I. That we are _most conscious of_, _and have most control over_, such
habits as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences--which are
acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after birth, and
not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not become entirely
human.
II. That we are _less conscious of_, _and have less control over_, the
use of teeth, swallowing, breathing, seeing and hearing--which were
acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, and for which we had provided
ourselves with all the necessary apparatus before we saw light, but which
are still, geologically speaking, recent, or comparatively recent.
ill. That we are _most unconscious of_, _and have least control over_,
our digestion, which we have in common even with our invertebrate
ancestry, and which is a habit of extreme antiquity.
There is something too like method in this for it to be taken as the
result of mere chance--chance again being but another illustration of
Nature's love of a contradiction in terms; for everything is chance, and
nothing is chance. And you may take it that all is chance or nothing
chance, according as you please, but you must not have half chance and
half not chance--which, however, in practice is just what you _must_
have.
Does it not seem as though the older and more confirmed the habit, the
more unquestioning the act of volition, till, in the case of the oldest
habits, the practice of succeeding existences has so formulated the
procedure, that, on being once committed to such and such a line beyond a
certain point, the subsequent course is so clear as to be open to no
further doubt, and admit of no alternative, till the very power of
questioning is gone, and even the consciousness of volition? And this
too upon matters which, in earlier stages of a man's existence, admitted
of passionate argument and anxious deliberation whether to resolve them
thus or thus, with heroic hazard and experiment, which on the losing side
proved to be vice, and on the winning virtue. For there was passionate
argument once what shape a man's teeth should be, nor can the colour of
his hair be considered as even yet settled, or likely to be settled for a
very long time.
It is one against legion when a creature tries to differ from his own
past selves. He must yield or die if he wants to differ widely, so as to
lack natural instincts, such as hunger or thirst, or not to gratify them.
It is more righteous in a man that he should "eat strange food," and that
his cheek should "so much as lank not," than that he should starve if the
strange food be at his command. His past selves are living in unruly
hordes within him at this moment and overmastering him. "Do this, this,
this, which we too have done, and found our profit in it," cry the souls
of his forefathers within him. Faint are the far ones, coming and going
as the sound of bells wafted on to a high mountain; loud and clear are
the near ones, urgent as an alarm of fire. "Withhold," cry some. "Go on
boldly," cry others. "Me, me, me, revert hitherward, my descendant,"
shouts one as it were from some high vantage-ground over the heads of the
clamorous multitude. "Nay, but me, me, me," echoes another; and our
former selves fight within us and wrangle for our possession. Have we
not here what is commonly called an _internal tumult_, when dead
pleasures and pains tug within us hither and thither? Then may the
battle be decided by what people are pleased to call our own experience.
Our own indeed! What is our own save by mere courtesy of speech? A
matter of fashion. Sanction sanctifieth and fashion fashioneth. And so
with death--the most inexorable of all conventions.
However this may be, we may assume it as an axiom with regard to actions
acquired after birth, that we never do them automatically save as the
result of long practice, and after having thus acquired perfect mastery
over the action in question.
But given the practice or experience, and the intricacy of the process to
be performed appears to matter very little. 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. Surely the _onus probandi_ must rest with him who makes it.
A man may make a lucky hit now and again by what is called a fluke, but
even this must be only a little in advance of his other performances of
the same kind. He may multiply seven by eight by a fluke after a little
study of the multiplication table, but he will not be able to extract the
cube root of 4913 by a fluke, without long training in arithmetic, any
more than an agricultural labourer would be able to operate successfully
for cataract. If, then, a grown man cannot perform so simple an
operation as that, we will say, for cataract, unless he have been long
trained in other similar operations, and until he has done what comes to
the same thing many times over, with what show of reason can we maintain
that one who is so far less capable than a grown man, can perform such
vastly more difficult operations, without knowing how to do them, and
without ever having done them before? There is no sign of "fluke" about
the circulation of a baby's blood. There may perhaps be some little
hesitation about its earliest breathing, but this, as a general rule,
soon passes over, both breathing and circulation, within an hour after
birth, being as regular and easy as at any time during life. Is it
reasonable, then, to say that the baby does these things without knowing
how to do them, and without ever having done them before, and continues
to do them by a series of lifelong flukes?
