Book 4 (Part I)

I5 Almost always, the moment that one becomes conscious of this, it stops, and the dreary old struggle between the cowboy will and the buckjumper mind begins again. Like every other physiological process, consciousness of it implies disorder or disease. In analysing the nature of this work of controlling the mind, the student will appreciate without trouble the fact that two things are involved—the person seeing and the thing seen—the person knowing and the thing known; and he will come to regard this as the necessary condition of all consciousness. We are too accustomed to assume to be facts things about which we have no real right even to guess. We assume, for example, that the unconscious is the torpid; and yet nothing is more certain than that bodily organs which are functioning well do so in silence. The best sleep is dreamless. Even in the case of games of skill our very best strokes are followed by the thought, “I don’t know how I did it ; ” and we cannot repeat those strokes at will. The moment we begin to think consciously about a stroke we get “nervous,” and are lost. In fact, there are three main classes of stroke; the bad stroke, which we associate, and rightly, with wandering attention ; the good stroke which we associate, and rightly, with fixed attention ,' and the perfect stroke, which we do not understand, but which is really caused by the