CONSCIOUSNESS
We took a glimpse at random into the mental life of an adult
consciousness, and found it very complicated, constantly changing. We
found it packed with shifting material, which, on the surface, seemed to
bear very little relation. We found reason, feeling, and will all
interacting. We found nothing to indicate that a consciousness as simple
as mere _awareness_ might exist. We believe there might be such in the
newborn babe, perhaps even in the baby a month old; but can we prove it?
Let us look within again and see if there are not times of mere, bare
consciousness in our own experience that give us the proof we need.
I have slept deeply all night. It is my usual waking time. Something
from within or from without forces an impression upon my mind, and I
stir, and slowly open my eyes. As yet I have really not seen anything.
With my eyes open my mind still sleeps--but in a few seconds comes a
possessing sense of well-being. Obeying some stimulus, not recognized by
the senses as yet, I begin to stretch and yawn, then close my eyes and
settle down into my pillows as for another nap. I am not aware that I
am I, that I am awake, that I have yawned and stretched. I have a
pleasant, half-dreamy feeling, but could not give it a name. For those
few seconds this is all my world--a pleasant drowsiness, a being
possessed by comfort. My consciousness is mere awareness--a pleasant
awareness of uncomplicated existence. In another moment or two it is a
consciousness of a day's work or pleasure ahead, the necessity of
rising, dressing, planning the day, the alert reaction of pleasure or
displeasure to what it is to bring, the effort to recall the dreams of
sleep--the complicated consciousness of the mature man or woman. But I
started the day with a mental condition close to pure sensation, a vague
feeling of something different than what was just before.
Or this bare consciousness may come in the moment of acute shock, when
the sense of suffering, quite disconnected from its cause, pervades my
entire being; or at the second when I am first "coming back" after a
faint, or at the first stepping out from an anesthetic. In these
experiences most of us can recall a very simple mental content, and can
prove to our own satisfaction that there is such a thing as mere
awareness, a consciousness probably close akin to that of the lower
levels of animal life, or to that of the newborn babe when he first
opens his eyes to life.
_Consciousness_, then, in its elements, is the simplest mental reaction
to what the senses bring.
How shall we determine when consciousness exists? What are its tests?
The response of the mind to stimuli, made evident by the body's
reaction, gives the proof of consciousness in man or lower animal.
But what do we mean by a stimulus?
Light stimulates me to close my eyes when first entering its glare from
a dark room, or to open them when it plays upon my eyelids as I sleep
and the morning sun reaches me. It is a stimulus from without.
The fear-thought, which makes my body tremble, my pupils grow wide, and
whitens my cheeks, is a stimulus from within.
An unexpected shot in the woods near-by, which changes the whole trend
of my thinking and startles me into investigating its cause, is a
stimulus from without causing a change within.
A _stimulus_, then, is anything within or without the body that arouses
awareness; and this is usually evidenced by some physical change,
however slight--perhaps only by dilated pupils or an expression of
relief. When we see the reaction of the body to the stimulus we know
there is consciousness. On the other hand, we cannot say that
consciousness is always absent when the usual response does not occur;
for there may be injury to organs accounting for the lack of visible
reaction, while the mind itself may respond. But with due care, in even
such cases, some external symptoms of response can usually be found if
consciousness exists.
We have already realized how complex, intricate, and changing is fully
developed consciousness.
THE UNCONSCIOUS
But the mind of man knows two distinct conditions of activity--the
conscious and the unconscious. Mind is not always wide awake. We
recognize what we call the _conscious_ mind as the ruling force in our
lives. But how many things I do without conscious attention; how often I
find myself deep in an unexplainable mood; how the fragrance of a flower
will sometimes turn the tide of a day for me and make me square my
shoulders and go at my task with renewed vigor; or a casual glimpse of a
face in the street turn my attention away from my errand and settle my
mind into a brown study. Usually I am alert enough to control these
errant reactions, but I am keenly aware of their demands upon my mind,
and frequently it is only with conscious effort that I am kept upon my
way unswerved by them, though not unmoved.
When we realize that nothing that has ever happened in our experience is
forgotten; that nothing once in consciousness altogether drops out, but
is stored away waiting to be used some day--waiting for a voice from the
conscious world to recall it from oblivion--then we grasp the fact that
the quality of present thought or reaction is largely determined by the
sum of all past thinking and acting. Just as my body is the result of
the heritage of many ancestors plus the food I give it and the use to
which I subject it, so my mind's capacity is determined by my
inheritance plus the mental food I give it, plus everything to which I
have subjected it since the day I was born. For it forgets absolutely
nothing.
