But this involves a second aspect which is surely no less important.  While the attended impression becomes more vivid, all the other impressions become less vivid, less clear, less distinct, less detailed.  They fade away.  We no longer notice them.  They have no hold on our mind, they disappear.  If we are fully absorbed in our book, we do not hear at all what is said around us and we do not see the room; we forget everything.  Our attention to the page of the book brings with it our lack of attention to everything else.  We may add a third factor.  We feel that our body adjusts itself to the perception.  Our head enters into the movement of listening for the sound, our eyes are fixating the point in the outer world.  We hold all our muscles in tension in order to receive the fullest possible impression with our sense organs.  The lens in our eye is accommodated exactly to the correct distance.  In short our bodily personality works toward the fullest possible impression.  But this is supplemented by a fourth factor.  Our ideas and feelings and impulses group themselves around the attended object.  It becomes the starting point for our actions while all the other objects in the sphere of our senses lose their grip on our ideas and feelings.  These four factors are intimately related to one another.  As we are passing along the street we see something in the shop window and as soon as it stirs up our interest, our body adjusts itself, we stop, we fixate it, we get more of the detail in it, the lines become sharper, and while it impresses us more vividly than before the street around us has lost its vividness and clearness.

If on the stage the hand movements of the actor catch our interest, we no longer look at the whole large scene, we see only the fingers of the hero clutching the revolver with which he is to commit his crime.  Our attention is entirely given up to the passionate play of his hand.  It becomes the central point for all our emotional responses.  We do not see the hands of any other actor in the scene.  Everything else sinks into a general vague background, while that one hand shows more and more details.  The more we fixate it, the more its clearness and distinctness increase.  From this one point wells our emotion, and our emotion again concentrates our senses on this one point.  It is as if this one hand were during this pulse beat of events the whole scene, and everything else had faded away.  On the stage this is impossible; there nothing can really fade away.  That dramatic hand must remain, after all, only the ten thousandth part of the space of the whole stage; it must remain a little detail.  The whole body of the hero and the other men and the whole room and every indifferent chair and table in it must go on obtruding themselves on our senses.  What we do not attend cannot be suddenly removed from the stage.  Every change which is needed must be secured by our own mind.  In our consciousness the attended hand must grow and the surrounding room must blur.  But the stage cannot help us.  The art of the theater has there its limits.