Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/83

58 due to a direction of attention which we can then and there alter by an instantaneous and voluntary shifting of our point of view. In such cases we speak of voluntary inattention, as when, in order to listen better, we neglect the facts of vision, or, in order to think better, disregard a bodily discomfort. But even within the limits of our momentary consciousness, our attention and inattention, although expressions of our will, are not always just then alterable at will. And even so, our inattention to the countless real facts, which at any moment of our human existence we altogether fail concretely to acknowledge, is due to conditions of our attention and of our inattention which we cannot at present alter except by the infinitely numerous small steps that together make up what we call the process of experience. This process of experience itself, of which empiricism justly makes much, is not, however, something determined wholly from without, by the mere coming of the facts to us. It is determined also from within, by our going to meet the facts, as we actually and restlessly do whenever we inquire, observe, or reflect. And every least shifting of our conscious momentary attention is one of these small steps whereby we continually undertake to make good the original sin, as it were, with which our form of consciousness is beset. On the other hand, this narrowness of our actual attention, this limitation to a few concrete facts, and this ignoring of the infinite detail of a world that, at any moment, we acknowledge as real only in its vague wholeness, is a condition fixed for us, not by a power wholly external to our own will, but by the very Will of which our every