As to the origin of attention, it must arise with cognition itself. The past act of cognition was, as we have seen (p. 61), a powerful will act, an achievement through struggle, and therefore an attention. The history of cognition and of its ultimate development into the highest forms is a story of incessant and fierce competition in the struggle of life. Man’s power of sense, perception and thought is an inheritance from an immense deal of will effort by untold millions of ancestors. The necessities of existence compelled an alertness, a general cognitive strain, which effected progress and discovery, the attainment and integration of new and most valuable forms of experience which have been handed down to later generations. The earliest cognitive life is then almost entirely attentive; cognition does not _come_, it must be _attained_. Gradually, however, some low form like general sensation is so integrated, and requires less and less attention, till it _comes_, is _given_, with comparatively no effort, and a state of unattention thus appears in consciousness. The child repeats quickly, easily, without attention, the evolution of the past, and this spontaneous re-enactment continues up to the full point of hereditary integration. Without effort the child is carried on at the incitement of instinctive inherent interest up to a certain comparatively high grade of experience. But heredity _momentum_ gradually ceases, and if there is to be individual progress, attention must come in. Thus, intellectual education is fundamentally a developing of attention. Conscious control of cognition, both positively and negatively, becomes more and more efficient, and the progress of the race is dependent on exceptional attention in exceptional individuals—geniuses. Attention becomes more and more limited and specialized, and a minute subdivision of labour results.