and in reflecting on the lamentable helplessness of nine men out of ten when you ask them to do anything slightly different from what they have been accustomed to do. This debate had been started by the observation that my handwriting varied according to the nature of the argument, being larger when that was diffuse and explanatory, occupied with a supposed audience, and smaller when it was close, occupied only with the sequence of propositions. Along with these trains of thought went the sensations of noises made by poultry, dogs, children, and organ-grinders, and that diffused feeling in the side of the face and head which means a probable toothache in an hour or two."
Now all this sounds perfectly intelligible when the different elements in the section of consciousness examined are referred to their real causes, and recognized as the effects of an independent world of causally connected things. But the richly variegated scene which Clifford conjures up may serve to bring home to us the hopelessly disconnected appearance which the simultaneities and sequences of our psychological life would present, were they not constantly pieced out and connected – interpreted in a thousand ways – by reference to a system of extra-psychological realities. If the train of thoughts and images seems to proceed for a time with a certain orderliness, under the guidance of association, this sequence is accompanied by a mass of changing organic sensations, which arise and disappear without any reference to the chain of thoughts, and so far as consciousness is concerned, have an absolute beginning out of nothing and an absolute end. Or it may be that our meditations are abruptly interrupted by a sight or a sound – the sound of a street-fight, the entrance of a friend, "the noises made by poultry, dogs, children and organ-grinders" – by a percept of some kind, in short, which, so far from having any connection with my immediately preceding states of consciousness, is shot from a pistol, as the saying is – projected headlong into their midst in an utterly inexplicable fashion. The same discontinuous and irregular character of subjective experience as such is exemplified every time I turn my head and bring into view
