writing what we have often written before, we lose consciousness of
this too, as fully as we do of the characters necessary to convey the
substance to another person, and we shall find ourselves writing on
as it were mechanically while thinking and talking of something else.
So a paid copyist, to whom the subject of what he is writing is of no
importance, does not even notice it. He deals only with familiar
words and familiar characters without caring to go behind them, and
thereupon writes on in a quasi-unconscious manner; but if he comes to
a word or to characters with which he is but little acquainted, he
becomes immediately awakened to the consciousness of either
remembering or trying to remember. His consciousness of his own
knowledge or memory would seem to belong to a period, so to speak, of
twilight between the thick darkness of ignorance and the brilliancy
of perfect knowledge; as colour which vanishes with extremes of light
or of shade. Perfect ignorance and perfect knowledge are alike
unselfconscious.

The above holds good even more noticeably in respect of reading. How
many thousands of individual letters do our eyes run over every
morning in the "Times" newspaper, how few of them do we notice, or
remember having noticed? Yet there was a time when we had such
difficulty in reading even the simplest words, that we had to take
great pains to impress them upon our memory so as to know them when
we came to then again. Now, not even a single word of all we have
seen will remain with us, unless it is a new one, or an old one used
in an unfamiliar sense, in which case we notice, and may very likely
remember it. Our memory retains the substance only, the substance
only being unfamiliar. Nevertheless, although we do not perceive
more than the general result of our perception, there can be no doubt
of our having perceived every letter in every word that we have read