d spent many
years working with machinery, and as a result, things mechanical at once
attracted him. Similarly, if a man and a woman walk along a street
together and look in at the shop windows, the woman sees only hats,
dresses, ribbons, and other finery, while the man sees only cigars,
pipes, and automobile supplies. Every day we live, we are building up
habits of attending to certain types of things. What repeatedly comes
into our experience, easily attracts our attention to the exclusion of
other things.

=The Function of Attention.= Attention is the unifying aspect of
consciousness. There are always many things in consciousness, and we
cannot respond to all at once. The part of consciousness that is clear
and focal brings about action. The things to which we attend are the
things that count.

In later chapters we shall learn that in habit-formation, attention is
an important factor. We must attend to the acts we are trying to
make habitual. In getting knowledge, we must attend to what we are
trying to learn. In committing to memory, we must attend to the ideas
that we are trying to fix and make permanent. In thinking and reasoning,
those ideas become associated together that are together in attention.

Attention is therefore the controlling aspect of consciousness. It is
the basis of what we call _will_. The ideas that are clear and focal and
that persist in consciousness are the ideas that control our action.
When one says he has made up his mind, he has made a choice; that merely
means that a certain group of ideas persist in consciousness to the
exclusion of others. These are the ideas which ultimately produce
action. And it is our past experience that determines what ideas will
become focal and persist.

=Training the Attention.= There are two aspects of the training of
attention. (1) We can learn to hold ourselves to a task. When we sit
down to a table to study, there may be many things that tend to call us
away. There lies a magazine which we might read, there is a play at the
theater, there are noises outside, there is a friend calling across the
street. But we must study. We have set ourselves to a task and we must
hold fast to our purpose.

The young child cannot do this. He must be trained to do it. The
instruments used to train him are pleasure and pain, rewards and
punishments that come from parents. Gradually, slowly, the child gains
control over himself. No one ever amounts to anything till he c