388 
Feeling and Energy. 
[July, 
been supposed to go on sometimes in the absence of feeling. 
The incessant action of the heart and its vessels, that of the 
organs of digestion, and many if not most of our “ involun- 
tary ” actions, are alleged to be unattended by feeling. In 
answer to this I should say that it is a question whether the 
thing which is alleged to occupy no share of our attention 
should not be described as simply occupying our attention 
least. The fadt, as has been pointed out by some writers, 
that, when the heart and digestive organs are in any diseased 
or abnormal condition, sensations arise forcibly detaining the 
attention, proves that what may thus command at occasions 
much attention may continually be a fadtor in our feelings, 
though intellectually we take no note of it. What I mean 
by this will be best illustrated by dealing with a class of 
alleged fadts of the same kind comprehended under the 
heads of “feelingless automatic action” or “unconscious 
cerebration. ” 
Nothing is more common as a fadt of experience than our 
forgetting that we used certain words in conversation or 
debate. We cannot believe now that we said so-and-so ; or, 
admitting that we may, we explain it as a lapsis lingua, as if 
due to the mere machinery of vocal utterance unattended by 
consciousness. Then, again, we sometimes lay past an 
objedt, as the banker cited by Dr. Carpenter laid by his safe- 
key, and forget where we have laid it. Or we may often do 
something very different from what we originally intended, 
like the gentleman, again mentioned by Carpenter, who went 
up-stairs to dress for dinner and “ unconsciously ” undressed 
and went to bed. 
The statement that we do anything unconsciously, in the 
sense of not associating with it all the circumstances that an 
ordinarily rational being will usually include, is quite a 
truism ; but the absence of the usual compounding of the 
separate cognitions of surrounding circumstances with our 
cognitions of the adt we are performing is one thing to 
admit, and the entire absence of consciousness or feeling in 
connection with any adt is quite another. The former is 
what we might expedt from the complex character of the 
nervous system as a compound of feeling organs, which 
complexity renders it liable to operate in parts more or less 
in isolation from each other. Recollection means a feeble 
revival of the excitement originally made in the nerves by 
that object or set of circumstances which we are said to re- 
member. When we fail to remember it the revival does not 
take place, because the original excitement was not made in 
nerves directly connected with those nerves which are the 
