36 STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



we reflect upon the fact that higher life is a tremendously complex 

 matter in its nervous and mental phases alone, we may well be 

 tempted to wonder that we really find time for all the acts involved in 

 the exercise of even our ordinary work. The condition of the brain 

 and nervous apparatus at large might at first sight appear to represent 

 that of an overworked signal-box at an important railway junction. 

 Questions of commissariat, of threatening danger, of demands for 

 information, of difficulties to be cleared away, are perpetually pre- 

 senting themselves to the nervous apparatus for solution. Yet it is 

 plain that many complex acts, the knowledge of which costs us a deal 

 of trouble to acquire in early life, are not only performed correctly 

 in the absence of all that we may name conscious thought or atten- 

 tion, but are discharged the more efficiently because they are so un- 

 thinkingly performed. What we term " automatic " action in human 

 and in lower animal life, is only another name for an economical 

 dispensation of bodily work and of the time that work demands for 

 its performance. Reading and writing do not " come by nature," 

 but require to be taught, and from the " A-B-C " stage of the one, 

 the " pothooks-and-hangers " stage of the other, both demanding 

 thought and care, we work our way slowly upward to a phase when 

 we neither need to think about our " p's " and " q's " in writing or 

 our syllables or sounds in reading. In other words, the intellectual 

 operations of early life have become the " automatic acts " of adult 

 existence. The immense saving of nerve-power or at least of the 

 highest powers we may collectively name " thought "involved in 

 such an arrangement may readily be understood. We have not 

 even to waste brain-work in the conduct of our steps in walking. 

 We avoid our neighbours and the lamp-posts without concerning 

 ourselves about either. How large a part of our life is automatically 

 ordered a superficial glance at the history of the nervous system will 

 disclose. The digestion of food, the circulation of the blood, breath- 

 ing, and many other functions on the due performance and nervous 

 regulation of which the continuity of life depends, are all discharged 

 in this automatic manner. 



There is implied herein a large saving of that vital wear and tear 

 of which we have already spoken. Life would indeed be far too 

 short for the safe and satisfactory discharge of the duties of even the 

 humblest life to say nothing of the performance of merely physical 

 duties of existence had we to " mark, learn, and inwardly digest " 

 every act in our daily round of labour. We may grumble as we 

 please at overwork, and criticise rightly the evil effects of overstrain ; 

 but we should also bear in mind that the nature we own has saved 

 us many a worry and many a pang by the exercise of that system of 

 rigid economy which is traceable, in one form or another, in well-nigh 

 every phase of the life universal. 



