484 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XX. No. 511. 



was genetic, nothing logical, while as yet 

 no symptom of the great paralyzer, self 

 ■consciousness, had appeared. This was the 

 ■great reality which our late developed and 

 senescent, ingrowing intellect has lost and 

 yearns for as old age yearns for its van- 

 ished youth. Its traces, fossils, remnants, 

 still abound in our own body and soul and 

 in life about us, but unless we can read our 

 titles clear to this pler.oma of life abound- 

 ing, the psychologist will still have reason 

 to grieve as an exile from his pristine para- 

 dise vainly seeking atonement with God, 

 the world and self. Some type of soul life 

 has passed out of the world with every 

 species that became extinct, every vanished 

 tribe, with every child that develops into 

 maturity, with every substitution of self- 

 consciousness and reflection for the naive, 

 intuitive, spontaneous, and what we call the 

 progress of knowledge is a compound of 

 mingled gains which we keenly feel with 

 losses that we far less keenly realize. 



When the intellect, which seems to have 

 been developed late, as a new function of 

 adaptation to the external world, leaves the 

 latter and seeks to introspect its own proc- 

 esses and reflect upon them, it crosses some 

 important pons. This involution is hard, 

 slow and with many stages. Perhaps first 

 are the half-instinctive musings on some 

 memory-content of conduct as affecting 

 pleasure and pain, or upon 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 strug- 

 gling for survival or for emergence into 

 the narrow focus of attention, chaotic ir- 

 ruptions into saner sequences of perception 

 or thought, manifold shades or elements 

 which language is far too clumsy and con- 

 ventionalized to adequately express, dis- 



tractions 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 cos- 

 mos of habitual sequences and reasoned 

 thought lies a vast and rank chaos of un- 

 organized elements that defy order, anal- 

 ysis or even description. Some are new 

 and some, perhaps, older than history or 

 even than man ; some strong and compel- 

 ling and some so pallid and imperceptible 

 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 reverberate in the subliminal field, 

 echo in feeling tones or on occasion have 

 sudden resurgence in automatisms, out- 

 breaks of passion or insistent ideas and 

 impressions, or are injected like dikes into 

 otherwise coherent conduct or thought. 

 The power of survival of these rudimentary 

 organs and processes of the past life of the 

 soul is prodigious. Perhaps they never 

 quite vanish even asjmiptotically. If the 

 purest science is the completest description 

 of origins and stages of development, psy- 

 chology 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 ; 



