Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/506

THE PHYSICAL CONDITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 493 not believe that I ever felt, thought and acted as I did ; and if my past self were to meet me face to face and to greet me as myself, I should not recognise and own it. Life is a suc- cession of scenes in which the curtain falls on a dead self and its interests to rise on a new self and its interests. Time is the consoler and reconciler, because we change with time and are no longer the same : it is not I who am who was bereaved or offended, it was the I that I was. n. The habitual recurrence of impressions of the same kind and of respondent acts ends notably in an unconsciousness of them and the acts. They and their motor machinery become automatic in action ; a fitly organised adaptation of action to impression is perfected ; and the subject is unaware of them and their motor outcomes unless he deliberately think of them. The double mechanism of reception and reaction, perfected for its purpose, acts simply and directly as one, without needing or causing any coincident activity. When a man twirls the end of his moustache he does an act which he has consciously learnt to do, and of which he is conscious as he does it ; but he may do the same kind of act unawares even when, struck with apoplexy, he is entirely unconscious of what he is doing. The same tracts of the brain are in the same action ; but in the former case there must be some difference in the act to account for the consciousness. What is the difference ? Not a greater intensity of the particular activity, whereby what was below consciousness rises into it, since there is no evidence of that either in the increase of the stimulus or in the character of the act, nor any probability that such an increase of intensity, if it took place, could ever excite consciousness during the deep apoplectic coma. Is not the difference this that there is the addition of a concurrent or rapidly alternating activity of another tract of brain which the apoplectic damage has paralysed ; that the action, when conscious, is not simple, separate, complete in itself; that it involves an induction of activity in related parts, a certain sympathy or synergy of them ? If there be such a reflection of the particular energy on to other related tracts, it will naturally come to pass that the character of consciousness will vary according to the number of them implicated, being large and calm consciousness when they are many, intense and narrow consciousness when one only is implicated. The fundamental fact in man's relation to the world