Letter to Thomas William Gale Butler
February 18th, 1876.
My dear Namesake . . .
My present literary business is a little essay some 25 or 30 pp. long, which is still all in the rough and I don’t know how it will shape, but the gist of it is somewhat as follows:—
1. Actions which we have acquired with difficulty and now perform almost unconsciously—as in playing a difficult piece of music, reading, talking, walking and the multitude of actions which escape our notice inside other actions, etc.—all this worked out with some detail, say, four or five pages.
General deduction that we never do anything in this unconscious or semi-conscious manner unless we know how to do it exceedingly well and have had long practice.
Also that consciousness is a vanishing quantity and that as soon as we know a thing really well we become unconscious in respect of it—consciousness being of attention and attention of uncertainty—and hence the paradox comes clear, that as long as we know that we know a thing (or do an action knowingly) we do not know it (or do the action with thorough knowledge of our business) and that we only know it when we do not know of our knowledge.
2. Whatever we do in this way is all one and the same in kind—the difference being only in degree. Playing [almost?] unconsciously—writing, more unconsciously (as to each letter)—reading, very unconsciously—talking, still more unconsciously (it is almost impossible for us to notice the action of our tongue in every letter)—walking, much the same—breathing, still to a certain extent within our own control—heart’s beating, perceivable but beyond our control—digestion, unperceivable and beyond our control, digestion being the oldest of the . . . habits.
3. A baby, therefore, has known how to grow itself in the womb and has only done it because it wanted to, on a balance of considerations, in the same way as a man who goes into the City to buy Great Northern A Shares . . . It is only unconscious of these operations because it has done them a very large number of times already. A man may do a thing by a fluke once, but to say that a foetus can perform so difficult an operation as the growth of a pair of eyes out of pure protoplasm without knowing how to do it, and without ever having done it before, is to contradict all human experience. Ipso facto that it does it, it knows how to do it, and ipso facto that it knows how to do it, it has done it before. Its unconsciousness (or speedy loss of memory) is simply the result of over-knowledge, not of under-knowledge. It knows so well and has done it so often that its power of self-analysis is gone. If it knew what it was doing, or was conscious of its own act in oxidising its blood after birth, I should suspect that it had not done it so often before; as it is I am confident that it must have done it more often—much more often—than any act which we perform consciously during our whole lives.
4. When, then, did it do it? Clearly when last it was an impregnate ovum or some still lower form of life which resulted in that impregnate ovum.