UNCONSCIOUS BRAIN WORK.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 15, 6 May 1871, Page 4

UNCONSCIOUS BRAIN WORK.

As a general rule, the unconscious brain, like an enfant terrible, is extremely veracious. The " Palace of Truth" is nothing but a house full of absent-minded people who unconsciously say what they think of each other, when they consciously intend to be extremely flattering. But it also sometimes happens that falsehood has so far become second nature that that a man's very interjections, unconscious answers aud soliloquies may all be lies. Nothing can be more false to nature than the dramas and novels wherein profound scoundrels, in the privacy of an evening wall? beside a hedge, unveil their secret plots in an address to fate or the moon ; or fall into a well-timed brain-fever, and babble out exactly the truth with which the reader needs to be told. Your real villain never tells truth even to himself, much to fate or the moon; and it is to be doubted whether even in delirium his unconscious cerebration would not run in the accustomed ruts of fable rather than the unwonted paths of veracity.

Another failure of unconscious cerebration is seen in the continuance of habitual actions when the motive for them has ceased. A change of attire, altering the position of our pockets, never fails to cause us a dozen fruitless struggles to find our handkerchiefs or replace our purse. In returning to an old abode we are sure sooner or later to blunder into our former sleeping-room, and to be much startled to find in it another occupant. It happened to me once, after an interval of eight years, to find myself again in the chamber, at the table, and seated on the chair where my little studies had gone on for half a lifetime. J had business to occupy my thoughts, and was soon (so far as consciousness went) buried in my task of writing. But all the time I wrote my feet moved, restlessly in a most unaccustomed way under the table, " What is the matter with me ?" I paused at last to ask myself, and then remembered that when I had written at this table in long past days, I had had a stool under it, It was that particular stool my unconscious cerebration was seeking. During all the interval I had perhaps not once used a similar support; but the moment I sat in the same spot the trifling habit vindicated itself afresh, the brain acted on its old impression. Of course it is as easy as it is common to dismiss all fantastic tricks with a single word "habit.'' But the word " habit" like the word " law," has no positive sense as if it were itself an originating cause. It implies a persistent mode of action, but affords no clue to the force which indicates and maintains that action. All that we can say in the case of the phenomena of unconcious cerebration, is that when volitional actions have been often repeated, they sink into the class of voluntary ones, and are performed unconsciously. We may define the moment when a habit is established as that wherein the volitional act becomes voluntary. —" Harper's Weekly."