Judging by the many letters that I get about the so-called “direction sense,” it is a question which interests and puzzles a very large number. It is just because it so puzzles that it so interests. In a letter to the editor (see the “W.W.G.” of January 13th) Mr. Alfred Watkins cites an instance, of his own experience, when the “direction sense” of a native guide in Switzerland failed badly at a crucial moment of a mountain traverse, and was corrected by the intelligent use of such plain aids as map and compass. Of course, that is a simple instance of the failure of the direction sense, if such a sense there be; and, whatever our views, we are not likely to claim it as infallible. Very interesting are Mr. Watkins’s further notes in that letter about the way-signs along the ancient British tracks.
One infers that Mr. Watkins is among the many who think that this finding of the way (nearly always, be it noted, it is the way home—a return on a track already travelled) comes by observation. I am inclined to that opinion too, although it is the less interesting, and the more commonplace. But I also believe that it comes more often by unconcious, sometimes called subconscious, observation, than from effort of the fully alert attention. I believe, moreover, that it comes better, and more vividly so; and it is scarcely possible to doubt that it is in this manner that it comes to the uneducated man, to the savage man, and to the animal below man. We may guess that it works in inverse ratio to the conscious and self-conscious mentality. In the tales that are related of a savage guide leading travellers or sportsmen back to the camp through trackless forest, when the white man has asked his dusky saviour “how it is done”—how he found the way?—the guide is scarcely ever able to tell him. He might say, “I think this is the way,” or perhaps, confidently, and without qualification, “This is the way”; but to the question, “What makes you think so?” he had no answer. He could not tell what it was that gave him his impression: all he knew was that the impression was there, impressing him, and possibly it was rather risky, rather likely to blotch the clearness of the impression, even to ask him how it came. It was an affair in which the anxious searching of the intellect had better lie in abeyance and not interfere. I remember a man telling me that in the Gulf of St. Lawrence he had been overtaken by, or had run into, one of the blanketing fogs that are frequent in that great estuary. He was passing from the South shore to the North, with a landfall near the mouth of the Saguenay river. The pilot, a local Canadian, carried on, despite the fog, and made the landfall almost exactly, though he had no compass; but he, too, asked “how it was done” was as dumb and unable to explain as the African in the forest.
Now, in our own Admiralty buildings in London, especially with those additional annexed houses that it took on during the War, the passages were interminable, and branched as numerously as boughs of a dense tree, and each dingy passage was the exact image of the dingy next. I, humblest of flies on the great wheel, worked there awhile, and sometimes had to go from one end of the maze to the other. I found that if I tried to “think” my way back, saying to myself, with anxious observation, “This is the turn I took,” and so on, I was lost irretrievably. But if I allowed my mind to retain its customary blankness, and took no thought, I generally went right. How was it? “By subconsciously following, in reverse order, the turns which you had subconsciously observed in going.” That is a suggestion proffered, and I am willing to accept it. Perhaps the subconscious observation is the most vivid and correct; but it must be subconsciously recalled; which means that the conscious mind must not work too hard, or that recall will be interfered with. That, too, might explain the dark guide in the dark forest. But how about the St. Lawrence fog? There are no points there, even for the subconscious to hang its notes on.
Source info: MS note by AW “W. West May 12”; and cutting refers to cutting 87c.