The term attention is, like feeling, a word of extremely doubtful and variable import. Like feeling, attention may be used as denominating any stage of consciousness, or it may be restricted to some more or less specific form. As affections of the organism all psychoses are termed feelings; viewed as subjective-objective acts, a content being attained, consciousness as such is termed attention. We are said to be attending when we have any activity of mind, when we have anything in the mind or before the mind. When consciousness has something in it, consciousness is attending, whence attention means consciousness acting. But what is consciousness inactive? Nothing. Hence consciousness attending, used for consciousness acting, is a pleonasm. Consciousness, by virtue of always being conscious of something, does not need the word attention to qualify it. The attention of consciousness is called, attracted, or engaged, when any mental act occurs, whether a pain, pleasure, perception, or whatever form it may be. When the mind is occupied with anything, _i.e._, is active, it is thereby attending to the thing. If I am conscious, I am, of course, conscious of something, hence attending to that something. But all these expressions are incompatible with a purely psychological point of view. In psychics, as opposed to physics, the thing exists only as perceived and in perceiving, _esse_ is _percipi_; the object or content of consciousness exists neither beyond consciousness nor in it; it is consciousness and consciousness is it, it is nothing more than objectifying fact. Consciousness does not, like a pail, have contents, but it is merely a name for the sum of activities we term conscious. Such a phrase, then, as, attending to something, may be radically misleading. We do not have both consciousness and a field of consciousness, a presentation field. A tolerably constant part of human consciousness is an activity which is a constituting a world of external and internal objects. This objectifying activity, which may or may not be object for higher activity—apperception or attention in one sense—does not, however, persist and subsist as a more or less mechanical _continuum_, as Mr. James Ward and that school maintain. Still the word attention may in a vague and general way denote both the realizing force and will effort therein of every act of consciousness. But yet as thus a general term for certain aspects or general qualities, it is liable to misconstruction, and we do not propose to employ it either as denoting any act of consciousness as such, or any aspect thereof.