lty in awakening consciousness which has
become, so to speak, latent,--a consciousness of that which is known too
well to admit of recognised self-analysis while the knowledge is being
exercised--as in creating a consciousness of that which is not yet well
enough known to be properly designated as known at all. On the other
hand, we observe that the less the familiarity or knowledge, the greater
the consciousness of whatever knowledge there is.

* * * * *

To sum up, then, briefly. It would appear as though perfect knowledge
and perfect ignorance were extremes which meet and become
indistinguishable from one another; so also perfect volition and perfect
absence of volition, perfect memory and perfect forgetfulness; for we are
unconscious of knowing, willing, or remembering, either from not yet
having known or willed, or from knowing and willing so well and so
intensely as to be no longer conscious of either. Conscious knowledge
and volition are of attention; attention is of suspense; suspense is of
doubt; doubt is of uncertainty; uncertainty is of ignorance; so that the
mere fact of conscious knowing or willing implies the presence of more or
less novelty and doubt.

It would also appear as a general principle on a superficial view of the
foregoing instances (and the reader may readily supply himself with
others which are perhaps more to the purpose), that unconscious knowledge
and unconscious volition are never acquired otherwise than as the result
of experience, familiarity, or habit; so that whenever we observe a
person able to do any complicated action unconsciously, we may assume
both that he must have done it very often before he could acquire so
great proficiency, and also that there must have been a time when he did
not know how to do it at all.

We may assume that there was a time when he was yet so nearly on the
point of neither knowing nor willing perfectly, that he was quite alive
to whatever knowledge or volition he could exert; going further back, we
shall find him still more keenly alive to a less perfect knowledge;
earlier still, we find him well aware that he does not know nor will
correctly, but trying hard to do both the one and the other; and so on,
back and back, till both difficulty and consciousness become little more
than "a sound of going," as it were, in the brain, a flitting to and fro
of something barely recognisable as the desire to will or know at
all--much less as the desire to know