THE UNITY OF MENTAL SCIENCE 581 



motor impulses, or the somatic stages that accompany thought are 

 more vividly sensed. Many laboratory experiments directed to other 

 ends have as their best result the revelation of the intricacy of the 

 simplest psychic operations. We find a mazy network of tentative 

 associations and impulses struggling for survival or for emergence 

 into the narrow focus of attention, chaotic irruptions into saner 

 sequences of perception or thought, manifold shades or elements 

 which language is far too clumsy and conventionalized adequately to 

 express, distractions which must be ignored by an act of the will as 

 we ignore all that is in the indirect field of vision. From all this we 

 select out the few and meager factors we want. But if, instead of 

 doing so, we yield to the diverticula and seek to note all that takes 

 place within, we soon feel that we are sane only by a small working 

 majority of our activities, and that underneath the cosmos of habit- 

 ual sequences and reasoned thought lies a vast and rank chaos of 

 unorganized elements that defy order, analysis, or even description. 

 Some are new and some, perhaps, older than history, or even than 

 man; some strong and compelling and some so pallid and imper- 

 ceptible that many experimenters hardly suspect their existence, 

 some congruent and some diametrically opposed to each other. 

 But the tropical sea and jungle are not more rank with life. From 

 all this we realize in a new and deeper sense that conscious mind is 

 only a rather superficial product of gradual and half-unconscious 

 selection, from all this vast seething psychic activity within, of those 

 factors that are practical or most needed for the present conduct of 

 life. Old systems and adjustments to earlier conditions are ever 

 disintegrating and left to lapse and ruin, although they long rever- 

 berate in the subliminal field, echo in feeling tones, or on occasion 

 have sudden resurgence in automatisms, outbreaks of passion, or 

 insistent ideas and impressions, or are injected like dikes into other- 

 wise coherent conduct or thought. The power of survival of these 

 rudimentary organs and processes of the past life of the soul is pro- 

 digious. Perhaps they never quite vanish even asymptotically. If 

 the purest science is the completest description of origins and stages 

 of development, psychology may, perhaps, never be complete. 



Leaving these, must we not hence infer that the conscious soul we 

 know was evolved solely as an organ to regulate practical life; that 

 there is no criterion of truth, save its value as a guide to conduct; 

 that the sciences of nature and of mind are, can be, and mean only 

 a system of rules for right living and thinking; that to ask what the 

 world and soul are per se is an extravasation of the intellect which 

 was kindled only to shed light upon the supreme problem of how 

 to feel and act aright and to \vhich it is subordinate as means to end; 

 that to ask what mind and nature are per se and apart from all use 

 by heart and will is paranoiac, or a new scholastic entity cult, because 



