Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/698

680 wonder that we really find time for. all the acts involved in the exercise of even our ordinary work. The condition of the brain and nervous apparatus at large might at first sight appear to represent that of an overworked signal-box at an important railway junction. Questions of commissariat, of threatening danger, of demands for information, of difficulties to be cleared away, are perpetually presenting themselves to the nervous apparatus for solution. Yet it is plain that many complex acts, the knowledge of which costs us a deal of trouble to acquire in early life, are not only performed correctly in the absence of all that we may name conscious thought or attention, but are discharged the more efficiently because they are so unthinkingly performed. What we term "automatic" action in human and in lower animal life is only another name for an economical dispensation of bodily work and of the time that work demands for its performance. Reading and writing do not "come by nature," but require to be taught, and from the "A-B-C" stage of the one, the "pothooks-and-hangers" stage of the other, both demanding thought and care, we work our way slowly upward to a phase when we neither need to think about our "p's" and "q's" in writing or our syllables or sounds in reading. In other words, the intellectual operations of early life have become the "automatic acts" of adult existence. The immense saving of nerve power—or at least of the highest powers we may collectively name "thought"—involved in such an arrangement may readily be understood. We have not even to waste brain-work in the conduct of our steps in walking. We avoid our neighbors and the lamp-posts without concerning ourselves about either. How large a part of our life is automatically ordered, a superficial glance at the history of the nervous system will disclose. The digestion of food, the circulation of the blood, breathing, and many other functions on the due performance and nervous regulation of which the continuity of life depends, are all discharged in this automatic manner.

There is implied herein a large saving of that vital wear and tear of which we have already spoken. Life would indeed be far too short for the safe and satisfactory discharge of the duties of even the humblest life—to say nothing of the performance of merely physical duties of existence—had we to "mark, learn, and inwardly digest" every act in our daily round of labor. We may grumble as we please at overwork, and criticise rightly the evil effects of overstrain; but we should also bear in mind that the nature we own has saved us many a worry and many a pang by the exercise of that system of rigid economy which is traceable, in one form or another, in well-nigh every phase of the life universal.—Longman's Magazine.