communication with the outer world. My action seems planned for
protection. In reality there was no plan. Probably enough I did not
perceive the flash; the lid, at any rate, would close equally well if
I did not. In falling from a height I do not decide to sacrifice my
arms rather than my body, and accordingly stretch them out. They
stretch themselves, without intention on my part. How anything so
blind yet so sagacious can occur will become clearer if we take an
illustration from a widely different field.

To-day we are all a good deal dependent on the telephone; though, not
being a patient man, I can seldom bring myself to use it. It has one
irritating feature, the central office, or perhaps I might more
accurately say, the central office girl. Whenever I try to communicate
with my friend, I must first call up the central office, as it is
briefly called and longly executed. Not until attention there has been
with difficulty obtained can I come into connection with my friend;
for through a human consciousness at that mediating point every
message must pass. In that central office are accordingly three
necessary things; viz., an incoming wire, a consciousness, and an
outgoing wire; and I am helpless till all these three have been
brought into cooperation. Really I have often thought life too short
for the performance of such tasks. And apparently our Creator thought
so at the beginning, when in contriving machinery for us he dispensed
with the hindering factor of a central office operator. For applied to
our previous example of a flash of light, the incoming message
corresponds to the sensuous report of the flash, the outgoing message
to the closure of the eye, and the unfortunate central office girl has
disappeared. The afferent nerve reports directly to the efferent,
without passing the message through consciousness. A fortune awaits
him who will contrive a similar improvement for the telephone. A