CREATIVE SCIENCE 353 



and Wallace (reading Malthas), Metchnikoff, and Nicolle. Poincare 

 views the sudden inspiration as only a terminal event in a process 

 that continues, throughout an apparently effortfree interim period, 

 once it has been initiated by intense (though fruitless) conscious 

 efforts to solve a problem. 



These efforts then have not been as sterile as one thinks: thev have 

 set in motion the machine of the unconscious, and without them it 

 would not have moved and would have produced nothing. 



One would not wish to make overmuch of "the Unconscious"— a dis- 

 embodied entity within the disembodied entity of the mind. But may 

 we not speculate about "subliminal workings of the brain" (lower 

 case and referring to a genuine noun)? Braithwaite argues for a re- 

 lated conception in terms which seem to me persuasive. 



... to give an explanation in terms of processes in an "Unconscious" 

 does not preclude the possibility of also giving an explanation in terms 

 of physico-chemical processes in the brain (or, more generally, in the 

 body). What they [Freud and his disciples] claim is that, although 

 they believe, with the physiologists, that such a physico-chemical ex- 

 planation may well be discovered in the future, at the present time, 

 with our ignorance of the detailed workings of the brain, an explana- 

 tion in terms of an Unconscious is more profitable in enabling pre- 

 dictions to be made. . . . On the other hand, many neurologists have 

 rejected out of hand any explanation in terms of unconscious states of 

 mind on the ground that these are unobservable and are therefore 

 mythical entities, without appearing to realize that, if such entities 

 occur as theoretical concepts in the highest-level hypotheses of a 

 scientific deductive system conclusions from which are empirically 

 confiiTned, they have exactly the same epistemological status as the 

 electrical and chemical concepts in terms of which the neurologists 

 would wish to give their physico-chemical explanation. 



One may then perhaps hypothesize subliminal thought at least 

 partly freed from some of the constraints imposed by our waking 

 conception of "the possible." Categories and classifications ordinarily 

 definitive are somewhat dissolved, logical connections ordinarily in- 

 dubitable are loosened, certain habitual implicit assumptions per- 

 haps drop entirely from view. The rigidity of a pattern of thought is 

 relaxed, its contents are freed to mix with other facts and ideas. Now 

 arise possibilities that consciousness would ordinarily "forbid." The 



