MENTAL HEALING 193 



— Then ask not wherefore, here, alone, 



Conversing as I may, 



I sit upon this old grey stone. 



And dream my time away. 



Sweet is the lore which Nature brings ; 

 Our meddling intellect, 



Alis-shapes the beauteous forms of things : — 

 We murder to dissect. 



Enough of Science and of Art ; 



Close up those barren leaves; 



Come forth, and bring with yon a heart 



That watches and receives." 



If we take the mind of a child with its unhmited imaginations and 

 questions — the mind of a poet dreaming his time away on an old 

 grey stone,^ — the mind of an untutored native blinking in the sun 

 before his hut, — the mind of a Boer farmer sitting on his stoep 

 with a mind alert and responsive to the movements and sounds 

 and manifold life of the veld which passes unnoticed by others — 

 the mind of a mystic like S. Terese moving in a world, and receiving 

 influences, foreign and strange to the ordinary Christian — we shall 

 see many and various forms of a mentality different from that of 

 the keen self-assertive intellect of the Johannesburg stock-broker, 

 and not perhaps so infinitely inferior as that gentleman fondly 

 imagines. 



And this wider sort of mind, which " watches and receives " 

 the mind of the child or the poet, is not fully explained as a sur- 

 vival of the primitive human mind. We have to go further back 

 still to get at its origin. Rudimentary kinds of consciousness have 

 been carried up with us in our ascent from lower grades of being, 

 and survive, dormant but real, over against that rational intellect 

 which is the peculiar achievement of man. This residual con- 

 -ciousness (the consciousness which exists along- ide of the rational 

 intellec ) consists largely of instincts and capacities w^hich regulate 

 the lives of other animals, and which were employed by man in 

 his primitive state, but for which he has no time in his present-day 

 existence ; modes of receptivitj' and re- action which were natural 

 to him in his dreamy childhood, but which are discarded in the 

 aggressive, self-assertive, wide-awake condi-tion in which he now 

 lives. And further it has been suggested that we must go lower 

 down than animal life for the explanation of some ot the phenomena 

 of this wider mind. Thus Professor Stewart, in his Myths of 

 Plato, speaks of that 



" primeval condition from which we are sprung when life was still as 

 sound asleep as death, and there was no time yet," 



and remarks : 



" That we should fall for a while, now and then, from our waking time- 

 marking life, into the timeless slumber of the primeval life, is easy to under- 

 stand, for the principle solely operative in that primeval life is indeed 

 the fundamental principle of our nature, being that ' vegetative part of 

 the soul,' which made from the first, and still silentl}^ makes, the assump- 

 tion on which our whole rational life of conduct and science rests the 

 assumption that life is worth living." 

 Thus our instinct of self-preservation, our rooted attachment tO' 



