William James belonged, recognized, in the concomitant of attention, a
fact bound up with the nature of the subject, a "spiritual force," one
of the "mysterious factors of life."

"... From whence his intellect
Deduced its primal notices of thought,
Man therefore knows not; or his appetites
Their first affection; such In you as zeal
In bees to gather honey."

(Carey's translation, Dante's _Purgatorio_, Canto XVIII.)

There is in man a special attitude to external things, which forms
part of his nature, and determines its character. The internal
activities act as cause; they do not react and exist as the _effect_
of external factors. Our attention is not arrested by all things
indifferently, but by those which are congenial to our tastes. The
things which are useful to our inner life are those which arouse our
interest. Our internal world is created upon a selection from the
external world, acquired for and in harmony with our internal
activities. The painter will see a preponderance of colors in the
world, the musician will be attracted by sounds. It is the quality of
our attention which reveals ourselves, and we manifest ourselves
externally by our aptitudes; it is not our attention which creates us.
The individual character, the internal form, the difference between
one man and another, are also obvious among men who have lived in the
same environment, but who from that environment have taken only what
was necessary for each. The "experiences" with which each constructs
his _ego_ in relation to the external world do not form a _chaos_, but
are _directed_ by his intimate individual aptitudes.

If there were any doubt as to the natural force which directs
psychical formation, our experiences with little children would
furnish a decisive proof. No teacher could procure such phenomena of
attention by any artifices; they have evidently an internal origin.
The power of concentration shown by little children from three to four
years old have no counterpart save in the annals of genius. These
little ones seem to reproduce the infancy of men possessing an
extraordinary power of attention, such as Archimedes, who was slain
while bending over his circles, from which rumors of the taking of
Syracuse had failed to distract him; or Newton, who, absorbed in his
studies, forgot to eat; or Vittorio Alfieri, who, when writing a poem,
heard nothing of the noisy wedding procession which was passing wit