Spontaneous Attention. -- In our account of attention, early
in the book, we emphasised the basal nature of what we called
spontaneous or non-voluntary attention, i. e., attention directed
freely and without compulsion in a manner expressive of the
mind's inner interests. We have recently been discussing a
parallel fact in the motor region under the name of impulse.
When we put these two groups of considerations together,
we find that the organism manifests, both on the psychical
and the physiological sides, definite projective tendencies.
Certain kinds of movement, certain kinds of objects, appeal
to us at once natively and without reflection. We come
into the world, so to speak, with a bias already favour-
ing certain experiences at the cost of other possible ones.
Moreover, we vary from one another very markedly as regards
the special directions of this bias. So far, then, as choice
comes down to a question of attention to ideas, we may be
sure that by virtue of this spontaneous characteristic of atten-
tion certain ideas will from the first be given preference over
others.

If we take the situation on the level of our own adult con-
sciousness, we find that we are naturally disposed to attend to
those ideas which immediately interest us, rather than to those
which do not. But when we ask the further question, why
they interest us, we can only point again to the spontaneous
and impulsive nature of attention. We get back here finally
to the admission that both the hereditary and the personal
history of each of us has produced differences in our impulsive
and spontaneous modes of acting which we all recognise in
one another, and for which we can offer no detailed explana-
tion. Fortunately, however, we can point out somewhat
more intimately certain of the fundamental features of in-
terest as a mode of consciousness, and this we may briefly
undertake.

Interest. -- Interest has sometimes been treated by psycholo-
gists as one of the intellectual feelings. In the case of mere

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