have defined it, you are sure to know just as |