ignorance were extremes which meet and become indistinguishable from
one another; so also perfect volition and perfect absence of
volition, perfect memory and utter forgetfulness; for we are
unconscious of knowing, willing, or remembering, either from not yet
having known or willed, or from knowing and willing so well and so
intensely as to be no longer conscious of either. Conscious
knowledge and volition are of attention; attention is of suspense;
suspense is of doubt; doubt is of uncertainty; uncertainty is of
ignorance; so that the mere fact of conscious knowing or willing
implies the presence of more or less novelty and doubt.

It would also appear as a general principle on a superficial view of
the foregoing instances (and the reader may readily supply himself
with others which are perhaps more to the purpose), that unconscious
knowledge and unconscious volition are never acquired otherwise than
as the result of experience, familiarity, or habit; so that whenever
we observe a person able to do any complicated action unconsciously,
we may assume both that he must have done it very often before he
could acquire so great proficiency, and also that there must have
been a time when he did not know how to do it at all.

We may assume that there was a time when he was yet so nearly on the
point of neither knowing nor willing perfectly, that he was quite
alive to whatever knowledge or volition he could exert; going further
back, we shall find him still more keenly alive to a less perfect
knowledge; earlier still, we find him well aware that he does not
know nor will correctly, but trying hard to do both the one and the
other; and so on, back and back, till both difficulty and
consciousness become little more than a sound of going in the brain,
a flitting to and fro of something barely recognisable as the desire