able to hold our minds down to work for any
length of time unless the task develops interest
in itself.

This attention with effort is known as _*voluntary
attention_. It is the most exhausting act
which any individual can perform. Strength
of will consists in the power to resist distractions
and to hold the mind down to even
the most uninteresting occupations.

_Fortunately for human achievement, acts
which in the beginning require voluntary effort
may later result without effort_.

The schoolboy must struggle to keep his
mind on such uninteresting things as the alphabet.
Later he may become a literary
man and find that nothing attracts his attention
so quickly as printed symbols. In commercial
arithmetic the boy labors to fix his
attention on dollar signs and problems involving
profit and loss. Launched in business,

however, these things may attract him more
than a football game.

It is the outcome of previous application
that we now attend without effort to many
things in our civilization which differ from