258 THE PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY 



make an increased number of mistakes; but this is not 

 because we have converted an involuntary act into a 

 voluntary one. It is only because we are trying to do the 

 act in an unaccustomed way by means of our concentrated 

 attention, instead of by means of our peripheral attention 

 aided by the associations the various movements comprising 

 the act have formed among themselves. Thus when a 

 woman is knitting automatically the feeling of one move- 

 ment supplies through association the tendency to start the 

 next. When she concentrates her attention she abandons to 

 some extent the aid of these associations and tries to do the 

 knitting in the way it was done when she was learning it. 

 Just so might a soldier, well-drilled in a complicated 

 manoeuvre, be confused by a number of unnecessary com- 

 mands issued by a fussy officer. The existence of the 

 acquired associations no more converts an automatic action 

 into a reflex action, than the existence of an acquired desire 

 converts "rational" action into an instinctive one. Their 

 presence does not imply an absence of will ; it implies 

 merely that the will has established aids to enable itself to 

 work swiftly and easily. The fact that automatic actions 

 are acquirements, and that they are initiated, directed, and 

 controlled throughout by the will, sets them poles apart from 

 reflexes. They are, however, admirable substitutes for reflex 

 actions just as rational actions are admirable substitutes 

 for instinctive actions. They are the analogues, not the 

 homologues, of reflexes. They are functions of the cerebrum, 

 not of lower nervous centres. 



421. It seems certain, then, that automatic actions do not 

 retire altogether out of our minds during their performance ; 

 they merely pass into the background. They receive our 

 attention, but not the concentrated part of our attention. 

 They are directed by our wills, but not by the concentrated 

 part of our wills. They occupy not the fovea centralis of our 

 mental retina, but the peripheral surface. Our memory of 

 doing them, like our memory of the images that fall on the 

 peripheral portion of the retina, is faint or non-existent 

 because memory stores with care only things on which we 

 concentrate our attention. The more completely we are 

 habituated to any action, the more completely automatic it 

 has become, the farther it is possible to push it into the 

 background during efficient performance. Thus walking has 

 become very automatic, and therefore we are able to walk 

 even while our attention, and therefore our will, is almost 

 wholly concentrated on some other subject. Even when 



