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236 you misuse them, "we will make you know that we are here." And so you become conscious of them: but that doesn't make you happier. Yet in a sort of way, I suppose, a man would realise himself more completely if he had sciatica all over him, and could count up his nerves, and tell all his bones by the aches and pains attaching to them.

Now it is easy enough for a man to say (I think it was H. M. Stanley, the explorer, who did say so) that he would rather endure torment for all eternity than accept a state of annihilation. In thus protesting he is talking through his hat of something too far beyond human experience for the mind to realise. Toothache he has probably always found bearable, because he knew that in course of time it would end. On the other hand, sound dreamless sleep is probably not less bearable to him because during that sleep he has not a ghost of a notion that he will ever wake up again. He is carried, that is to say, every day of his life while in health, into a state closely resembling annihilation of consciousness, in which such annihilation has no terrors for him at all; he accepts it as a comfortable part of existence, and goes to it with delight when his faculties are tired. Its attractions for him would naturally be less while all his senses were alert and fresh.

But the waking man is not the whole man; the subconscious life, acquiescent to imposed conditions, occupies by far the larger part of