"Me, me, me, revert hitherward, my descendant," shouts one as it were
from some high vantage-ground over the heads of the clamorous
multitude. "Nay, but me, me, me," echoes another; and our former
selves fight within us and wrangle for our possession. Have we not
here what is commonly called an INTERNAL TUMULT, when dead pleasures
and pains tug within us hither and thither? Then may the battle be
decided by what people are pleased to call our own experience. Our
own indeed! What is our own save by mere courtesy of speech? A
matter of fashion. Sanction sanctifieth and fashion fashioneth. And
so with death--the most inexorable of all conventions.

However this may be, we may assume it as an axiom with regard to
actions acquired after birth, that we never do them automatically
save as the result of long practice, and after having thus acquired
perfect mastery over the action in question.

But given the practice or experience, and the intricacy of the
process to be performed appears to matter very little. There is
hardly anything conceivable as being done by man, which a certain
amount of familiarity will not enable him to do, as it were
mechanically and without conscious effort. "The most complex and
difficult movements," writes Mr Darwin, "can in time be performed
without the least effort or consciousness." All the main business of
life is done thus unconsciously or semi-unconsciously. For what is
the main business of life? We work that we may eat and digest,
rather than eat and digest that we may work; this, at any rate, is
the normal state of things: the more important business then is that
which is carried on unconsciously. So again the action of the brain,
which goes on prior to our realising the idea in which it results, is
not perceived by the individual. So also all the deeper springs of