stable and irritable, flitting from one subject to another with
feverish haste. In mania there is often a similar, but much
exaggerated, attention to the flow of disconnected ideas. In
melancholia, on the other hand, as in the milder types of
neurasthenic hypochondria, attention is morbidly fascinated
by some single idea, or group of ideas, and cannot be long
lured away to the normal business of life.

Definition of Attention. -- When we attempt a definition of
attention we experience the same sort of difficulty which we
met in defining consciousness, and for a similar reason. So
long as we are conscious at all, attention in some degree is
present. We therefore find it difficult to define it without
employing the thing itself in the definition. Because of this
fact, attention has been commonly referred to as a 'general,
or universal, characteristic of consciousness,' or as a 'general
attitude,' especially as an attitude of expectancy. In default
of a wholly satisfactory definition of attention, we may at
least illustrate what we mean by the term. When we look at
a printed page there is always some one portion of it, per-
haps a word, which we see more clearly than we do the rest;
and out beyond the margin of the page we are still conscious
of objects which we see only in a very imperfect way. The
field of consciousness is apparently like this visual field. There
is always a central point of which we are momentarily more
vividly conscious than of anything else. Fading gradually
away from this point into vaguer and vaguer consciousness, is
a margin of objects, or ideas, of which we are aware in a sort
of mental indirect vision. This fact that consciousness al-
ways has a focal point, which reveals the momentary activity
of the mind, is what is meant by the fact of attention, so
far as it can be described in terms of the content of conscious-
ness. Baldwin has suggested the accompanying diagram-
matic presentation of the facts we are speaking of, in con-
nection with certain others. (Figure 33.) The margin of
mental processes, outside the focal point of attention, con-

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