APPLICATION OF FOREGOING CHAPTERS. 53 



and our former selves fight within us and wrangle for 

 our possession. Have we not here what is commonly 

 called an internal tumult, when dead pleasures and 

 pains tug within us hither and thither ? Then may 

 the battle be decided by what people are pleased to 

 call our own experience. Our own indeed ! What is 

 our own save by mere courtesy of speech ? A matter 

 of fashion. Sanction sanctifieth and fashion fashioneth. 

 And so with death the most inexorable of all con- 

 ventions. 



However this may be, we may assume it as an 

 axiom with regard to actions acquired after birth, that 

 we never do them automatically save as the result 

 of long practice, and after having thus acquired perfect 

 mastery over the action in question. 



But given the practice or experience, and the 

 intricacy of the process to be performed appears to 

 matter very little. There is hardly anything con- 

 ceivable as being done by man, which a certain amount 

 of familiarity will not enable him to do, as it were 

 mechanically and without conscious effort. "The 

 most complex and difficult movements," writes Mr. 

 Darwin, " can in time be performed without the least 

 effort or consciousness." All the main business of life 

 is done thus unconsciously or semi-unconsciously. 

 For what is the main business of life? We work 

 that we may eat and digest, rather than eat and digest 

 that we may work ; this, at any rate, is the normal 

 state of things : the more important business then is 

 that which is carried on unconsciously. So again 

 the action of the brain, which goes on prior to 



