A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tiveness of the person meanwhile absorbed in emotion or calculation or landscape, is more significant than his attentiveness. (d) The discovery that one attends to a part only of the total object of consciousness at once suggests the question: To what part? The answers to this question may, perhaps, reduce themselves to three. It is a matter of common obser¬ vation that I attend (i) to the pleasant or unpleasant —for example, to the compliment which some one pays me or to my toothache; and (2) to the novel, or unusual, for example, to the figure of a turbaned Hindu in an Oxford audience which fills the Sheldonian theatre. My attention to a sensationally in¬ tense object, for example, to a thunder-clap, and my attention to a moving object, for example, to a flying bird or to a moving signal, are cases of attention to the surprising or unusual. Finally (3) I attend to that part of my total field of conscious¬ ness which is connected with other objects of my attention. If I am studying the problem of immigration from Southern Europe I notice the most casual newspaper references to Slavs and to Italians, and I remember the southern type of this or that face in a crowd. If I have hurried the carpenters out of the house which they are building for me, by helping to fill with putty the holes left by the nails in the woodwork, then for weeks I mark the variations of color between wood and putty in the wainscotings and furnishings of the houses which I visit. No one of these three characters invariably distin¬ guishes the object of attention — one may attend to the dull color or the soft sound; an object closely connected with our ordinary interests may be unattended to; and finally — though psychologists are not in agreement on this point — one may attend to an object which is neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
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