y be
doing their accustomed work automatically.

It is not always the most efficient mental process that is most
conscious; indeed, practising an act makes it both more efficient and
less conscious. It is, rather, the less efficient processes that
require attention, because they require mental work to keep them going
straight.

Our sixth law of attention, emerging from this introspective study, is
naturally of a different style from the remainder of the list, which
were objectively observed; yet it {267} is no less certain and perhaps
no less significant. It may be called:

(6) The _law of degrees of consciousness_, and thus stated: _An
attentive response is conscious to a higher degree than any
inattentive response made at the same time_. An inattentive response
may be dimly conscious or, perhaps, altogether unconscious. The less
familiar the response, and the higher it stands in the scale of mental
performances, the more attentive it is, and the more conscious.

The Management of Attention

Attentive observation is more trustworthy than inattentive, and also
gives more facts. Attentive movement is more accurate than
inattentive, and may be quicker as well. Attentive study gives quicker
learning than inattentive, and at the same time fixes the facts more
durably.

Shall we say, then, "Do everything attentively"? But that is
impossible. We sense so many stimuli at once that we could not
possibly attend to all of them. We do several things at once, and
cannot give attention to them all. A skilful performance consists of
many parts, and we cannot possibly give careful attention to all the
parts. Attention is necessarily selective, and the best advice is, not
simply to "be attentive", but to attend to the right things.

In observation, the best plan is obviously to decide beforehand
exactly what needs to be observed, and then to focus attention on this
precise point. That is the principle underlying the remarkably sure
and keen observation of the scientist. Reading may be called a kind of
observation, since the reader is looking for what the author has to
tell; and the rule that holds for other observation holds also for
reading. That is to say that the reader finds the most when he knows
just what he is looking for. We can learn {268} something here from
story-reading, which is the most efficient sort of reading, in the
sense that you get the point of the story better than that of more
serious reading matter,