46 LIFE AND HABIT. 



exhibits in the case of the more difficult operation all 

 the phenomena which ordinarily accompany a more 

 complete mastery and longer practice ? Analogy 

 would certainly seem to point in the direction of 

 thinking that the necessary experience cannot have 

 been wanting, and that, too, not in such a quibbling 

 sort as when people talk about inherited habit or 

 the experience of the race, which, without explana- 

 tion, is to plain-speaking persons very much the same, 

 in regard to the individual, as no experience at all, 

 but band fide in the child's own person. 



Breathing, again, is an action acquired after birth, 

 generally with some little hesitation and difficulty, but 

 still acquired in a time seldom longer, as I am informed, 

 than ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. For an art 

 which has to be acquired at all, there would seem here, 

 as in the case of eating, to be a disproportion between, 

 on the one hand, the intricacy of the process performed, 

 and on the other, the shortness of the time taken to 

 acquire the practice, and the ease and unconsciousness 

 with which its exercise is continued from the moment 

 of acquisition. 



We observe that in later life much less difficult 

 and intricate operations than breathing require much 

 longer practice before they can be mastered to the 

 extent of unconscious performance. We observe also 

 that the phenomena attendant on the learning by an in- 

 fant to breathe are extremely like those attendant upon 

 the repetition of some performance by one who has done 

 it very often before, but who requires just a little prompt- 

 ing to set him off, on getting which, the whole familiar 



