Attention may also denote dominancy in consciousness. When any one factor is pre-eminent, we say the mind is therewith attentive. When any element has a marked ascendency, so that all others are much feebler and subservient, thereby is constituted a state of attention; as when sight perception monopolizes consciousness in an eagle watching for prey, or hearing commands all the mental powers of a deer listening to a strange sound. However, practically all states are in reality complexes in which some one factor is and must be dominant, and this universal phenomenon of dominancy scarcely deserves the specific name, attention. Consciousness is always more or less concentrated in some single channel; the factors in any state of consciousness are never perfectly equal in intensity, and so are never in perfect balance. But attention is not this fact of dominancy, but rather that of consciously sustained dominancy, as we shall note later. If attention is not a proper term to denote simple dominancy, may it not denote that complete form, engrossment, or absorption, where one element predominates to the exclusion of all others, and so occupies all of consciousness—that is, more exactly, is all the consciousness—and also tests the capacity for consciousness to the full? The fixed idea is an instance in point, and in a certain way also preoccupation or absent-mindedness. Still, in this last there are manifold elements and often great complexity—_e.g._, train of thought—hence dominances of different forms, but yet a persistence of a certain mode with consciousness running at its full capacity, and the result being that the general trend is not easily altered. In cases of fixed idea and brown study we say, “his attention is fully occupied,” which means nothing more than his mind or consciousness capacity is fully taken. I do not see that we gain anything by using attention in the same sense as these two general terms, mind and consciousness, which are surely sufficient. Further, when one “loses himself in a subject,” the power of self-activity, and hence power of real attention, is lost. Mental activity which has slipped beyond the control of will is not in any true and high sense an attending, nor is attention good term for consciousness at saturation point. Again, attention is often used to denote consciousness in its change aspect. When a new consciousness comes in and supplants a former state, we say, in popular but misleading phrase, “it takes or attracts his attention,” as if attention were entity rather than activity. But when we say that change of consciousness is change of attention, we really add nothing; it is an identical proposition. Attention does not qualify consciousness, but is merely synonym for it.