6o Unconscious Memory 



only. To count a million a million times over, he would 

 require four million days, or roughly ten thousand years ; 

 for five hundred millions of millions, he must have the 

 utterly unrealisable period of five million years. Yet he 

 actually goes through this stupendous piece of reckoning 

 unconsciously hour after hour, day after day, it may be 

 for eighty years, often in each second of daylight ; and 

 how much more by artificial or subdued light I do not 

 know. He knows whether his eye is being struck five 

 hundred millions of millions of times, or only four hundred 

 and eighty-two millions of millions of times. He thus 

 shows that he estimates or counts each set of vibrations, 

 and registers them according to his results. If a man 

 writes upon the back of a British Museum blotting-pad 

 of the common nonpareil pattern, on which there are some 

 thousands of small spaces each differing in colour from 

 that which is immediately next to it, his eye will, never- 

 theless, without an effort assign its true colour to each 

 one of these spaces. This implies that he is all the time 

 counting and taking tally of the difference in the numbers 

 of the vibrations from each one of the small spaces in 

 question. Yet the mind that is capable of such stupendous 

 computations as these so long as it knows nothing about 

 them, makes no little fuss about the conscious adding 

 together of such almost inconceivably minute numbers as, 

 we will say, 2730169 and 5790135 — or, if these be con- 

 sidered too large, as 27 and 19. Let the reader remember 

 that he cannot by any effort bring before his mind the 

 units, not in ones, hut in millions of millions of the pro- 

 cesses which his visual organs are undergoing second 

 after second from dawn till dark, and then let him 

 demur if he will to the possibility of the existence in a 

 germ, of currents and undercurrents, and rhythms and 

 counter - rhythms, also by the million of millions — each 

 one of which, on being overtaken by the rhythm from 

 without that chimes in with and stimulates it, may 

 be the beginning of that unsettlement of equilibrium 



