Life and Habit | Page 5

or to characters with which he is but little acquainted, he
becomes immediately awakened to the consciousness of either
remembering or trying to remember. His consciousness of his own
knowledge or memory would seem to belong to a period, so to speak,
of twilight between the thick darkness of ignorance and the brilliancy
of perfect knowledge; as colour which vanishes with extremes of light
or of shade. Perfect ignorance and perfect knowledge are alike
unselfconscious.
The above holds good even more noticeably in respect of reading. How

many thousands of individual letters do our eyes run over every
morning in the "Times" newspaper, how few of them do we notice, or
remember having noticed? Yet there was a time when we had such
difficulty in reading even the simplest words, that we had to take great
pains to impress them upon our memory so as to know them when we
came to then again. Now, not even a single word of all we have seen
will remain with us, unless it is a new one, or an old one used in an
unfamiliar sense, in which case we notice, and may very likely
remember it. Our memory retains the substance only, the substance
only being unfamiliar. Nevertheless, although we do not perceive more
than the general result of our perception, there can be no doubt of our
having perceived every letter in every word that we have read at all, for
if we come upon a word misspelt our attention is at once aroused;
unless, indeed, we have actually corrected the misspelling, as well as
noticed it, unconsciously, through exceeding familiarity with the way
in which it ought to be spelt. Not only do we perceive the letters we
have seen without noticing that we have perceived them, but we find it
almost impossible to notice that we notice them when we have once
learnt to read fluently. To try to do so puts us out, and prevents our
being able to read. We may even go so far as to say that if a man can
attend to the individual characters, it is a sign that he cannot yet read
fluently. If we know how to read well, we are as unconscious of the
means and processes whereby we attain the desired result as we are
about the growth of our hair or the circulation of our blood. So that
here again it would seem that we only know what we know still to
some extent imperfectly, and that what we know thoroughly escapes
our conscious perception though none the less actually perceived. Our
perception in fact passes into a latent stage, as also our memory and
volition.
Walking is another example of the rapid exercise of volition with but
little perception of each individual act of exercise. We notice any
obstacle in our path, but it is plain we do not notice that we perceive
much that we have nevertheless been perceiving; for if a man goes
down a lane by night he will stumble over many things which he would
have avoided by day, although he would not have noticed them. Yet
time was when walking was to each one of us a new and arduous
task--as arduous as we should now find it to wheel a wheelbarrow on a

tight-rope; whereas, at present, though we can think of our steps to a
certain extent without checking our power to walk, we certainly cannot
consider our muscular action in detail without having to come to a dead
stop.
Talking--especially in one's mother tongue--may serve as a last
example. We find it impossible to follow the muscular action of the
mouth and tongue in framing every letter or syllable we utter. We have
probably spoken for years and years before we became aware that the
letter h is a labial sound, and until we have to utter a word which is
difficult from its unfamiliarity we speak "trippingly on the tongue" with
no attention except to the substance of what we wish to say. Yet talking
was not always the easy matter to us which it is at present--as we
perceive more readily when we are learning a new language which it
may take us months to master. Nevertheless, when we have once
mastered it we speak it without further consciousness of knowledge or
memory, as regards the more common words, and without even
noticing our consciousness. Here, as in the other instances already
given, as long as we did not know perfectly, we were conscious of our
acts of perception, volition, and reflection, but when our knowledge has
become perfect we no longer notice our consciousness, nor our volition;
nor can we awaken a second artificial consciousness without some
effort, and disturbance of the process of which we are