The crowd is tireless, all eyes.  The four principals still converse and write.  Nobody in the crowd comprehends what they are about.  At length the driver separates himself, but is drawn back, and a new parley is commenced.  But everything ends.  The policemen turn on their immense heels.  The driver and conductor race towards the motor-bus.  The bell rings, the motor-bus, quite empty, disappears snorting round the corner into Walham Green.  The crowd is now lessening.  But it separates with reluctance, many of its members continuing to stare with intense absorption at the place where the puppy lay or the place where the policemen stood.  An appreciable interval elapses before the “street accident” has entirely ceased to exist as a phenomenon.

The members of the crowd follow their noses, and during the course of the day remark to acquaintances: 

“Saw a dog run over by a motor-bus in the Fulham Road this morning!  Killed dead!”

And that is all they do remark.  That is all they have witnessed.  They will not, and could not, give intelligible and interesting particulars of the affair (unless it were as to the breed of the dog or the number of the bus-service).  They have watched a dog run over.  They analyse neither their sensations nor the phenomenon.  They have witnessed it whole, as a bad writer uses a cliche.  They have observed—­that is to say, they have really seen—­nothing.

II

It will be well for us not to assume an attitude of condescension towards the crowd.  Because in the matter of looking without seeing we are all about equal.  We all go to and fro in a state of the observing faculties which somewhat resembles coma.  We are all content to look and not see.

And if and when, having comprehended that the role of observer is not passive but active, we determine by an effort to rouse ourselves from the coma and really to see the spectacle of the world (a spectacle surpassing circuses and even street accidents in sustained dramatic interest), we shall discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act of seeing, which seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems.  Let a man resolve:  “I will keep my eyes open on the way to the office of a morning,” and the probability if that for many mornings he will see naught that is not trivial, and that his system of perspective will be absurdly distorted.  The unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly attract him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental and universal.  Travel makes observers of us all, but the things which as travellers we observe generally show how unskilled we are in the new activity.