"That is not true," you say, "for I have tried desperately to remember
certain incidents, certain lessons learned--and they are _gone_.
Moreover, I cannot remember what happened back there in my babyhood."
Ah, but you are mistaken, my friend. For you react to your task today
differently because of the thing which you learned and have "forgotten."
Your mind works differently because of what you disregarded then. "You"
have forgotten it, but your brain-cells, your nerve-cells have not; and
you are not quite the same person you would be without that forgotten
experience, or that pressing stimulus, which you never consciously
recognized, but allowed your subconsciousness to accept. Some night you
have a strange, incomprehensible dream. You cannot find its source, but
it is merely the re-enacting of some past sensation or experience of
your own, fantastically arrayed. Some day you stop short in your hurried
walk with a feeling of compulsion which you cannot resist. You know no
reason for it, but some association with this particular spot, or some
vague resemblance, haunts you. You cannot "place" it. One day you hit
the tennis-ball at a little different angle than you planned because a
queer thought came unbidden and directed your attention aside. Again,
under terrific stress, with sick body and aching nerves, you go on and
do your stint almost mechanically. You do not know where the strength or
the skill is derived. But your unconscious or subconscious--as you
will--has asserted itself, has usurped the place of the sick conscious,
and enabled you automatically to go on. For we react to the storehouse
of the unconscious even as we do to the conscious.
Remember that the unconscious is simply the latent conscious--what once
was conscious and may be again, but is now buried out of sight.
The mind may be likened to a great sea upon which there are visible a
few islands. The islands represent the conscious thoughts--that
consciousness we use to calculate, to map out our plans, to form our
judgments. This is the mind that for centuries was accepted as all the
mind. But we know that the islands are merely the tops of huge
mountain-ranges formed by the floor of the sea in mighty, permanent
upheaval; that as this sea-floor rises high above its customary level
and thrusts its bulk above the waters into the atmosphere, is the island
possible.
Just so there can be no consciousness except as that which is already in
the mind--the vast subconscious material of all experience--rises into
view and relates itself through the senses to an outside world. We speak
very glibly of motion, of force, of power. We say "The car is moving
now." But how do we know? Away back there in our babyhood there were
some things that always remained in the same place, while others changed
position. The _changing_ gave our baby minds a queer sensation; it made
a definite impression; and sometimes we heard people say "move," when
that impression came. Finally, we call the feeling of that change
"move," or "movement," or "motion." The word thereafter always brings to
our minds a picture of a change from one place to another. The
process--the slow comprehending of the baby mind--was buried in
forgetfulness even at the time. But had not the subconscious been
imprinted with the incident and all its succeeding associations, that
particular phenomenon we could not name today. It would be an entirely
unique experience. So our recognition of the impression is merely the
rising into consciousness of the subconscious material in response to a
stimulus from the outside world which appeals through the sense of
sight. We can get no response whatever except as the stimulus asking our
attention is related by "like" or "not like" something already
experienced; that is, it must bear some relation to the known--and
perhaps forgotten--just as the island cannot be, except as, from far
down below, the sea-floor leaves its bed and raises itself through the
deeps. The visible island is but a symbol of the submarine mountain.
The present mental impression is but proof of a great bulk of past
experiences.
And so we might carry on the figure and compare the birth of
consciousness to the instant of appearance of the mountain top above the
water's surface. It is not a new bit of land. It is only emerging into a
new world.
"But," you ask, "do you mean to assert that the baby's mind is a
finished product at birth; that coming into life is simply the last
stage of its growth? How unconvincing your theory is."
No, we only now have the soil for consciousness. The island and the
submarine mountain are different things. The sea-floor is transformed
when it enters into the new element. An entirely different vegetation
takes place on this visible island than took place on the floor of the
sea before it emerged. But the only new elements added to the hitherto
submerged land come from the new atmosphere, and the sea-floor
immediately begins to become a very different thing. Nevertheless, what
it is as an island is now, and forever will be due, primarily, to its
structure as a submarine mountain. In the new atmosphere the soil is
changed, new chemical elements enter in, seeds are brought to it by the
four winds--and it is changed. But it is still the sea-floor
transformed.
Just so the baby brain, complete in parts and mechanism at birth, is a
different brain with every day of growth in its new environment, with
every contact with the external world. But it is, primarily and in its
elements, the brain evolved through thousands of centuries of pushing up
to man's level through the sea of animal life, and hundreds of centuries
more of the development of man's brain to its present complete mechanism
through experience with constantly changing environment.
