Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/472

 458 GUSTAV SPILLER : engaged in doing with but the slightest interference what might be called fresh things, so that all we have new in this action is the somewhat greater ease with which the attention is divided. The intensity of feeling accompanying the sug- gestion of the act is reduced to an inconsiderable extent. We may speak of the climbing over a stile as organically generated. Yet that action embraces perhaps not one new feature. A man climbs over a stile as he has been accustomed to surmount similar obstacles. Thus fifty different activities might be considered as fifty distinct sets of organic reactions when there is in reality but one. In the instance of the stile we are considering, not at all a simple one, there is no learning, no mistake, no oblivion, no effort of attention. The man scales the hundredth stile with perhaps no greater ease than the first. Consider a man's general bearing. May he speak of it as organic ? Perhaps he saw some one bow in a certain fashion. He admired the elegance of the gesture, and when he had to bow, he recalled his model. Or as he grew up he bowed as his sister or brother did, without deliberation. Or he adopted the various portions of the bow from various persons, not connecting in consciousness the different movements he had imitated. Thus with the smile present on his lips ; the manner he holds his head ; the way his eyes meet others' eyes ; the normal expression on his face. In short, he may speak of his total bearing as a definite settled whole ; as acquired deliberately and in a logical order of which he is precisely aware. As a matter of fact, a mass of independent units are included in our bearing. A small portion of it, such as the manner one bows, may have been, as shown, acquired at different times and independently. More than this. Per- haps the bow is not a stable quantity. Parts of it may vary, or the whole of it change, as the outcome of a multiplicity of causes. So with the whole of a man's bearing. From the point of view of a careful analysis he cannot speak of his bearing as one trend, acquired and fixed in a deliberate order. He has before him rather an indefinite complex. A routine- act is not bound by any dimensions. It is not independent of other routine acts. It may consist of a single elementary reaction or of a multiplicity of reactions. The exact turning at which an activity becomes organic cannot be decided, mainly for the reason that no such turning is imaginable. Its hold even varies. Looking at a hat, we recognise it instantly as being a hat. How far a set of reactions can be simplified and apparently detached from the