ANTS AND SOME OTHER INSECTS. 3 



ent in consciousness or have been. Indeed, certain sense-impres- 

 sions remain, at the moment of their occurrence, unconscious so 

 far as our ordinary consciousness or superconsciousness is con- 

 cerned, although they can be subsequently recalled into conscious- 

 ness by suggestion. Whole chains of brain-activities, (dreams, 

 somnambulism, or secondary consciousness) seem ordinarily to be 

 excluded from the superconsciousness, but may subsequently be 

 associated by suggestion with the remembered contents of con- 

 sciousness. In all these cases, therefore, what seems to be uncon- 

 scious is after all proved to be conscious. The above-mentioned 

 phenomena have frequently led to mystical interpretations, but 

 they are explainable on a very simple assumption. Let us assume 

 and this is quite in harmony with observation that the fields of 

 the introspectively conscious brain-activities are limited by so-called 

 association or dissociation processes, i. e., that we are unable ac- 

 tively to bring them all into connection at the same time, and that 

 therefore all that seems to us unconscious has also in reality a con- 

 sciousness, in other words, a subjective reflex, then the following 

 results : Our ordinary waking consciousness or superconsciousness 

 is merely an inner subjective reflex of those activities of attention 

 which are most intimately connected with one another, i. e., of the 

 more intensively concentrated maxima of our cerebral activities 

 during waking. There exist, however, other consciousnesses, partly 

 forgotten, partly only loosely or indirectly connected with the con- 

 tents of the superconsciousness, in contradistinction to which these 

 may be designated as subconsciousness. They correspond to other 

 less concentrated or otherwise associated cerebral activities. We 

 are bound to assume the existence of still more remotely intercon- 

 nected subconsciousnesses for the infra-cortical (lower) brain- 

 centers, and so on. 



It is easy to establish the fact that the maximum of our psychic 

 activity, namely, attention, passes every moment from one percep- 

 tion or thought to another. These objects of attention, as visual 

 or auditory images, will-impulses, feelings or abstract thoughts, 

 come into play and of this there is no doubt in different brain- 

 regions or neuron-complexes. We can therefore compare attention 



