The mind
wanders from the nominal subject and devotes itself to what is
intrinsically more desirable. A systematized divided attention
expressing the duplicity of the state of desire is the result.
One has only to recall his own experiences in school or at the
present time when outwardly employed in actions which do not
engage one's desires and purposes, to realize how prevalent is
this attitude of divided attention -- double-mindedness. We are
so used to it that we take it for granted that a considerable
amount of it is necessary. It may be; if so, it is the more
important to face its bad intellectual effects. Obvious is the
loss of energy of thought immediately available when one is
consciously trying (or trying to seem to try) to attend to one
matter, while unconsciously one's imagination is spontaneously
going out to more congenial affairs. More subtle and more
permanently crippling to efficiency of intellectual activity is a
fostering of habitual self-deception, with the confused sense of
reality which accompanies it. A double standard of reality, one
for our own private and more or less concealed interests, and
another for public and acknowledged concerns, hampers, in most of
us, integrity and completeness of mental action. Equally serious
is the fact that a split is set up between conscious thought and
attention and impulsive blind affection and desire. Reflective
dealings with the material of instruction is constrained and
half-hearted; attention wanders.
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