THE MIND- STUFF THEORY. 171 



an unconscious state, since we so completely fail to single 

 them out.* The books of the analytic school of psychol- 

 ogy abound in examples of the kind. Who knows the 

 countless associations that mingle with his each and every 

 thought ? Who can pick apart all the nameless feelings 

 that stream in at every moment from his various internal 

 organs, muscles, heart, glands, lungs, etc., and compose in 

 their totality his sense of bodily life ? Who is aware of the 

 part played by feelings of innervation and suggestions of 

 possible muscular exertion in all his judgments of distance, 

 shape, and size ? Consider, too, the difference between a 

 sensation which we simply have and one which we attend to. 

 Attention gives results that seem like fresh creations ; and 

 yet the feelings and elements of feeling which it reveals 

 must have been already there — in an unconscious state. 

 We all know practically the difference between the so-called 

 sonant and the so-called surd consonants, between D, B, Z, 

 G, V, and T, P, S, K, F, respectively. But comparatively few 

 persons know the difference theoretically, until their atten- 

 tion has been called to what :t is, when they perceive it 

 readily enough. The sonants are nothing but the surds 

 plus a certain element, which is alike in all, superadded. 

 That element is the laryngeal sound with which they are 

 uttered, surds ha\^ng no such accompaniment. When we 

 hear the sonant letter, both its component elements must 

 really be in our mind ; but we remain unconscious of what 

 they rerlly are, and mistake the letter for a simple quality 

 of sound until an effort of attention teaches us its two com- 

 ponents. There exist a host of sensations which most men 

 pass through life and never attend to, and consequently 

 have only in an unconscious way. The feelings of opening 

 and closing the glottis, of making tense the tympanic mem- 

 brane, of accommodating for near ^dsion, of intercepting the 

 passage from the nostrils to the throat, are instances of 

 what I mean. Every one gets these feelings many times an 

 hour ; but few readers, probably, are conscious of exactly 

 what sensations are meant by the names I have just used. 

 All these facts, and an enormous number more, seem to 



* Cf. the statemeuls from Heluiboltz to be found later in Chapter 

 Xlll. 



