Consider what happens when a blow is aimed at the eye.[75] Instantly, and without our knowledge or will, and even against the will, the eyelids close.  What is it that happens?  A picture of the rapidly advancing fist is made upon the retina at the back of the eye.  The retina changes this picture into an affection of a number of the fibres of the optic nerve; the fibres of the optic nerve affect certain parts of the brain; the brain, in consequence, affects those particular fibres of the seventh nerve which go to the orbicular muscle of the eyelids; the change in these nerve-fibres causes the muscular fibres to change their dimensions, so as to become shorter and broader; and the result is the closing of the slit between the two lids, round which these fibres are disposed.  Here is a pure mechanism, giving rise to a purposive action, and strictly comparable to that by which Descartes supposes his waterwork Diana to be moved.  But we may go further, and inquire whether our volition, in what we term voluntary action, ever plays any other part than that of Descartes’ engineer, sitting in his office, and turning this tap or the other, as he wishes to set one or another machine in motion, but exercising no direct influence upon the movements of the whole.

Our voluntary acts consist of two parts:  firstly, we desire to perform a certain action; and, secondly, we somehow set a-going a machinery which does what we desire.  But so little do we directly influence that machinery, that nine-tenths of us do not even know its existence.

Suppose one wills to raise one’s arm and whirl it round.  Nothing is easier.  But the majority of us do not know that nerves and muscles are concerned in this process; and the best anatomist among us would be amazingly perplexed, if he were called upon to direct the succession, and the relative strength, of the multitudinous nerve-changes, which are the actual causes of this very simple operation.

So again in speaking.  How many of us know that the voice is produced in the larynx, and modified by the mouth?  How many among these instructed persons understand how the voice is produced and modified?  And what living man, if he had unlimited control over all the nerves supplying the mouth and larynx of another person, could make him pronounce a sentence?  Yet, if one has anything to say, what is easier than to say it?  We desire the utterance of certain words:  we touch the spring of the word-machine, and they are spoken.  Just as Descartes’ engineer, when he wanted a particular hydraulic machine to play, had only to turn a tap, and what he wished was done.  It is because the body is a machine that education is possible.  Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body; so that acts, which at first required a conscious effort, eventually became unconscious and mechanical.  If the act which primarily requires a distinct consciousness and volition of its details, always needed the same effort, education would be an impossibility.