BASIS OF PSYCHICAL-SOCIAL INDIVIDUALITY 621 



conscious thinking and feeling, centering around the "I," which activate in 

 us the thought and feeling that we possess a distinct individuality. But 

 frequent repetition of an experience or of certain reactions, and the conse- 

 quent habit formation result in a loss of the intensity of thinking, of the 

 ready and extensive association of the momentary thought with other 

 thoughts, and in particular with the "I" concept, as well as of the accompany- 

 ing emotions, and thus our mental processes change from the conscious to 

 the unconscious state. Any impediment, however, arising in our habitual 

 actions, making them more difficult of performance, again tend to restitute 

 conscious processes. There is a further factor which intensifies our feeling 

 that we are distinct individualities in the psychical-social sense ; this is the 

 idea that we have free will, that our actions are in the last instance determined 

 by ourselves, without inner mechanisms or outer environmental factors 

 rigidly controlling our choice. The feeling of freedom of the will is conditioned 

 by the great complexity of the factors and their intricate connections acting 

 on us and directing our reactions. 



We find, phylogenetically, a progressively increasing complexity in the 

 activities of organisms and increasing differences between members of the 

 same species, an increasing individualization which reaches its highest de- 

 velopment in man. Conditioned reflexes are acquired more readily and in a 

 greater variety, the more highly developed the species ; but even in apes the 

 highest degree of apparent freedom of action depends upon a very limited range 

 of adaptation between the aims sought and the means used to accomplish 

 them. Moreover, the reactions in organisms concern the satisfaction of 

 relatively simple needs, both needs and reactions being constituent parts of 

 instincts. These processes remain, to a great extent, mentally dissociated, 

 while consciousness depends upon the ready association of a thought with 

 a large series of other thoughts and with pictures related to it in time, space 

 and content. We forget, therefore, much more readily what we do as a 

 simple conditioned thought reflex than what we do consciously ; in the latter 

 case we are better oriented, but also more subject to inhibition. 



While in man thought reflexes also have their root in the needs of the 

 organism, the variety of his conditioned reflexes increases greatly in all 

 directions with the increasing number of constellations and suggestions 

 acting on him. This increasing complexity is made possible through the action 

 of the cortex of the brain, which mediates between the environment and the 

 more individualized reactions of the organism. There develop, thus, a multi- 

 tude of thought-emotion mechanisms and a play of interacting thoughts based 

 on memory, abstraction and synthesis, the result being that our behavior 

 appears unpredictable to others ; and it is often inexplicable to ourselves, in 

 that we commonly err in our judgment or deceive ourselves as to the origin 

 of our actions, the causal connection between environmental factors and 

 thoughts, emotions and actions being difficult to establish. The greater the 

 complexity of the factors acting on and in the individual, the greater the 

 probability that non-recurring patterns will occur. These original, unique, 

 unforeseen and apparently unpredictable configurations in the life of the 



