268 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



This brings us on to one of the most important 

 achievements of modern psychology — the discovery 

 and analysis of the subconscious. Impossible here 

 to go into detail ; w^e must content ourselves with 

 a few broad statements. When we speak of the 

 subconscious mind, we mean that in man there exist 

 processes which appear for many reasons to be of 

 the same nature as those of the normal mind (in 

 that they are associated with the same parts of the 

 nervous system, fulfil the same general biological 

 functions, and probably operate through similar 

 mechanisms), with the single exception that we are 

 not conscious of them as such.^ 



The conscious mind, that which we think of as 

 the basis of our mental individuality, as our personal 

 being, is the result of a long process of organization. 

 We come into the world with a set of instinctive and 

 emotional reactions only waiting their proper stimuli 

 to be fired oflF, with a capacity for learning, for amass- 

 ing experience, and a capacity for modifying our 

 instincts and our behaviour according to our experi- 

 ence. We incorporate experience in ourselves, and 

 in so doing we alter the original basis of our reactions ; 

 a strongly emotional experience colours all that is 

 closely associated with it ; and so after birth we are 

 continually making our mental microcosm not only 

 larger but qualitatively more complex, in exactly 



^ See Prince, '06 and '16 j Freud, '22 j Jung, '19 j Rivers, '20 j 

 Brown, '22. 



