any one of these acquired habits, the more easily, automatically and
unconsciously, we perform it. Look, on the other hand, broadly, at the
three points to which I called attention in "Life and Habit":--

I. That we are most conscious of and have most control over such habits
as speech, the upright position, the arts and sciences--which are
acquisitions peculiar to the human race, always acquired after birth, and
not common to ourselves and any ancestor who had not become entirely
human.

II. That we are less conscious of and have less control over eating and
drinking [provided the food be normal], swallowing, breathing, seeing,
and hearing--which were acquisitions of our prehuman ancestry, and for
which we had provided ourselves with all the necessary apparatus before
we saw light, but which are still, geologically speaking, recent.

III. That we are most unconscious of and have least control over our
digestion and circulation--powers possessed even by our invertebrate
ancestry, and, geologically speaking, of extreme antiquity.

I have put the foregoing very broadly, but enough is given to show the
reader the gist of the argument. Let it be noted that disturbance and
departure, to any serious extent, from normal practice tends to induce
resumption of consciousness even in the case of such old habits as
breathing, seeing, and hearing, digestion and the circulation of the
blood. So it is with habitual actions in general. Let a player be never
so proficient on any instrument, he will be put out if the normal
conditions under which he plays are too widely departed from, and will
then do consciously, if indeed he can do it at all, what he had hitherto
been doing unconsciously. It is an axiom as regards actions acquired
after birth, that we never do them automatically save as the result of
long practice; the stages in the case of any acquired facility, the
inception of which we have been able to watch, have invariably been from
a nothingness of ignorant impotence to a little somethingness of highly
self-conscious, arduous performance, and thence to the
unselfconsciousness of easy mastery. I saw one year a poor blind lad of
about eighteen sitting on a wall by the wayside at Varese, playing the
concertina with his whole body, and snorting like a child. The next year
the boy no longer snorted, and he played with his fingers only; the year
after that he seemed hardly to know whether he was playing or not, it
came