Specific purposes are necessary in the first place, because they help
to supply motive power both for study and for life in general. Proper
study requires abundant energy, for it is hard work; and young people
cannot be expected to engage in it heartily without good reason. In
particular, it requires very close and sustained attention, which it
is most difficult to give. Threats and punishments can, at the best,
secure it only in part; for young people who thus suffer habitually
reserve a portion of their energy to imagine the full meanness of
their persecutors and, not seldom, to devise ways of getting even.
Neither can direct exercise of will insure undivided attention. How
often have all of us, conscious that we _ought_ fully to concentrate
attention upon some task, determined to do so in vain.

The best single guarantee of close and continuous attention is a deep,
direct interest in the work in hand, an interest similar in kind to
that which children have in play. Such interest serves the same
purpose with man as steam does in manufacturing,--it is motive power,
and it is as necessary to provide for it in the one case as in the
other.

Broad, general aims cannot generate this interest, for abstractions do
not arouse enthusiasm. It is the concrete, the detailed, that arouses
interest, particularly that detail that is closely related to life. We
all remember how, in the midst of listless reading, we have sometimes
awakened with a start, when we realized that what we were reading bore
directly upon some vital interest. Specific purposes of the kind
described insure the interest, and therefore the energy, necessary for
full and sustained attention. "For remember," says Lowell, "that there
is nothing less profitable than scholarship for the mere sake of
scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. But the