T22 LIFE AND HABIT. 



pression " which produces their action, and if in that 

 action there is (and there would certainly appear to be 

 so) " all that constitutes an intelligent act, ... a 

 determinate adaptation to a determinate end/' one fail3 

 to see on what ground they should be supposed to be 

 incapable of perceiving their own action, in which 

 case the action of the hind legs becomes distinctly 

 psychological. 



Secondly, M. Ribot appears to forget that it is the 

 tendency of all psychological action to become uncon- 

 scious on being frequently repeated, and that no line 

 can be drawn between psychological acts and those 

 reflex acts which he calls physiological. All we can 

 say is, that there are acts which we do without know- 

 ing that we do them ; but the analogy of many habits 

 which we have been able to watch in their passage 

 from laborious consciousness to perfect unconscious- 

 ness, would suggest that all action is really psycho- 

 logical, only that the soul's action becomes invisible 

 to ourselves after it has been repeated sufficiently 

 often — that there is, in fact, a law as simple as in the 

 case of optics or gravitation, whereby conscious per- 

 ception of any action shall vary inversely as the 

 square, say, of its being repeated. 



It is easy to understand the advantage to the in- 

 dividual of this power of doing things rightly without 

 thinking about them ; for were there no such power, 

 the attention would be incapable of following the 

 multitude of matters which would be continually arrest- 

 ing it; those animals which had developed a power 

 of working automatically, and without a recurrence to 



