If attention consists in cognitive effort, whether successful or not, what is the nature of the effort to attend? A student says, I try to attend, but I cannot; I cannot hold my mind down to anything. Professor James remarks, “In fact, it is only to the _effort to attend_, not to the mere _attending_, that we are seriously tempted to ascribe spontaneous power” (_Psychology_, p. 451). But it is obvious in such phrases attention means simply cognition, and may be substituted for it, whereas we have just pointed out that attention is both the effort toward and in cognizing act. Literally interpreted, then, the problem is whether we can make an effort to make an effort at cognizing. In great lassitude or exhaustion we lose control of ourselves, we are unable to exercise volition either as attention or otherwise. We recognise and lament the fact to ourselves, we feel our powerlessness, but I hardly think we do ever really make an effort at effort. At the very first stage of recovery from such state of utter non-volition, the will act is always toward definite sense adjustments, or in holding to and promoting certain thoughts and representations, and we thus have real attention. The utter rout of psychoses, which once possessed us, we now conquer and control for our ends and interests. Attention to attention is obviously distinctively different from this phase. We can and do attend to attention as psychic fact. An act of attention cannot, indeed, attend to itself, but the volition act in consciousness of consciousness, as consciousness of some attention act, is very properly an attention to attention. If I am looking attentively at a man, I cannot, by the very nature of attention, be simultaneously volitionally introspective of, _i.e._, attentive to the looking attentively. When actively sensing light, I cannot at the same moment attend to this attention, because attention is always concentrative of will. To be volitionally conscious of light is one moment, and to be volitionally conscious of this light consciousness is another moment. The attention attended to is not in process at the same moment as the attention. This does not deny that we have simultaneous spontaneous introspection of attentions. Introspection, like sensation, perception, ideation, is attention only so far as it is effortful. In his recent treatise on psychology Professor James discusses in an interesting and suggestive way the relation of ideation to attention, maintaining that “ideational preparation ... is concerned in all attentive acts.” Attention is “anticipatory imagination” or “preperception” which prepares the mind for what it is to experience. Thus the schoolboy, listening for the clock to strike twelve, anticipates in imagination and is prepared to hear perfectly the very first sound of the striking.