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.

    119/446 page 101
    I. Natural, or Instinctive (always Involuntary) to a. The pleasant or unpleasant. b. The novel. II. Acquired Involuntary! to the object associatively connected Voluntary j with an object naturally attended to. The relation between will and attention, which is sometimes denied, will be further discussed in a later chapter.* It is, however, immediately clear that acquired attention is of great practical significance. If our attention were purely in¬ stinctive, we should go on through life enlarging our primary childhood interests — absorbed in the objects, brilliant, novel, or pleasant, of our immediate perception. We ac¬ quire new interests through our ability to compel ourselves to attend to what is normally uninteresting and unattended to. Thus, voluntary attention attests the power of intellectual development. As Professor Barrett Wendell says: “The practical aim of a general education is such training as shall enable a man to devote his faculties intently to matters which of themselves do not interest him. The power which enables a man to do so is obviously the power of voluntary, as dis¬ tinguished from spontaneous, attention.” Of the bodily conditions of attention there is little to be said. There are evidently no end-organ excitations of at¬ tention. And though we are justified by physiological anal¬ ogy in postulating some special neural condition of attention, the physiologists speak in vague and more or less divergent terms of the nature of such a neural process. Some sort of special ‘preparedness of brain-centres’ must be assumed to exist. The characteristic muscular contractions which ac-
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image