228 Heredity. 



to automatism, and it is never perfect unless when it is entirely 

 unconscious. 



These facts have long been recognized ; but here are some that 

 have received less attention. In the group of the phenomena of 

 sensibility we discern, both from their effects and directly, the 

 existence of unconscious pleasure and pain, whence come our 

 causeless joy and sadness. The instincts peculiar to man, such as 

 modesty and shame, maternal love, presentiments, secret sym- 

 pathies and antipathies, only become conscious exceptionally and 

 incidentally ; yet we feel that all these instincts spring from the 

 depths of our being, from the dim region of the unconscious. 

 Nowhere is this fact more striking than in the sexual instinct, which, 

 both in man and in animals, takes its rise prior to all experience. 

 This instinct, which perhaps even determines individual selection, 

 where it takes place, caused Schopenhauer to maintain ingeniously 

 that love is the tendency of specific conservation, and that we must 

 recognize ' in this daemon a certain unconscious idea of species.' 

 In a word, are not the intellectual sentiments (those of the true 

 and the false) an unconscious, half-perceived cognition? Every 

 cognition is in its origin instinctive. The experimental method was 

 instinctively anticipated by the alchemists before it was clearly per- 

 ceived by Galileo and Bacon. What in medicine and the sciences 

 is denominated diagnosis is an unconscious cognition. 



If we pass from phenomena of sensibility to intellectual oper- 

 ations, we shall see that every mode of intelligence has its 

 unconscious form. In the first place, the difference between con- 

 scious perception and unconscious (or rather semi-conscious) 

 impression is well known ; the sensorial nerve-centres can receive 

 and preserve impressions which either never attain the state of 

 consciousness or do so only after a time. Perception can exist 

 only by the aid of two principal forms, space and time, and by 

 certain processes which ultimately determine the position of the 

 object in a certain point in space; and thus the unconscious serves 

 as support and condition for conscious perception. We need say 

 nothing of memory, which is altogether a form of unconsciousness, 

 recollection being nothing but the transition from unconsciousness 

 to consciousness. The latent association of ideas is a pheno- 

 menon of the same kind. The mind goes through a series of 



