To attend, namely, is to take note of differences (and consequently of resemblances) which, were we inattentive, we should ignore. To turn our attention from certain facts, is to disregard differences of which we were before taking account. Now we are here speaking of attention, not as of a causally efficacious psychological process (for cause and effect concern us not yet), but as of one aspect of that relative fulfilment of purpose in present consciousness of which I have all along spoken. That to which we attend interests us. In attending to a sound, to a color, to an abstract conception, we find our purpose in some degree fulfilled by the ignoring or observing of some specific likenesses and differences. And the correlated likenesses and differences which appear before us in the observed facts are such as the direction of our attentive interest in some measure favors.
The world of facts is thus not merely given as like or different; it is at any moment regarded as possessing the correlative likenesses and differences to which we then and there attend. In fact, that reaction to our world, of which at the last time we spoke, is in great part an attentive attitude of the will, and is in so far a regarding of that to which we attend as more definitely different from the background of consciousness than it otherwise would be. It is perfectly true that we are not conscious of creating, i.e. of finding our purpose presently fulfilled in, more than a very subordinate aspect of the differences and correlative likenesses that we at any moment observe in the facts of our world. That is because of that relatively “foreign” character of the facts of which we spoke in defining the Ought. But it is
