Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VIII. CONSCIOUSNESS.--ATTENTION.--ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. I. Consciousness.--The gradual development of consciousness in intensity and extension.--The conscious states and the consciousness of the self.--Conscious states following an unconscious act, a conscious perception, an absolutely internal conscious state.--Consciousness is not coextensive with the whole mental life. II. Attention, a more intense degree of consciousness.--Attention in the child and in the adult.-- Attention called spontaneous.--Voluntary or active attention.--Passive attention.--The child's attention is in one sense only a perpetual distraction.--Causes of the child's involuntary attention.--Novelty produces surprise, astonishment, and consequently attention.--Is involuntary attention always caused by affective states ?--Curiosity, the intellectual germ of attention.--Origin of voluntary attention.--Voluntary attention also presupposes stimuli, but inner stimuli.-- The exercise of attention in the child's plays.--Effects of attention.--The lack of attention in idiots. III. Attention isolates and separates intellectual elements; association of ideas reunites them.--Mechanical characteristics of the association of ideas.--Successive states of consciousness tend to reappear in the same order.--Association of distinct impressions not contiguous in time.--Associations by resemblance.--Purely verbal associations by the sound of words. I. More than once in the course of the preceding chapters we have had occasion to speak of the child's consciousness, and to show that the essential fact of the life of the mind, the inexplicable and indefinable character common to all the conscious phenomena, is developed only step bystep. The light of consciousness, in succeeding...
