THE UNCONSCIOUS ACTION OF THE BRAIN. 561 



regulating and dominating all these lower tendencies to a certain ex- 

 tent, not to an unlimited extent. We cannot prevent those thoughts 

 and feelings rising in our minds that we know to be undesirable ; but 

 we can escape from them, we can repress them ; but, as I said, the effort 

 to escape from them is much more effectual than the effort to repress 

 them, excepting when they arise with great power, and then we have 

 immediately, as it were, to crush them out ; but when they tend to 

 return over and over again, the real mode of subduing them is to de- 

 termine to give our attention to something else. It is by this exercise 

 of the will, therefore, in training and disciplining the mind, that it 

 acquires that method by which it will work of itself. The mathema- 

 tician could never have worked out that difficult problem, nor the 

 lawyer have given his opinion, nor the artist have developed those con- 

 ceptions of beauty which he endeavors to shape either in music, or 

 poetry, or painting, but for the training and disciplining which his 

 mind has undergone. The most wonderfully creative of all musicians, 

 Mozart, whose music flowed from him with a spontaneousness that no 

 musician, I think, has ever equalled Mozart went through, in early 

 life, a most elaborate course of study, imposed upon him, in the first 

 instance, by his father, and afterward maintained by himself. When 

 his contemporaries remarked how easily his compositions flowed from 

 him, he replied, " I gained the power by nothing but hard work." 

 Mozart had the most extraordinary combination of this intuitive musi- 

 cal power, with a knowledge derived from patient and careful study, 

 that probably any man ever attained. Now, in the same manner we 

 have persons of extraordinary natural gifts, and see these gifts frequent- 

 ly running to waste, as it were, because they have not received this 

 culture and discipline. And it is this discipline which gives us the 

 power of performing, unconsciously to ourselves, these elaborate mental 

 operations ; because I hold that a very large part of our mental life 

 thus goes on, not only automatically, but even below the sphere of our 

 consciousness. And you may easily understand this if you refer to the 

 diagram which I drew just now on the black-board. You saw that the 

 Cerebrum, the part that does the work, what is called the convoluted 

 surface of the brain, lies just immediately under the skull-cap ; that it 

 is connected with the sensorium at the base of the brain by a series of 

 fibres which are merely, I believe, conducting fibres. Now, I think that 

 it is just as possible that the Cerebrum should work by itself when the 

 sensorium is otherwise engaged or in a state of unconsciousness, as that 

 impressions should be made on the eye of which we are unconscious. 

 A person may be sleeping profoundly, and you may go and raise the 

 lid and bring a candle near, and you will see the pupil contract ; and 

 yet that individual shall see nothing, for he is in a state of perfect un- 

 consciousness. His eye sees it, so to speak, but his mind does not ; and 

 you know that his eye sees it by the contraction of the pupil, which is 

 a reflex action ; but his mind does not see it, because the sensorium is 

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