Life and Habit | Page 4

if disturbed, as we
have seen above, he will have to start de novo from an accustomed
starting-point.

Yet nothing can be more obvious than that there must have been a time
when what is now so easy as to be done without conscious effort of the
brain was only done by means of brain work which was very keenly
perceived, even to fatigue and positive distress. Even now, if the player
is playing something the like of which he has not met before, we
observe he pauses and becomes immediately conscious of attention.
We draw the inference, therefore, as regards pianoforte or violin
playing, that the more the familiarity or knowledge of the art, the less is
there consciousness of such knowledge; even so far as that there should
seem to be almost as much difficulty in awakening consciousness
which has become, so to speak, latent,--a consciousness of that which is
known too well to admit of recognised self-analysis while the
knowledge is being exercised--as in creating a consciousness of that
which is not yet well enough known to be properly designated as
known at all. On the other hand, we observe that the less the familiarly
or knowledge, the greater the consciousness of whatever knowledge
there is.
Considering other like instances of the habitual exercise of intelligence
and volition, which, from long familiarity with the method of procedure,
escape the notice of the person exercising them, we naturally think of
writing. The formation of each letter requires attention and volition, yet
in a few minutes a practised writer will form several hundred letters,
and be able to think and talk of something else all the time he is doing
so. It will not probably remember the formation of a single character in
any page that he has written; nor will he be able to give more than the
substance of his writing if asked to do so. He knows how to form each
letter so well, and he knows so well each word that he is about to write,
that he has ceased to be conscious of his knowledge or to notice his acts
of volition, each one of which is, nevertheless, followed by a
corresponding muscular action. Yet the uniformity of our handwriting,
and the manner in which we almost invariably adhere to one method of
forming the same character, would seem to suggest that during the
momentary formation of each letter our memories must revert (with an
intensity too rapid for our perception) to many if not to all the
occasions on which we have ever written the same letter
previously--the memory of these occasions dwelling in our minds as
what has been called a residuum--an unconsciously struck balance or

average of them all--a fused mass of individual reminiscences of which
no trace can be found in our consciousness, and of which the only
effect would seem to lie in the gradual changes of handwriting which
are perceptible in most people till they have reached middle-age, and
sometimes even later. So far are we from consciously remembering any
one of the occasions on which we have written such and such a letter,
that we are not even conscious of exercising our memory at all, any
more than we are in health conscious of the action of our heart. But, if
we are writing in some unfamiliar way, as when printing our letters
instead of writing them in our usual running hand, our memory is so far
awakened that we become conscious of every character we form;
sometimes it is even perceptible as memory to ourselves, as when we
try to remember how to print some letter, for example a g, and cannot
call to mind on which side of the upper half of the letter we ought to
put the link which connects it with the lower, and are successful in
remembering; but if we become very conscious of remembering, it
shows that we are on the brink of only trying to remember,--that is to
say, of not remembering at all.
As a general rule, we remember for a time the substance of what we
have written, for the subject is generally new to us; but if we are
writing what we have often written before, we lose consciousness of
this too, as fully as we do of the characters necessary to convey the
substance to another person, and we shall find ourselves writing on as it
were mechanically while thinking and talking of something else. So a
paid copyist, to whom the subject of what he is writing is of no
importance, does not even notice it. He deals only with familiar words
and familiar characters without caring to go behind them, and
thereupon writes on in a quasi-unconscious manner; but if he comes to
a word