Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/196

 178 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

the discussions of those who take the latter position. They seem to confound the attention with the span of conscious ness. The span of consciousness may, and perhaps always does, cover several objects, but this includes not only the clear focus but the less clear background as well. When the experimental evidence is closely studied it seems to es tablish the contention that we can focus consciousness on only a single object at any absolutely single point of time. That object may, however, be complex, i.e., may consist of several objects grasped as a unity; but in that case the separate constituents of the unity do not stand singly in the clear focus, nor any one of them, but the entire group as a group. This by subsequent acts of attention may be broken up into its elements, and its parts or phases attended to one after another.

V. Its constant shifting. The narrow scope of the atten tion would be exceedingly unfortunate were it not compen sated for by the rapid and constant flitting of attention from one thing to another. If we should compare the attention to a search-light turned upon objects, then we should think of it as darting its searching beam rapidly now this way and now that. No one can have failed to notice this character istic of his mental life. The attention can hardly be pinned down to a single point. If it is, consciousness begins to drop toward drowsy extinction, or the mind falls into a sort of hypnotic trance. The very life of normal consciousness consists in this constant moving from one object to another. We do not have any certain knowledge of the cause of this exceeding restlessness of the mind. Is it due to the speedy exhaustion of the delicate brain cells employed in any act of attention? That is conceivable; but we simply do not know. Certainly it will appear to be a most fortunate characteristic of our minds, if we consider a few facts in their relation to one another.

First, is the fact that we live in a very complex, many- sided environment. We have to bring ourselves into ad justment to a great multitude of things. Second, these

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