And yet the instruction would sin unpardonably if it were
not steadily making serious demands upon the child's at-
tention. Other functions of the child grow with the mere
passing of years ; the child's attention grows only through
systematic and careful training.
CHAPTER XIX

IMITATION AND SUGGESTION

We want to speak of imitation, suggestion, and efiEort;
and yet after all that only means that we want to go on
speaking of attention. Did we not recognize that the chief
significance of attention lies in its power to give us more
and more of the attended-to material ? Every single trait
of the process served this end. The mind seeks to get a
deeper insight and firmer hold on the object of attention,
aims toward the unfolding and fuller eflfectiveness of its
object. The actions and the suppressing of the opposite
actions, the vividness of the impressions and the inhibition
of the opposite impressions all cooperate to make the con-
tents attended to clearer and stronger and more lasting in
consciousness. How will it be, then, in case the attended-
to material is the idea of a bodily movement?

If we give our attention to the idea of a movement,
there is only one way to fulfill the purpose of attention:
the organism itself must produce the movement. The per-
formance of the movement then furnishes a new vivid per-
ception of it and the mere idea of the action thus becomes
reenforced by the fresh perception. We must not forget
that the association between the movement impulse and
the image of the movement is naturally most intimate.
Through our whole life history we have experienced
the movement and the corresponding sensation together.
