CHAPTER VII. THE HIDDEN SOUL. VII. HE object of this chapter is not so CHAPTER The object to show is a hidden what it as to show that there is a mental existence chapter is within us which may be so called-a secret that there flow of thought which is not less energetic soul, and than the conscious flow, an absent mind which means. haunts us like a ghost or a dream and is an essential part of our lives. Incidentally, there will be no escaping the observation that this unconscious life of the mind-this hidden soul bears a wonderful resemblance to the supposed features of imagination. That, however, is but the ultimate conclusion to which we are driving. My more immediate aim is to show that we have within us a hidden life, how vast is its extent, how potent and how constant is its influence, how strange are its effects. VII. CHAPTER This unconscious part of the mind is so dark, and yet so full of activity; so like the conscious intelligence and yet so divided from it by the veil of mystery, that it is not much of a hyperbole to speak of the human soul as double; or at least as leading a double life. One of these lives-the veiled life, now awaits the rudeness of our scrutiny. The character of the facts to Many of the facts which in this exposition it will be requisite to mention must be known to be studied. some readers, and nearly all of them indeed should be recognized as more or less belonging to common experience. But notwithstanding their familiarity we must needs go the whole round of the facts that bear witness to the reality of a hidden life within us, for it is only from a pretty full muster of the evidence-the familiar with the unfamiliar-that we can see the magnitude of our hidden life, the intimacy of its relations with our conscious every-day thinking, the constancy and variety of its working in all the nooks and crannies of the mind. Though some of these facts are familiar, they are also interesting enough to be worth repeating. To lay The interest bare the automatic or unconscious action of the mind is indeed to unfold a tale which outvies the romances of giants and ginns, wizards in their palaces and captives in the Domdaniel roots of the sea. As I am about to show how the mind and all its powers work for us in secret and lead us unawares to results so of the sub ject. VII. much above our wont and so strange that we CHAPTER attribute them to the inspiration of heaven or to the whispers of an inborn genius, I seem to tread enchanted ground. The hidden efficacy of the mind. of our thoughts, their prodigious power of working in the dark and helping us underhand, can The romance be compared only to the stories of our folk-lore, and chiefly to that of the lubber-fiend who toils for us when we are asleep or when we are not looking. There is a stack of corn to be thrashed, or a house to be built, or a canal to be dug, or a mountain to be levelled, and we are affrighted at the task before us. Our backs are turned and it is done in a trice, or we awake in the morning and find that it has been wrought in the night. The lubber-fiend or some other shy creature comes to our aid. He will not lift a finger that we can see; but let us shut our eyes, or turn our heads, or put out the light, and there is nothing which the good fairy will not do for us. We have such a fairy in our thoughts, a willing but unknown and tricksy worker which commonly bears the name of Imagination, and which may be named as I think more clearly -The Hidden Soul. ence of thought It is but recently that the existence of hidden The existor unconscious thought has been accepted as a hidden fact in any system of philosophy which is not only remystical. It used to be a commonplace of philosophy, that we are only in so far as we know ledged. that we are. In the Cartesian system, the acknow The Cartesian doctrine opposed to it. CHAPTER essence of mind is thought; the mind is nothing VII. unless it thinks, and to think is to be conscious. To Descartes and his vast school of followers, a thought which transcends consciousness is a nullity. The Cartesian system is perfectly ruthless in its assertion of the rights of consciousness, and the tendency of the Cartesians has been to maintain not only that without consciousness there can be no mind, but also that without consciousness there can be no matter. Nothing exists, they inclined to say, except it exists as thought (in technical phrase, esse is percipi), and nothing is thought except we are conscious of it. In our own times, the most thorough-going statement of the Cartesian doctrine has come from Professor Ferrier, in one of the most gracefully written works on metaphysics that has ever appeared. "We are," says Ferrier, "only in so far as we know; and we know only in so far as we know that we know." Being and knowledge are thus not only relative, but also identical. Leibnitz first sug modern doctrine. To Leibnitz is due the first suggestion of gested the thought possibly existing out of consciousness. He stated the doctrine clumsily and vaguely, but yet with decision enough to make it take root in the German system of thought. There it has grown and fructified and run to seed; there, also, it has expanded into all the absurdities and extravagancies of the transcendental philosophy. But though much of that |