First published in 1889, Théodule Ribot’s The Psychology of Attention remains a landmark in the scientific understanding of how we focus, sustain, and lose control of our mental gaze. This modern-English edition renders Ribot’s precise, physiological account into clear, flowing prose—preserving his groundbreaking insights on voluntary and involuntary attention, the interplay of body and mind, and the remarkable effects of concentration on memory, emotion, and action. Ribot draws on clinical cases, everyday experience, and the emerging neurology of his day to explore why attention can be fragile, why it fatigues, and how it can become disordered. Far from a dry treatise, his work speaks directly to anyone curious about the dynamics of thought, distraction, and will. Faithful to the original argument and structure, this edition makes a classic of psychological science genuinely accessible to today’s reader. Part of The Modern Wisdom Library.