n the type of their field of consciousness. In some persons
this is highly focalized and concentrated, and the focal ideas
predominate in determining association. In others we must suppose the
margin to be brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric
showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal
ideas, and carrying association in their own direction. Persons of the
latter type find their attention wandering every minute, and must bring
it back by a voluntary pull. The others sink into a subject of
meditation deeply, and, when interrupted, are 'lost' for a moment before
they come back to the outer world.

The possession of such a steady faculty of attention is unquestionably a
great boon. Those who have it can work more rapidly, and with less
nervous wear and tear. I am inclined to think that no one who is without
it naturally can by any amount of drill or discipline attain it in a
very high degree. Its amount is probably a fixed characteristic of the
individual. But I wish to make a remark here which I shall have occasion
to make again in other connections. It is that no one need deplore
unduly the inferiority in himself of any one elementary faculty. This
concentrated type of attention is an elementary faculty: it is one of
the things that might be ascertained and measured by exercises in the
laboratory. But, having ascertained it in a number of persons, we could
never rank them in a scale of actual and practical mental efficiency
based on its degrees. The total mental efficiency of a man is the
resultant of the working together of all his faculties. He is too
complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any
one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the
strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he
takes in what is proposed. Concentration, memory, reasoning power,
inventiveness, excellence of the senses,--all are subsidiary to this.
No matter how scatter-brained the type of a man's successive fields
of consciousness may be, if he really _care_ for a subject, he will
return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and
last do more with it, and get more results from it, than another
person whose attention may be more continuous during a given interval,
but whose passion for the subject is of a more languid and less
permanent sort. Some of the most efficient workers I know are of the
ultra-scatterbrained ty