The key to all forms of learning is _attention_. The key to attention is _feeling_. Feeling depends upon the nature of the child, inherited and acquired. In our search for the means of arousing interest, we look first to the original nature of the child, to the instincts and the emotions. We look next to the acquired nature, the habits, the ideals, the various needs that have grown up in the individual's life. Educational writers have overemphasized the original nature of the child as a basis of interest and have not paid enough attention to acquired nature. We should not ask so much what a child's needs are, but what they _ought_ to be. Needs can be created. The child's nature to some extent can be changed. The problem of arousing interest is therefore one of finding in the child's nature a basis for attention and pleasure. If the basis is not to be found there, then it must be built up. How this can be done, how human nature can be changed, is to some extent the main problem of psychology. Every chapter in this book, it is hoped, will be found to throw some light on the problem. SUMMARY. The two elementary feeling states are pleasantness and unpleasantness. The emotions are complex mental states composed of feeling and the sensations from bodily reactions to the situations. Feeling and emotion are the motive forces of life, at the bottom of all important actions. The bodily reactions of emotions are reflex and instinctive. Attention is a matter of the relative clearness of the contents of consciousness. The function of attention is to unify thought and action. It is the important factor in all learning and thinking, for it is only the attentive part of consciousness that is effective. CLASS EXERCISES 1. Make out a complete list of the more important emotions. 2. Indicate the characteristic expression of each emotion in your list. 3. Can you have an emotion without its characteristic expression? If, for example, when a situation arises which ordinarily arouses anger in you, you inhibit all the usual motor accompaniments of anger, are you really angry? 4. Are the expressions of the same emotion the same for all people? 5. Try to analyze some of your emotional states: anger, or fear, or grief. Can you detect the sensations that come from the bodily reactions? 6. Try to induce an emotional state by producing its characteristic reactions. 7. Try to change an emotional state to an opposite emotion; for example, grief to joy. 8. Try to control and change emotional states in children. 9. Name some sensations that for you are always pleasant, others that are always unpleasant--colors, sounds, tastes, odors, temperatures. 10. Confirm by observation the statement of the text as to the importance of emotions in all the important actions of life.