448 PHYSIOLOGY CHAP. 



falling below the " psychical diaphragm " that separates the 

 conscious from the unconscious. 



" When we examine the actions of other men," writes P. 

 Janet, " we are too prone to credit them with the ideas and 

 arguments that we ourselves employ in interpreting their conduct. 

 Too often we believe that a man has acted with intention, has 

 calculated the consequences of Ms actions, has formed from his 

 ideas a systematic entity knit together by well-understood rela- 

 tions, while in reality he has allowed his thoughts to run on 

 mechanically, one by one, without grasping any systematic con- 

 nection between them. . . . Even if the phenomena of conscious- 

 ness exhibited by any one else appear to us to be interrelated by 

 ties of resemblance, of difference, or of finality, we must not 

 conclude that there was in that man's mind the consciousness of 

 such a resemblance, difference, or finality." 



At each moment of our existence our voluntary actions are 

 determined less by conscious motives than by a certain tendency 

 to act in a given manner and a certain repugnance to act other- 

 wise ; a tendency and a repugnance for which we are unable to 

 account at the moment of action that is, of which we only 

 vaguely recognise the motives. At times the hidden impulses to 

 our voluntary acts are in antithesis to the confessed motives 

 which would impel us to act in the contrary manner, if they were 

 not overborne by the secret impulse. 



"No one," says Patini (1910), "can be fully conscious at any 

 given moment of the entire range of his field of psychical 

 activity. Part of the psychical processes for ever elude the 

 vigilance of the ego. These are the subconscious, which consist 

 in motives that are not revealed but remain obscure, although 

 they are strong enough to result in action. In character they are 

 related to actual experience, they become intercalated with our 

 conscious motives, and are essentially active." 



This definition is, in our opinion, on the one hand too wide, 

 inasmuch as it confounds semi-consciousness with subconsciousness ; 

 and on the other hand too narrow, because it includes only those 

 subconscious phenomena which are concomitant with conscious 

 manifestations, and apparently excludes from the subconscious 

 those active but hidden psycho-physical processes which precede, 

 interlock with, and succeed the conscious processes. Of these 

 last we have already given some examples to prove that the 

 range of mental life is not confined within the narrow limits of 

 conscious nervous processes, but extends much farther, beyond 

 the extreme threshold of consciousness. 



No one has brought out better than Myers, in his strikingly 

 original, posthumous Human Personality (1903), the importance 

 of subconscious psychical phenomena which he terms sub- 

 liminal in relation to mental life as a whole. On his theory, 



