The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change.  From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.  You can test this by the simplest possible case of sensorial attention.  Try to attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on the wall.  You presently find that one or the other of two things has happened:  either your field of vision has become blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in question, and are looking at something else.  But, if you ask yourself successive questions about the dot,—­how big it is, how far, of what shape, what shade of color, etc.; in other words, if you turn it over, if you think of it in various ways, and along with various kinds of associates,—­you can keep your mind on it for a comparatively long time.  This is what the genius does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates and grows.  And this is what the teacher must do for every topic if he wishes to avoid too frequent appeals to voluntary attention of the coerced sort.  In all respects, reliance upon such attention as this is a wasteful method, bringing bad temper and nervous wear and tear as well as imperfect results.  The teacher who can get along by keeping spontaneous interest excited must be regarded as the teacher with the greatest skill.

There is, however, in all schoolroom work a large mass of material that must be dull and unexciting, and to which it is impossible in any continuous way to contribute an interest associatively derived.  There are, therefore, certain external methods, which every teacher knows, of voluntarily arousing the attention from time to time and keeping it upon the subject.  Mr. Fitch has a lecture on the art of securing attention, and he briefly passes these methods in review; the posture must be changed; places can be changed.  Questions, after being answered singly, may occasionally be answered in concert.  Elliptical questions may be asked, the pupil supplying the missing word.  The teacher must pounce upon the most listless child and wake him up.  The habit of prompt and ready response must be kept up.  Recapitulations, illustrations, examples, novelty of order, and ruptures of routine,—­all these are means for keeping the attention alive and contributing a little interest to a dull subject.  Above all, the teacher must himself be alive and ready, and must use the contagion of his own example.

But, when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence, and can make their exercises interesting, while others simply cannot.  And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper springs of human personality to conduct the task.

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A brief reference to the physiological theory of the attentive process may serve still further to elucidate these practical remarks, and confirm them by showing them from a slightly different point of view.