CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE 
UNCONSCIOUS. 
ADDRESS TO SECTION J (PSYCHOLOGY) BY 
C. LLOYD MORGAN, LL.D., D.Sc., F.B.S., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
Psycuotocy has now been given full sectional status, taking effect at 
this meeting of the British Association. I trust that we shall justify 
the confidence reposed in us by our fellow-workers in other branches 
of science. I need hardly add that I deem it no mean honour to be 
chosen as your President on this occasion. 
The subject of my address bristles with difficulties. I may at once 
state that my primary aim is to consider in what way mind and con- 
sciousness may be regarded as natural products of that all-embracing 
process which I propose to name ‘ emergent evolution,’ and thus come 
within the purview of science as I understand its aim and methods. 
Emergent Evolution. 
What do I mean by emergent evolution? Shall we start from the 
platform of that which we call common-sense as tempered by the 
refinement of scientific thought? By general consent we live in a world 
in which there seems to be an orderly passage of events. That orderly 
passage of events, in so far as something new comes on to the scene 
of nature, is what I here mean by evolution. If nothing really new 
emerges—if there be only permutations of what was pre-existent (per- 
mutations predictable in advance by some Laplacian calculator)—then, 
so far, there is no evolution, though there may be progress through 
survival and spread on the one hand and elimination on the other. 
Under nature is to be included the plan, expressive of natural law, on 
which all events (including mental events) run their course. 
From the point of view of a philosophy based on science our aim 
is to interpret the natural plan of evolution, and this is to be loyally 
accepted just as we find it. The most resolute modern attempt to 
interpret evolution from this point of view is that of Professor S. Alex- 
ander in his ‘ Space, Time, and Deity.’ He starts from the world of 
common sense and science as it seems to be given for thought to 
interpret. In order to get at the very foundation of nature he bids 
us think out of it all that can possibly be excluded short of the utter 
annihilation of events. That gives us a world of ultimate or basal 
events in purely spatial and temporal relations. ‘This he calls ‘ space- 
time,’ inseparably hyphened throughout Nature. From this is evolved 
matter, with its primary and, at a later stage of development, its 
secondary qualities. Here new relations, other than those which are 
only spatio-temporal, supervene. Later in logical and _ historical 
sequence comes life, a new quality of certain systems of matter in 
