Great minds thus travel over vast
fields of thought with an ease of which they are themselves
unaware. Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch once said that in translating the
"Mecanique Celeste," he had come upon formulas which Laplace
introduced with the word "obviously," where it took nevertheless
many days of hard study to supply the intermediate steps through
which that transcendent mind had passed with one huge leap of
inference. At some time in his youth no doubt Laplace had to think
of these things, just as Rubinstein had once to think how his
fingers should be placed on the keys of the piano; but what was
once the object of conscious attention comes at last to be
well-nigh automatic, while the night of the conscious mind goes on
ever to higher and vaster themes.
Let us now take a long leap from the highest level of human
intelligence to the mental life of a turtle or a codfish. In what
does the mental life of such creatures consist? It consists of a
few simple acts mostly concerned with the securing of food and the
avoiding of danger, and these few simple acts are repeated with
unvarying monotony during the whole lifetime of these creatures.
Consequently these acts are performed with great ease and are
attended with very little consciousness, and moreover the capacity
to perform them is transmitted from parent to offspring as
completely as the capacity of the stomach to digest food is
transmitted.
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