rties of its
constituents. By the help of the brain we may acquire an affinity of
ARTIFICIAL reflex actions. That is to say, an action may require all
our attention and all our volition for its first, or second, or third
performance, but by frequent repetition it becomes, in a manner, part
our organisation, and is performed without volition, or even
consciousness.

'As everyone knows, it takes a soldier a very long time to learn his
drill--to put himself, for instance, into the attitude of 'attention'
at the instant the word of command is heard. But, after a time, the
sound of the word gives rise to the act, whether the soldier be
thinking of it or not. There is a story, which is credible enough,
though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a
discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out
'Attention!' whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and
lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been gone
through, and its effects had become embodied in the man's nervous
structure.

'The possibility of all education (of which military drill is only one
particular form) is based upon, the existence of this power which the
nervous system possesses, of organising conscious actions into more or
less unconscious, or reflex, operations. It may be laid down as a rule,
that if any two mental states be called up together, or in succession,
with due frequency and vividness, the subsequent production of the one
of them will suffice to call up the other, and that whether we desire
it or not.'[1]

[1] Huxley's Elementary Physiology, pp. 284-286.

The body of the accomplished man has thus become by training different
from what it once was, and different from that of the rude man; it is
charged with stored virtue and acquired faculty which come away from it
unconsciously.

Again, as to race, another authority teaches:--'Man's life truly
represents a progressive development of the nervous system, none the
less so because it takes place out of the womb instead of in it. The
regular transmutation of motions which are at first voluntary into
secondary automatic motions, as Hartley calls them, is due to a
gradually effected organisation; and we may rest assured of this, that
co-ordinate activity always testifies to stored-up power, either innate
or acquired.

'The way in which an acquired faculty of the parent animal is sometimes
distinctly transmitted to the progeny as a