iarity and practice
grow, the entire system of our objects of thought consolidates, most of
it becoming interesting for some purposes and in some degree.

An adult man's interests are almost every one of them intensely
artificial: they have slowly been built up. The objects of professional
interest are most of them, in their original nature, repulsive; but by
their connection with such natively exciting objects as one's personal
fortune, one's social responsibilities, and especially by the force of
inveterate habit, they grow to be the only things for which in middle
life a man profoundly cares.

But in all these the spread and consolidation have followed nothing but
the principles first laid down. If we could recall for a moment our
whole individual history, we should see that our professional ideals and
the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow accretion of one
mental object to another, traceable backward from point to point till we
reach the moment when, in the nursery or in the schoolroom, some little
story told, some little object shown, some little operation witnessed,
brought the first new object and new interest within our ken by
associating it with some one of those primitively there. The interest
now suffusing the whole system took its rise in that little event, so
insignificant to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in
swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose
feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects
of our thinking,--they hang to each other by associated links, but the
_original_ source of interest in all of them is the native interest
which the earliest one once possessed.

XI. ATTENTION

Whoever treats of interest inevitably treats of attention, for to say
that an object is interesting is only another way of saying that it
excites attention. But in addition to the attention which any object
already interesting or just becoming interesting claims--passive
attention or spontaneous attention, we may call it--there is a more
deliberate attention,--voluntary attention or attention with effort, as
it is called,--which we can give to objects less interesting or
uninteresting in themselves. The distinction between active and passive
attention is made in all books on psychology, and connects itself with
the deeper aspects of the topic. From our present purely practical point
of view, however, it is not necessary to be i