10 
Transactions Texas Academy of Science. 
consciousness of a race, that complex of characteristics which goes to 
differentiate one civilization from another, just as that indescribable 
thing character distinguishes one man from another, may be, must be, 
a very different thing from the individual characters of the individuals 
that compose it. 
This mighty organism which we call Man — whose breath has animated 
the “weary generations of men” through all the ages ; in whose immortal- 
ity we, though mortal, shall assuredly he deathless — this unifying spirit 
can be no mere magnified individual man, for thus we fall into the old 
anthropomorphic fallacy of the infant world. Call it what you will — 
Time- Spirit, Cosmic Consciousness, or what not — its thoughts are not 
the thoughts of individual men nor are its purposes his purposes. It 
is the blind attempt to characterize its manifestations that we use 
such words as destiny and social progress. 
It is this persistent racial consciousness which unifies all the phe- 
nomena of growth and decay, which must be invoked to explain the rise 
and fall of every very human institution that the world has known. It is 
precisely this dominant spirit w r hich eludes the individual imagination, 
which is the unpredictable element in social development, and which can 
be studied in its past manifestations, like the reefs of the coral polyp or 
the fossils that strew the fens of prehistoric times. 
This personality of a people, while it may be a less complex thing 
than the personality of the individual, must be regarded as something 
more than an average of the conscious psychic life of its individual con- 
stituents. In a striking passage in his Diseases of the Personality, Ribot 
says that “It is the organism with the brain, its supreme representative 1 , 
that constitutes the real personality; comprising all in itself all that we 
have been, and all the possibilities of all that we shall be. The whole 
individual character is there inscribed with its active and passive apti- 
tudes; * ■* * the part thereof which emerges into consciousness is 
little compared with what remains buried but nevertheless operative. 
The conscious personality is never more than a small fraction of the 
psychic personality. The unity of which we are so strongly conscious 
is not the unity of a single entity, but the fusion of a number of dif- 
ferent states perpetually arising within us and having for their common 
bond of union the vague feeling of our body.” 
This view of the individual personality, namely, that it is a co-ordina- 
tion of many disparate elements^ active and potential, the major portion 
of which forms no part of our psychic life, but goes on like the processes 
of digestion and assimilation without our being conscious of it, needs, 
perhaps, a little elaboration, and such elaboration is the more desirable in 
that it seems probable that we may call the submerged psychic life of the 
