64 LIFE AND HABIT. 



say that these processes are so rapid and subtle, owing, 

 as a general rule, to long experience in addition. Why 

 then should we find it so difficult to conceive that 

 this principle, which we observe to play so large a part 

 in mental physiology, wherever we can observe mental 

 physiology at all, may have a share also in the per- 

 formance of intricate operations otherwise inexplicable, 

 though the creature performing them is not man, or 

 man only in embryo ? 



Again, after the chicken is hatched, it grows more 

 feathers and bones and blood, but we still say that it 

 knows nothing about all this. What then do we say 

 it does know ? One is almost ashamed to confess that 

 we only credit it with knowing what it appears to 

 know by processes which we find it exceedingly easy 

 to follow, or perhaps rather, which we find it abso- 

 lutely impossible to avoid following, as recognising 

 too great a family likeness between them, and those 

 which are most easily followed in our own minds, to 

 be able to sit down in comfort under a denial of the 

 resemblance. Thus, for example, if we see a chicken 

 running away from a fox, we do admit that the 

 chicken knows the fox would kill it if it caught it. 



On the other hand, if we allow that the half- 

 hatched chicken grew the horny tip to be ready for 

 use, with an intensity of unconscious contrivance 

 which can be only attributed to experience, we are 

 driven to admit that from the first moment the hen 

 began to sit upon it — and earlier too than this — the 

 egg was always full of consciousness and volition, and 

 that during its embryological condition the unhatched 