It would be well if those who feel inclined to hazard such an assertion
would find some other instances of intricate processes gone through by
people who know nothing about them, and who never had any practice
therein. What _is_ to know how to do a thing? Surely to do it. What is
proof that we know how to do a thing? Surely the fact that we can do it.
A man shows that he knows how to throw the boomerang by throwing the
boomerang. No amount of talking or writing can get over this; _ipso
facto_, that a baby breathes and makes its blood circulate, it knows how
to do so; and the fact that it does not know its own knowledge is only
proof of the perfection of that knowledge, and of the vast number of past
occasions on which it must have been exercised already. As has been said
already, it is less obvious when the baby could have gained its
experience, so as to be able so readily to remember exactly what to do;
_but it is more easy to suppose that the necessary occasions cannot have
been wanting_, _than that the power which we observe_, _should have been
obtained without practice and memory_.
If we saw any self-consciousness on the baby's part about its breathing
or circulation, we might suspect that it had had less experience, or had
profited less by its experience, than its neighbours--exactly in the same
manner as we suspect a deficiency of any quality which we see a man
inclined to parade. We all become introspective when we find that we do
not know our business, and whenever we are introspective we may generally
suspect that we are on the verge of unproficiency. Unfortunately, in the
case of sickly children we observe that they sometimes do become
conscious of their breathing and circulation, just as in later life we
become conscious that we have a liver or a digestion. In that case there
is always something wrong. The baby that becomes aware of its breathing
does not know how to breathe and will suffer for his ignorance and
incapacity, exactly in the same way as he will suffer in later life for
ignorance and incapacity in any other respect in which his peers are
commonly knowing and capable. In the case of inability to breathe, the
punishment is corporal, breathing being a matter of fashion, so old and
long settled that nature can admit of no departure from the established
custom, and the procedure in case of failure is as much formulated as the
fashion itself. In the case of the circulation, the whole performance
has become one so utterly of rote, that the mere discovery that we could
do it at all was considered one of the highest flights of human genius.
It has been said a day will come when the Polar ice shall have
accumulated, till it forms vast continents many thousands of feet above
the level of the sea, all of solid ice. The weight of this mass will, it
is believed, cause the world to topple over on its axis, so that the
earth will be upset as an ant-heap overturned by a ploughshare. In that
day the icebergs will come crunching against our proudest cities, razing
them from off the face of the earth as though they were made of rotten
blotting-paper. There is no respect now of Handel nor of Shakespeare;
the works of Rembrandt and Bellini fossilise at the bottom of the sea.
Grace, beauty, and wit, all that is precious in music, literature, and
art--all gone. In the morning there was Europe. In the evening there
are no more populous cities nor busy hum of men, but a sea of jagged ice,
a lurid sunset, and the doom of many ages. Then shall a scared remnant
escape in places, and settle upon the changed continent when the waters
have subsided--a simple people, busy hunting shellfish on the drying
ocean beds, and with little time for introspection; yet they can read and
write and sum, for by that time these accomplishments will have become
universal, and will be acquired as easily as we now learn to talk; but
they do so as a matter of course, and without self-consciousness. Also
they make the simpler kinds of machinery too easily to be able to follow
their own operations--the manner of their own apprenticeship being to
them as a buried city. May we not imagine that, after the lapse of
another ten thousand years or so, some one of them may again become
cursed with lust of introspection, and a second Harvey may astonish the
world by discovering that it can read and write, and that steam-engines
do not grow, but are made? It may be safely prophesied that he will die
a martyr, and be honoured in the fourth generation.