APPLICATION OF FOREGOING CHAPTERS. 45 



perience, gradate away imperceptibly into actions v 

 which would seem, according to all reasonable analogy, 

 to presuppose experience, of which, however, the time 

 and place seem obscure, if not impossible ? 



Eating and drinking would appear to be such actions. 

 The new-born child cannot eat, and cannot drink, but he 

 can swallow as soon as he is born; and swallowing would 

 appear (as we may remark in passing) to have been an 

 earlier faculty of animal life than that of eating with 

 teeth. The ease and unconsciousness with which we eat 

 and drink is clearly attributable to practice ; but a very 

 little practice seems to go a long way — a suspiciously 

 small amount of practice — as though somewhere or at 

 some other time there must have been more .practice 

 than we can account for. We can very readily stop eat- 

 ing or drinking, and can follow our own action without 

 difficulty in either process ; but, as regards swallowing, 

 which is the earlier habit, we have less power of self- 

 analysis and control : when we have once committed 

 ourselves beyond a certain point to swallowing, we 

 must finish doing so, — that is to say, our control over 

 the operation ceases. Also, a still smaller experience 

 seems necessary for the acquisition of the power to 

 swallow than appeared necessary in the case of eating ; 

 and if we get into a difficulty we choke, and are more 

 at a loss how to become introspective than we are about 

 eating and drinking. 



Why should a baby be able to swallow — which 

 one would have said was the more complicated pro- 

 cess of the two — with so much less practice than 

 it takes him to learn to eat ? How comes it that he 



