It is probable that genius tends actually to prevent a man from acquiring habits of voluntary attention, and that moderate intellectual endowments are the soil in which we may best expect, here as elsewhere, the virtues of the will, strictly so called, to thrive. But, whether the attention come by grace of genius or by dint of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is _compos sui_ if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be _the_ education _par excellence_. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about. The only general pedagogic maxim bearing on attention is that the more interests the child has in advance in the subject, the better he will attend. Induct him therefore in such a way as to knit each new thing on to some acquisition already there; and if possible awaken curiosity, so that the new thing shall seem to come as an answer, or part of an answer, to a question preëxisting in his mind. =The Physiological Conditions of Attention.=--These seem to be the following: 1) _The appropriate cortical centre must be excited ideationally as well as sensorially, before attention to an object can take place._ 2) _The sense-organ must then adapt itself to clearest reception of the object, by the adjustment of its muscular apparatus._ 3) _In all probability a certain afflux of blood to the cortical centre must ensue._ Of this third condition I will say no more, since we have no proof of it in detail, and I state it on the faith of general analogies. Conditions 1) and 2), however, are verifiable; and the best order will be to take the latter first. =The Adaptation of the Sense-organ.=--This occurs not only in sensorial but also in intellectual attention to an object. That it is present when we attend to _sensible_ things is obvious. When we look or listen we accommodate our eyes and ears involuntarily, and we turn our head and body as well; when we taste or smell we adjust the tongue, lips, and respiration to the object; in feeling a surface we move the palpatory organ in a suitable way; in all these acts, besides making involuntary muscular contractions of a positive sort, we inhibit others which might interfere with the result--we close the eyes in tasting, suspend the respiration in listening, etc. The result is a more or less massive organic feeling that attention is going on. This organic feeling we usually treat as part of the sense of our _own activity_, although it comes in to us from our organs after they are accommodated. Any object, then, if _immediately_ exciting, causes a reflex accommodation of the sense-organ, which has two results--first, the feeling of activity in question; and second, the object's increase in clearness.