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I have ever had, when I remember the many occasions 

 on which I have lost myself and have had long 

 anxious hours of wandering in some unfamiliar place 

 with no faintest intimation of any such helpful sense 

 in me. For if this sense is so feeble in or so lost to us, 

 how came it to revive and function so perfectly on 

 this one occasion ? The psychologist cannot help me, 

 seeing that he takes no account of such a faculty; nor 

 the physiologist, since there is no corresponding organ 

 known to his science. But there is, there must be, an 

 organ, albeit unrecognisable, a specialised nerve in the 

 brain, I suppose, which keeps a record of all our turns 

 and windings about, and ever, like the magnetic 

 needle, swings faithfully round to point infallibly in 

 the direction to which we desire in the end to return. 

 This, at all events, is how it must be in the lower 

 animal, and in savage men. Admitting so much, how 

 came it to revive and function so perfectly in an 

 individual who had appeared to be without it ? I can 

 only suppose that it is not actually obsolete in us, 

 that it still exists and continues to function feebly 

 — so feebly, indeed, that we rarely or never become 

 conscious of it. If this be so, I take it that on this one 

 occasion the nerve was highly excited by my mental 

 agitation, the sense of being lost in that dark wood, 

 and that in that state it recovered its function and 

 the record of all the changes of direction I had taken 

 in my roamings about, and eventually produced that 

 conscious feeling of confidence and elation. 



