42 MEMOIR OF ALPEED SMEB. [Chap. V. 



between ourselves, when down we would go on the floor on our 

 hands and knees and pretend to be two bears fighting. Nothing of 

 our play or conversation escaped my father, busy and seemingly 

 absorbed aa'Jxe was with his writings. Afterwards I have heard 

 him observe, that during those breakfast hours he obtained a 

 greater insight into our separate characters than he would have 

 done had he seen us only when we were fully aware that he was 

 watching us, for we as children looked upon him as an extra- 

 ordinary man, who was so absent that we might do what we 

 liked, and he would not notice it. How differently perhaps 

 should we have behaved had we known that his eyes too were 

 upon us ! 



In this way we heard and saw much of great interest, for 

 he had the remarkable faculty of being able to write on the 

 most abstruse questions with people talking around him in 

 the same room, so great were his powers of abstraction and 

 concentration. It was his custom to write books, as it were, 

 in the mind, as he moved about in any ordinary avocations of 

 life. When composed in the mind, it frequently became, as he 

 has written, 



a mere question of mecliaiiical labour to transmit to paper those ideas 

 wten thought out ; and so mechanical is the act of writing, that I 

 frequently find myself using the pen on important matters whilst 

 conversing with those around me on the ordinary trivial subjects of 

 the day.* 



Sometimes his mind could attend to two matters at one time, 

 as instanced above, and sometimes eVen three operations of the 

 brain would occur to him simultaneously, besides many slighter 

 matters which the mind apprehended, such as the " ticking of a 

 watch or the passage of a figure before the eye," &c. However, 

 in laughing with him over his doing three things at one time, so 

 contrary to the adage, he would own that he " generally made a 

 hash of that." But duality of mental action or thought was an 

 ordinary habit with him. He has written concerning this — 



With me it is so constant, that it is my custom to read or even to 

 write upon one subject when my family are conversing upon another. 

 Most of my published treatises have been written, after having been 

 thought out, when I have been talking with my family and friends upon 

 the ordinary subjects which are discussed at a family gathering on a 

 winter's evening.f 



* See * Mind of Man,' p. 13. t Idem. 



