en 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 so easily to him. I know no
exception to this rule. Where is the intricate and at one time
difficult art in which perfect automatic ease has been reached
except as the result of long practice? If, then, wherever we can
trace the development of automatism we find it to have taken this
course, is it not most reasonable to infer that it has taken the
same even when it has risen in regions that are beyond our ken?
Ought we not, whenever we see a difficult action performed
automatically, to suspect antecedent practice? Granted that without
the considerations in regard to identity presented above it would
not have been easy to see where a baby of a day old could have had
the practice which enables it to do as much as it does
unconsciously, but even without these considerations it would have
been more easy to suppose that the necessary opportunities had not
been wanting, than that the easy performance could have been gained
without practice and memory.