1 6 Unconscious Memory 



with ourselves. A few days or weeks later than June 13, 

 1863, I published a second letter in the Press putting this 

 view forward. Of this letter I have lost the only copy I 

 had ; I have not seen it for years. The first was certainly 

 not good ; the second, if I remember rightly, was a good 

 deal worse, though I believed more in the views it put 

 forward than in those of the first letter. I had lost my 

 copy before I wrote " Erewhon," and therefore only gave 

 a couple of pages to it in that book ; besides, there was 

 more amusement in the other view. I should perhaps say 

 there was an intermediate extension of the first letter 

 which appeared in the Reasoner, July i, 1865. 



In 1870 and 1871, when I was writing " Erewhon," 

 I thought the best way of looking at machines was to see 

 them as limbs which we had made and carried about with 

 us or left at home at pleasure. I was not, however, satisfied, 

 and should have gone on with the subject at once if I had 

 not been anxious to write " The Fair Haven," a book 

 which is a development of a pamphlet I wrote in New 

 Zealand and published in London in 1865. 



As soon as I had finished this, I returned to the old 

 subject, on which I had already been engaged for nearly 

 a dozen years as continuously as other business would 

 allow, and proposed to myself to see not only machines 

 as limbs, but also lunbs as machines. I felt immediately 

 that I was upon firmer ground. The use of the word 

 " organ " for a limb told its own story ; the ^^'ord could 

 not have become so current under this meaning unless the 

 idea of a limb as a tool or machine had been agreeable to 

 common sense. What would follow, then, if we regarded 

 our limbs and organs as things that we had ourselves 

 manufactured for our convenience ? 



The first question that suggested itself was, how did 

 we come to make them without knowing anything about 

 it ? And this raised another, namely, how comes anybodj^ 

 to do anything unconsciously ? The answer " habit " 

 was not far to seek. But can a person be said to do a thing 



