o listen to the concerns of so many
uninteresting people, and to transact so much drudging detail, that the
faculty in question is always kept in training. A genius, on the
contrary, is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of
attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his
engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties
incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and
back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius
constantly occupies his mind.

Voluntary attention is thus an essentially instantaneous affair. You can
claim it, for your purposes in the schoolroom, by commanding it in loud,
imperious tones; and you can easily get it in this way. But, unless the
subject to which you thus recall their attention has inherent power to
interest the pupils, you will have got it for only a brief moment; and
their minds will soon be wandering again. To keep them where you have
called them, you must make the subject too interesting for them to
wander again. And for that there is one prescription; but the
prescription, like all our prescriptions, is abstract, and, to get
practical results from it, you must couple it with mother-wit.

The prescription is that _the subject must be made to show new aspects
of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change_. From an
unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away. You can test
this by the simplest possible case of sensorial attention. Try to
attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on the wall. You presently
find that one or the other of two things has happened: either your field
of vision has become blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at
all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in
question, and are looking at something else. But, if you ask yourself
successive questions about the dot,--how big it is, how far, of what
shape, what shade of color, etc.; in other words, if you turn it over,
if you think of it in various ways, and along with various kinds of
associates,--you can keep your mind on it for a comparatively long time.
This is what the genius does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates
and grows. And this is what the teacher must do for every topic if he
wishes to avoid too frequent appeals to voluntary attention of the
coerced sort. In all respects, reliance upon such attention as this is a
wasteful method, bringing bad