8 LIFE AND HABIT. 



generally new to us ; but if we are writing what we 

 have often written before, we lose consciousness of 

 this too, as fully as we do of the characters necessary 

 to con\«ey the substance to another person, and we 

 shall find ourselves writing on as it were mechanically 

 while thinking and talking of something else. So a 

 paid copyist, to whom the subject of what he is writing 

 is of no importance, does not even notice it. He 

 deals only with familiar words and familiar characters 

 without caring to go behind them, and thereupon 

 writes on in a ^asi-unconscious manner ; but if he 

 comes to a word or to characters with which he is but 

 little acquainted, he becomes immediately awakened 

 to the consciousness of either remembering or trying 

 to remember. His consciousness of his own know- 

 ledge or memory would seem to belong to a period, so 

 to speak, of twilight between the thick darkness of 

 ignorance and the brilliancy of perfect knowledge ; as 

 colour which vanishes with extremes of light or of 

 shade. Perfect ignorance and perfect knowledge are 

 alike unselfconscious. 



The above holds good even more noticeably in 

 respect of reading. How many thousands of indi- 

 vidual letters do our eyes run over every morning in 

 the "Times" newspaper, how few of them do we 

 notice, or remember having noticed ? Yet there was a 

 time when we had such difficulty in reading even the 

 simplest words, that we had to take great pains to 

 impress them upon our memory so as to know them 

 when we came to them again. Now, not even a single 

 word of all we have seen will remain with us, unless 



