Secondly, M. Ribot appears to forget that it is the tendency of all psychological action to become unconscious on being frequently repeated, and that no line can be drawn between psychological acts and those reflex acts which he calls physiological. All we can say is, that there are acts which we do without knowing that we do them; but the analogy of many habits which we have been able to watch in their passage from laborious consciousness to perfect unconsciousness, would suggest that all action is really psychological, only that the soul’s action becomes invisible to ourselves after it has been repeated sufficiently often—that there is, in fact, a law as simple as in the case of optics or gravitation, whereby conscious perception of any action shall vary inversely as the square, say, of its being repeated. It is easy to understand the advantage to the individual of this power of doing things rightly without thinking about them; for were there no such power, the attention would be incapable of following the multitude of matters which would be continually arresting it; those animals which had developed a power of working automatically, and without a recurrence to first principles when they had once mastered any particular process, would, in the common course of events, stand a better chance of continuing their species, and thus of transmitting their new power to their descendants. M. Ribot declines to pursue the subject further, and has only cursorily alluded to it. He writes, however, that, on the “obscure problem” of the difference between reflex and psychological actions, some say, “when there can be no consciousness, because the brain is wanting, there is, in spite of appearances, only mechanism,” whilst others maintain, that “when there is selection, reflection, psychical action, there must also be consciousness in spite of appearances.” A little later (p. 223), he says, “It is quite possible that if a headless animal could live a sufficient length of time” (that is to say, if _the hind legs of an animal_ could live a sufficient length of time without the brain), “there would be found in it” (_them_) “a consciousness like that of the lower species, which would consist merely in the faculty of apprehending the external world.” (Why merely? It is more than apprehending the outside world to be able to try to do a thing with one’s left foot, when one finds that one cannot do it with one’s right.) “It would not be correct to say that the amphioxus, the only one among fishes and vertebrata which has a spinal cord without a brain, has no consciousness because it has no brain; and if it be admitted that the little ganglia of the invertebrata can form a consciousness, the same may hold good for the spinal cord.”