69. Again, we are not conscious of the separate sensations which guide speech or writing; we cannot properly be said to will the utterance of each tone, or the formation of each letter. Are these processes mechanical and not volitional? By no means. We know that they were laboriously learned by long tentative efforts, each of which was accompanied by distinct consciousness. We also know that now when the mechanism is so easy in its adjustment as to suggest automatism, there needs but a slight alteration in the conditions to make us distinctly conscious of the processes--the wrong word spoken, or one letter ill formed, suffices to arrest the easy working of the mechanism. A similar mechanism operates in thinking, which also lapses from the conscious and voluntary to the unconscious and involuntary state. The logical process of Judgment is as purely a reflex from one neural group to another, as the physiological process of co-ordination. In ordinary thinking we are as little conscious of the particular steps--our interest being concentrated on the result--as we are of the particular stages of an action. The adjustments of the mechanism of Reproduction and Association are _set_ going by a motive, and _kept_ going by psychological motors. And here--as in bodily actions--there is often a conflict between motive and motors--between the foreseen result, and the available means of reaching it--the motors usually prevailing because they represent the active side of the mechanism. Thus when an oculist wishes to examine a patient’s eye, he does not tell him to give a particular direction to his eye, knowing that the _motive_ to do so will not suffice; instead of this he simply moves his own hand in the desired direction, certain that the eye will by reflex irresistibly follow it. Nay, there are sometimes such anomalies of innervation that the eye, instead of obeying the motive, moves in a contrary direction. Meschede mentions a patient whose movements were mostly of this anomalous kind: when he willed to move the eyes to the right, they moved to the left; when he willed to move them up, they moved down. It was thus also with his hands and feet. Yet he was distinctly conscious that his intention had been frustrated, and that he acted “because he could not help it.”[217] How insensibly a motive sinks into a motor, that is to say, a voluntary into an involuntary act, may be recognized in speech, writing, singing, walking, etc., and in the incessant movements of the eye in fixing objects. Aubert has well remarked that we only give definite movements to the eye when we wish to see an object distinctly. Whenever the indistinct vision suffices--as in walking through the streets occupied in conversation or thought--we make no such movements; but no sooner does any object excite our attention, than the effort to fix that object at once excites the necessary reflex.[218]