--------Footnote: 
The more I have observed and reflected, the more limited seems to me the
field of action of the human will.  Every act of choice involves a special
relation between the ego and the conditions before it.   But no man knows
what forces are at work in the determination of his ego.  The bias which
decides his choice between two or more motives may come from some
unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows nothing at all.   He is
automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of reflex action, all the time
having the feeling that he is self-determining.   The Story of Elsie
Yenner, written-soon after this book was published, illustrates the
direction in which my thought was moving.   ’The imaginary subject of the
story obeyed her will, but her will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal
poisoning influence.
--------

That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet and the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with, we have not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and constantly than they do.  Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and masks, and lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases, which we laugh at honestly, without affectation, that are still used in the Old-World puppet-shows.  I don’t think we on our part ever understand the Englishman’s concentrated loyalty and specialized reverence.  But then we do think more of a man, as such, (barring some little difficulties about race and complexion which the Englishman will touch us on presently,) than any people that ever lived did think of him.  Our reverence is a great deal wider, if it is less intense.  We have caste among us, to some extent; it is true; but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog such as you often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty individuality.

This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to me; it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans swim into each other’s laps.  The trouble is, it is so difficult to let out the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming to take a personal character.  But I never enjoy the Englishman so much as when he talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the Peruvians.  Then you get the real British flavor, which the cosmopolite Englishman loses.

How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!

—–­My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep.  I follow a slow person’s talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current of my own beneath it.  Under both runs obscurely a consciousness belonging to a third train of reflections, independent of the two others.  I will try to write out a Mental movement in three parts.