138 THE CONTROL OF LIFE 



the process of sneezing easy and in certain conditions 

 irresistible. Reflexes, the capacity for which is inborn, 

 must not be carelessly mixed up with reactions which 

 have become very rapid and facile in the course of long 

 practice, e.g. in cricket, tennis, and bicycling. This 

 facility, properly called habitual, is of course individu- 

 ally acquired, and is the outcome of a process of learning 

 which is anything but facile to begin with. 



Very important are the internal reflexes that only 

 physiologists know much about. These are responses 

 that organs of the body make to messages from other 

 parts of the body, or to changes in the composition of 

 the blood. When we are excited by good news and the 

 heart beats with unusual vigour, there is an automatic 

 enlargement of the blood-vessels so that there is a free 

 outlet for the blood. 



(D) In some way that we do not understand, our 

 personality is more bound up with our nervous system 

 than with the rest of our body. Our quickness or 

 slowness, alertness or dullness, cheerfulness or gloomi- 

 ness, reliability or fecklessness, good-will or selfishness, 

 are wrapped up — in our ordinary life inextricably— 

 with our very wonderful nervous system. Some people 

 believe that our inmost self uses the nervous system as a 

 musician uses a piano, and compare the disorder of 

 mind illustrated in the delirium of fever, or the decay 

 of mental vigour in the aged to disturbances or wear 

 and tear in the instrument. Others think that the 

 inner life of consciousness — feeling, thinking, and willing 

 — ^i>s one aspect of our mysterious living, and that the 



