ABSTRACT
To be fully aware of any object is to have it in the focus of attention. Consciousness is proportional to attention and the level of one corresponds to the level of the other, so that the primordial phases of consciousness are those at which attention is most diffuse. Attention introduces into the psychical field a series of gradations of definition and acuteness, of which, if attention is highly concentrated, there may be only two easily distinguishable levels; but more usually there are three or four. For example, a man looking at a scene through a window on a wintry morning will be sharply aware of some object which has caught his attention, say, a car skidding on the ice of a sloping road. The scream of the tyres will be prominent in the field of his awareness and the visual details of the car, its spinning rear wheels, its colour and shape and its abortive movements. He will be aware also, though somewhat less intensely, of the general background, of houses and trees, of pedestrians passing to and fro, of snow-covered landscape, the voices of children calling, other cars hooting and possibly the twittering of sparrows. But these sights and sounds will be less vivid and not so sharply discriminated. At a still lower level will come the appearance of the window frame and the objects in the room around him, odours of the household (a meal cooking, or the like), the ticking sound of expanding or contracting metal in the domestic heating system, and so forth. Still more vague will be his awareness of the pressure on his body of the chair he is sitting upon, the tactual sensations at separate points from his clothes, faint somatic sensations and the general feeling of tonus in his limbs. Any of the contents of any of these levels may be brought into the focus, the whole organization of the field being thereby radically changed; and intensity of sensation, though for the most part it does, by no means always corresponds to focus of attention.
