quite happy about them. We do not consider (because they operate by a volition of which we are unaware), that therefore we carry about with us a body of death from which our conscious ego must needs shrink in disgust—a dead heart, dead stomach, dead blood—that the unconsciousness which accompanies health is a state nearer to annihilation, and so less to be desired, than the pains accompanying functional disturbances.
When those things happen—functional disturbances—we are conscious of something more immediately relating to death than to life: it is because of local mortification that we become so much aware of things which our immortal part helps us to use unconsciously and without thought. Virtue itself, when engrained, tends to become instinctive and subconscious instead of an effort.
There is quite as much evidence, therefore, in our own bodies that unconsciousness is the real gate to immortal life, and the condition toward which all that is best and highest in us is seeking, as of the contrary teaching that increased self-consciousness is man's final goal. In the functional working of our own bodies an enormous amount of self-consciousness has been eliminated, and we do not for our happiness or self-realisation wish it restored to us; whole tracts and areas are immune from it, or only make a spasmodic grab at our consciousness when things go ill with them. "If you go on doing that," they say, when
