I. The Habit of Attention
Let us pass on, now, to the consideration of a group of mental habits which are affected by direct training rather than by example.
First, we put the habit of Attention, because the highest intellectual gifts depend for their value upon the measure in which their owner has cultivated the habit of attention. To explain why this habit is of such supreme importance, we must consider the operation of one or two of the laws of thought. But just recall, in the meantime, the fixity of attention with which the trained professional man––the lawyer, the doctor, the man of letters––listens to a roundabout story, throws out the padding, seizes the facts, sees the bearing of every circumstance, and puts the case with new clearness and method; and contrast this with the wandering eye and random replies of the uneducated;––and you see that to differentiate people according to their power of attention is to employ a legitimate test.