you to poke the hedge and stir up the ditch, and you all agree that you
have never known such a perfectly ridiculous thing before. And having
clearly proved that the ball isn't anywhere in the neighbourhood, you take
another out of the bag, and proceed with the game.

So far everything is quite ordinary. The game is over, the ball is lost,
and you prepare to go. But you decide to go home by a rather roundabout way
that brings you by the spot that you have scoured in vain. You are not
going to search for the ball. That would simply put the creature up to some
new artifice. No, you are just walking round that way accidentally. What so
natural as that you should have your eyes on the ground? And there, sure
enough, lies the ball, taken completely unaware. It is so ridiculously
obvious that to say that it was lying there when you were looking for it so
industriously is absurd. It simply couldn't have been there. You suspect
that if after your search, instead of going on with the play you had hidden
behind the hedge and watched, you would have seen the creature come out
from its hole.

I do not expect to have my theory that the golf-ball has an intelligence
accepted. The mystery is explicable, I am told, on the doctrine of the
"fresh eye." You look for a thing so hard that you seem to lose the faculty
of vision. Then you forget all about it and find it. The experience applies
to all the operations of the mind. If I get "stuck" in writing an article I
go and do a bit of physical work, ride a bicycle or merely walk round the
garden, and the current flows again. Or you have a knotty problem to
decide. You think furiously about it all day and get more hopelessly
undecided the longer you think. Then you go to bed, and you wake in the
morning with your mind made up. Hence the phrase, "I will sleep on it." It
is this freshness of the vision, this faculty of passive illumination, that
Wordsworth had in mind when he wrote: