and
great unexpected crisis, is in a great measure performed unconsciously
as to its mental means. The man is so _totus in illo_, that there is no
bit of the mind left to watch and record the acts of the rest; therefore
men, when they have done some signal feat of presence of mind, if asked
how they did it, generally don't very well know--they just did it; it
was, in fact, done and then thought of, not thought of and then done, in
which case it would likely never have been done. Not that the act was
uncaused by mind; it is one of the highest powers of mind thus to act;
but it is done, if I may use the phrase, by an acquired instinct. You
will find all this in that wonderful old Greek who was Alexander the
Great's and the old world's schoolmaster, and ours if we were
wise,--whose truthfulness and clear insight one wonders at the longer he
lives. He seems to have seen the human mind as a bird or an engineer
does the earth--he knew the plan of it. We now-a-days see it as one sees
a country, athwart and in perspective, and from the side; he saw it from
above and from below. There are therefore no shadows, no
foreshortenings, no clear-obscure, indeed no disturbing medium; it is as
if he examined everything _in vacuo_. I refer my readers to what he says
on {Anchinoia} and {Eustochia}.[8]

[8] As I am now, to my sorrow and shame, too much of a mediate
Grecian, I give a Balliol friend's note on these two
words:--"What you have called 'presence of mind' and 'happy
guessing' may, I think, be identified respectively with
Aristotle's {anchinoia} and {eustochia}. The latter of
these, {eustochia}, Aristotle mentions incidentally when
treating of {euboulia}, or good deliberation. _Eth. Nic._
bk. vi. ch. 9. Good deliberation, he says, is not
{eustochia}, for the former is a slow process, whereas the
latter is not guided by reason, and is rapid. In the same
passage he tells us that {anchinoia} is a sort of
{eustochia}. But he speaks of {anchinoia} more fully in
_Ana. Post._ i. 34:--'{Anchinoia} is a sort of happy
guessing at the intermediate, when there is not time for
consideration: as when a man, seeing that the bright side of
the moon is always turned towards the sun, comprehends that
her light is borrowed from the sun; or concludes, from
seeing one conversing with a capitalist that he wants to