SOURCES AND ENDS OF HUMAN EFFORT 329 



evidence on all of these cases except the last and re- 

 fuse to do so in that one is hard to understand. Pre- 

 sumably it is due to lack of knowledge of the bio- 

 logical evidence^ or else to a mind fortified against this 

 evidence by prejudice. Such a prejudice may arise 

 from a habit of mysticism, from some incompatible 

 a priori philosophical postulate such as parallelism, 

 or perhaps from a phobia against mysticism so power- 

 ful as to shy at a shadow cast by a past mysticism on 

 very real experience. 



Whether consciousness is present in any particular 

 neurologic process is a fact that can be determined 

 directly in the experience of the subject, and its pres- 

 ence or absence is independent of our knowledge of 

 the working of the mechanism. When it is present it 

 is the part of science as well as of common sense to 

 accept it as given — as a datum of experience — in just 

 the same way that we accept sugar tolerance as 

 dependent upon the normal working of the pancreas, 

 though in neither case have we an adequate under- 

 standing of the mechanism actually employed. For 

 this we live in hope. 



Symbolism, accordingly, can be treated scientifi- 

 cally either (i) in terms of its mechanism, which in the 

 present state of our knowledge must remain largely 

 theoretic, or (2) in terms of the awareness of the 



^ Current psychological literature is crammed with illustrations of 

 this ignorance where confusion has taken the place both of mysticism and 

 of established fact, some of which are commented upon in Warren's Neu- 

 rology: mystical and magical, Psychol. Bull., vol. 20 (1923), pp. 438-443. 



