Life and Habit | Page 9

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 of sheer exhaustion.
At the risk of appearing to wander too far from the matter in hand, a few further examples may perhaps be given of that irony of nature, by which it comes about that we so often most know and are, what we least think ourselves to know and be--and on the other hand hold most strongly what we are least capable of demonstrating.
Take the existence of a Personal God,--one of the