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Transactions Texas Academy of Science. 
and tend to demonstrate the extraordinary effects of such processes when, 
through some abnormality, they are concentrated in a particular direc- 
tion. Pathological examples of this sort are numerous, but I shall not 
weary y*ou with more. But enough has been said, I hope, to establish the 
contention that probably the larger part of our mental life is uncon- 
scious, and like the nervous reflexes go on without our being conscious 
of them. 
Thus it seems that just as, in explaining the individual personality, 
we must recognize a dual mental life, one part under the limelight of 
the consciousness, the other in the twilight or darkness of the subcon- 
scious, so it would seem we must explain, if we explain at all, the per- 
sonality of social man. 
The problem of our social psychologist would thus be to disentangle 
by statistical methods from the seeming chaos of history the ideals that 
underlie the sinuous advance of society and formulate them into laws 
which, like the laws of gravitation or thermodynamics, would make the 
phenomena of society as intelligibly explicable as the motions of the 
planets or the behavior of gases. 
In possession of such laws, we might hope to know how the manifold 
institutions that shape human society — religious, ethical or political — 
came into being, and what needs of this social creature they were created 
to satisfy. 
In an attempt to evaluate these social motives, historians of all ages 
have laid great stress on the activities of great men, geniuses of all types ; 
lawgivers, religious teachers, inventors, and scientists have been taken as 
iconic of their environment. In all mythology we find many of these 
functions blended into one personage in essence historical, but often 
clothed in many fictitious attributes and often deified. The biografic 
theory of history thus rests essentially on the hypothesis that the history 
of a race is in the main that of its great men. 
That this conception has in it a large element of truth no one will 
deny. As a social being man is characterized by the fact- that the human 
organism has the power of producing from time to time as the necessi- 
ties of its development may require, superior beings gifted with an in- 
sight of a far higher order than their fellows, who in themselves epito- 
mize along certain lines the net statistical progress of the race, and whose 
function it is to give explicit expression to some phase of such progress 
in such a way as shall make it a consciously realized part of the general 
assets of society. From one point of view these men may be regarded 
as the incarnation of the dumb, unconscious cosmic self. From some 
points of view the mutation theory of the origin of species is the analogue 
of this on the physical side. 
On the other hand the “special creation” theory of genius, like the 
