44 LIFE AND HABIT. 



knowing how we do them, and without any con- 

 scious exercise of the will — actions which we certainly 

 could not do if we tried to do them, nor refrain from 

 doing if for any reason we wished to do so — are done 

 so easily and so unconsciously owing to excess of 

 knowledge or experience rather than deficiency, we 

 having done them too often, knowing how to do them 

 too well, and having too little hesitation as to the 

 method of procedure, to be capable of following our 

 own action without the utter derangement of such 

 action altogether ; or, in other cases, because w r e have 

 so long settled the question, that we have stowed away 

 the whole apparatus with which we work in corners of 

 our system which we cannot now conveniently reach ? 



It may be interesting to see whether we can find 

 any class or classes of actions which would seem to 

 link actions which for some time after birth we could 

 not do at all, and in which our proficiency has reached 

 the stage of unconscious performance obviously through 

 repeated effort and failure, and through this only, with 

 actions which we could do as soon as we were born, 

 and concerning which it would at first sight appear 

 absurd to say that they can have been acquired by any 

 process in the least analogous to that which we com- 

 monly call experience, inasmuch as the creature itself 

 which does them has only just begun to exist, and can- 

 not, therefore, in the very nature of things, have had 

 experience. 



Can we see that actions, for the acquisition of 

 which experience is such an obvious necessity, that 

 whenever we see the acquisition we assume the ex- 



