258 EVOLUTION AND PSYCHOLOGY 



stellations of psychic elements, which may act 

 like foreign bodies in the soul, and some of which 

 are peculiarly suggestive of atavistic or outgrown 

 states. Here, too, belong many phenomena of 

 hypnoidization with more or less psychic decapi- 

 tation — Verdichtung — (which probably repre- 

 sents a type of psychoses that are peculiarly 

 characteristic of prehistoric man, who ejected 

 his subjective states much as Freud thinks that 

 dreamers are doing, to say nothing of the latest 

 studies of phonisms, photisms, and coenesthesias. 

 It is studies in this field, it may also be men- 

 tioned, that have led acute minds, like Bleuler, 

 to violent polemics against consciousness as the 

 muse of modern psychology, some of them insist- 

 ing that but little of the experience that has made 

 the mind in its human form has been connected 

 with either consciousness, apperception, or even 

 attention. The view is unquestionably gaining 

 ground that consciousness is an epiphenomenon 

 of mind, and that its function is essentially no 

 less remedial or cathartic than the church has 

 held confession to be, though in a somewhat dif- 

 ferent way. There is no better test of a psycho- 

 logical system than its applicability to psychi- 

 atry; and it is here that Wundt so signally fails, 

 for his fundamental assumption is that conscious- 

 ness is the condition of all psychic experience, 

 and he defines even feeling as a " subjective reac- 

 tion of consciousness." In fact, on the contrary, 

 there are incessant and manifold affective and 



