There is hardly anything
conceivable as being done by man, which a certain amount of familiarity
will not enable him to do, unintrospectively, and without conscious
effort. "The most complex and difficult movements," writes Mr. Darwin,
"can in time be performed without the least effort or consciousness." All
the main business of life is done thus unconsciously or
semi-unconsciously. For what is the main business of life? We work that
we may eat and digest, rather than eat and digest that we may work; this,
at any rate, is the normal state of things; the more important business
then is that which is carried on unconsciously. So again, the action of
the brain, which goes on prior to our realising the idea in which it
results, is not perceived by the individual. So also all the deeper
springs of action and conviction. The residuum with which we fret and
worry ourselves is a mere matter of detail, as the higgling and haggling
of the market, which is not over the bulk of the price, but over the last
halfpenny.
Shall we say, then, that a baby of a day old sucks (which involves the
whole principle of the pump, and hence a profound practical knowledge of
the laws of pneumatics and hydrostatics), digests, oxygenises its blood
(millions of years before Sir Humphry Davy discovered oxygen), sees and
hears--all most difficult and complicated operations, involving an
unconscious knowledge of the facts concerning optics and acoustics,
compared with which the conscious discoveries of Newton sink into utter
insignificance? Shall we say that a baby can do all these things at
once, doing them so well and so regularly, without being even able to
direct its attention to them, and without mistake, and at the same time
not know how to do them, and never have done them before?
Such an assertion would be a contradiction to the whole experience of
mankind.
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