with which we work in corners of our system which we cannot now
conveniently reach?

It may be interesting to see whether we can find any class or classes
of actions which would seem to link actions which for some time after
birth we could not do at all, and in which our proficiency has
reached the stage of unconscious performance obviously through
repeated effort and failure, and through this only, with actions
which we could do as soon as we were born, and concerning which it
would at first sight appear absurd to say that they can have been
acquired by any process in the least analogous to that which we
commonly call experience, inasmuch as the creature itself which does
them has only just begun to exist, and cannot, therefore, in the very
nature of things, have had experience.

Can we see that actions, for the acquisition of which experience is
such an obvious necessity, that whenever we see the acquisition we
assume the experience, gradate away imperceptibly into actions which
would seem, according to all reasonable analogy, to presuppose
experience, of which, however, the time and place seem obscure, if
not impossible?

Eating and drinking would appear to be such actions. The new-born
child cannot eat, and cannot drink, but he can swallow as soon as he
is born; and swallowing would appear (as we may remark in passing) to
have been an earlier faculty of animal life than that of eating with
teeth. The ease and unconsciousness with which we eat and drink is
clearly attributable to practice; but a very little practice seems to
go a long way--a suspiciously small amount of practice--as though
somewhere or at some other time there must have been more practice