Annual Addpess of the Pbesident. 
11 
individual is in many ways closely analogous to the superconsious person- 
ality of the social organism. 
Everyone present in this room realizes that there are things going on 
about him which make so feeble an impression on his senses of sight or 
hearing, or what not, that he is not conscious of them. A clock may 
strike and you do not hear it; objects pass through your field of vision 
and you do not see them. We may express this by saying that such sen- 
sations do not rise to the level of our conscious life; they lie beneath 
the threshold of consciousness. When we sleep few stimuli rise above 
this threshold. In a state of hypnotic sleep an artificial insensitiveness 
to all sorts of stimuli can be produced, so that we feel no pain if burned 
with a match or pricked with a pin. Many of the curious so-called phe- 
nomena of spiritualism are to be explained by means of this uncon- 
scious activity of the mind. The dictum of the older psychologists — that 
the mind never sleeps — is a partial statement of this vegetative function 
of the brain. Even the most complicated rational processes imply a 
period more or less long of unconscious incubation. Most of us like to 
sleep over a difficult decision; the thought processes started in our 
waking hours are carried on the unconscious currents of the brain; the 
storehouse of memory is ransacked, and the difficult decision of yester- 
day admits of an easy solution today. Everyone has probgbly had the 
experience of laying aside some knotty, long brooded-over problem to 
which no answer suggested itself, and finding after the lapse of days or 
years that, although so far as we could recall no attention had been paid 
to the matter in the meantime, it became readily answerable when we 
again considered it. 
Deliberate experimentation on this function of the mind is difficult, 
but some abnormal individuals afford a striking insight into the possi- 
bilities of this sort of brain activity. Everyone has beard of the phe- 
nomenal calculating boys who perform feats of computation in a few 
seconds which would require hours for the most expert computer. Cases 
of this sort have been experimented on; these peculiar people are gener- 
ally of inferior mentality, and may be even entirely ignorant of the rudi- 
ments of mathematics. The gift usually manifests itself at an early 
age, before there could be any question of a highly developel conscious 
rational process. It would be nonsense to say that these lightning cal- 
culators perform the feats they do with any conscious appreciation of the 
processes involved. With the disappearance of this faculty later in life 
no trace of it remains in the mind of the subject, nor can they describe 
their modes of calculation while in possession of the faculty or after- 
wards. 
While these cases are abnormal in a sense, they show in a striking 
way the marvelous activities of the subconscious intellectual processes 
