Life and Habit | Page 9

about our daily avocations. I am aware that I
may appear in the latter part of the chapter to have wandered somewhat
beyond the limits of my subject, but, on the whole, decide upon leaving
what I have written, inasmuch as it serves to show how far-reaching is
the principle on which I am insisting. Having said so much, I shall
during the remainder of the book keep more closely to the point.
Certain it is that we know best what we are least conscious of knowing,
or at any rate least able to prove, as, for example, our own existence, or
that there is a country England. If any one asks us for proof on matters
of this sort, we have none ready, and are justly annoyed at being called
to consider what we regard as settled questions. Again, there is hardly
anything which so much affects our actions as the centre of the earth
(unless, perhaps, it be that still hotter and more unprofitable spot the
centre of the universe), for we are incessantly trying to get as near it as
circumstances will allow, or to avoid getting nearer than is for the time
being convenient. Walking, running, standing, sitting, lying, waking, or
sleeping, from birth till death it is a paramount object with us; even
after death-- if it be not fanciful to say so--it is one of the few things of

which what is left of us can still feel the influence; yet what can
engross less of our attention than this dark and distant spot so many
thousands of miles away?
The air we breathe, so long as it is neither too hot nor cold, nor rough,
nor full of smoke--that is to say, so long as it is in that state within
which we are best acquainted--seldom enters into our thoughts; yet
there is hardly anything with which we are more incessantly occupied
night and day.
Indeed, it is not too much to say that we have no really profound
knowledge upon any subject--no knowledge on the strength of which
we are ready to act at all moments unhesitatingly without either
preparation or after-thought--till we have left off feeling conscious of
the possession of such knowledge, and of the grounds on which it rests.
A lesson thoroughly learned must be like the air which feels so light,
though pressing so heavily against us, because every pore of our skin is
saturated, so to speak, with it on all sides equally. This perfection of
knowledge sometimes extends to positive disbelief in the thing known,
so that the most thorough knower shall believe himself altogether
ignorant. No thief, for example, is such an utter thief--so GOOD a
thief--as the kleptomaniac. Until he has become a kleptomaniac, and
can steal a horse as it were by a reflex action, he is still but half a thief,
with many unthievish notions still clinging to him. Yet the
kleptomaniac is probably unaware that he can steal at all, much less
that he can steal so well. He would be shocked if he were to know the
truth. So again, no man is a great hypocrite until he has left off
knowing that he is a hypocrite. The great hypocrites of the world are
almost invariably under the impression that they are among the very
few really honest people to be found and, as we must all have observed,
it is rare to find any one strongly under this impression without
ourselves having good reason to differ from him.
Our own existence is another case in point. When we have once
become articulately conscious of existing, it is an easy matter to begin
doubting whether we exist at all. As long as man was too unreflecting a
creature to articulate in words his consciousness of his own existence,
he knew very well that he existed, but he did not know that he knew it.
With introspection, and the perception recognised, for better or worse,
that he was a fact, came also the perception that he had no solid ground

for believing that he was a fact at all. That nice, sensible,
unintrospective people who were too busy trying to exist pleasantly to
trouble their heads as to whether they existed or no--that this best part
of mankind should have gratefully caught at such a straw as "cogito
ergo sum," is intelligible enough. They felt the futility of the whole
question, and were thankful to one who seemed to clench the matter
with a cant catchword, especially with a catchword in a foreign
language; but how one, who was so far gone as to recognise that he
could not prove his own existence, should be able to comfort himself
with such a begging of the question, would seem unintelligible except
upon the ground