Hence, when the baby sees light and responds by tightly shutting his
eyes, then later by opening them to investigate, his sensation is what
it is because through the aëons of the past man has established a
certain relation to light through experiencing it. To go further than
this, and to find the very beginning, how the first created life came to
respond to environment at all, is to go beyond the realm of the actually
known. But that he did once _first_ experience his environment, and
establish a reaction that is now racial, we know.
So our baby soon shows certain "instinctive" reactions. He reaches out
to grasp. He sucks, he cries, he looks at light and bright objects in
preference to dark, he is carrying out the history of his race, but is
making it personal. He has evolved a new life, but all his ancestors
make its foundation. The personal element, added to his heritage, has
made him different from any and all of his forebears. But he can have no
consciousness except as a bit from the vast inherited accumulation of
the past of his ancestors, of all the race, steps forth to meet a new
environment.
And again you ask, "How came the first consciousness?"
And again I answer, "It is as far back as the first created or evolved
organism which could respond in any way to a material world; and only
metaphysics and the God behind metaphysics can say."
We only know that careful laboratory work in psychology--experiments on
the unconscious--today prove that our conscious life is what it is,
because of: _first_, what is stored away in the unconscious (_i. e._,
what all our past life and the past life of the race has put there);
_second_, because of what we have accepted from our environment; and
this comprises our material, intellectual, social, and spiritual
environment.
CONSCIOUSNESS IS COMPLEX
The one fact we want at this stage of our inquiry is simply this: that
consciousness, awaking at birth, very soon becomes complex. However
single and simple in content immediate consciousness may be, it is so
intimately linked with all preceding experience that a pure sensation is
probably never known after the first second of life. As the sensation is
registered it becomes a basis for comparison. That first sensation,
perhaps, was just a feeling of _something_. The next is a feeling of
something that is the same, or is not the same, as the first. So
immediately perception is established. The baby consciousness recognizes
that the vague feeling is, or is not, _that same thing_. And from
perception to a complex consciousness of perceptions, of ideas, of
memories and relations, and judgments, is so short a step that we cannot
use our measuring rods to span it.
Thus through the various stages of life, from infancy to maturity, the
conscious is passing into the unconscious, only to help form later a new
conscious thought. Hence the conscious thought is determined by the
great mass of the unconscious, plus the external world.
But every thought, relegated to the unconscious, through its association
there--for it is plastic by nature--comes back to consciousness never
quite the same, and meets never quite the same stimulus. And as a result
a repeated mental experience is never twice exactly the same. So the
conscious becomes the unconscious and the unconscious the conscious, and
neither can be without the other.
Our problem is to understand the workings of the mind as it exists
today, and to try to find some of its most constructive uses; and on
that we shall focus attention. To that end we must first examine the
various ways in which consciousness expresses itself.
We have recognized two distinct mental states--the conscious and the
unconscious--and have found them constantly pressing each on the other's
domain. Our study of consciousness reveals the normal in the aspects of
sleeping and waking, also various abnormal states. Consciousness may
become excited, depressed, confused, delirious, or insane. We shall
consider later some of the mental workings that account for these
abnormal expressions. At present let us examine the mind's activities in
sleep and in delirium.
CONSCIOUSNESS IN SLEEP
Sleep seldom, if ever, is a condition of utter unconsciousness. We so
frequently have at least a vague recollection, when we wake, of
dreaming--whether or not we remember the dream material--that we are
inclined to accept sleep as always a state of some kind of mental
activity, though waking so often wipes the slate clean. A new word which
serves our purpose well has come into common use these last years, and
we describe sleep as a state of rest of the conscious mind made possible
as weariness overpowers the _censor_, and this guard at the gate naps.
The censor is merely that mental activity which forces the mind to keen,
alert, constructive attention during our waking hours, a guard who
_censors_ whatever enters the conscious mind and compares it with
reality, forcing back all that is not of immediate use, or that is
undesirable, or that contradicts established modes of life or thought.
In sleep we might say that the censor, wearied by long vigilance,
presses all the material--constantly surging from the unconscious into
consciousness, there to meet and establish relations with matter--back
into the unconscious realms, and locks the door, and lies and slumbers.
Then the half-thoughts, the disregarded material, the unfit, the
unexpressed longings or fears, the forbidden thoughts; in fact, the
whole accumulation of the disregarded or forgotten, good, bad, and
indifferent--for the unconscious has no moral sense--seize their
opportunity. The guard has refused to let them pass. He is now asleep.
And the more insistent of them pick the lock and slip by, masquerading
in false characters, and flit about the realms of the sleeping
consciousness as ghosts in the shelter of darkness. If the guard
half-wakes he sleepily sees only legitimate forms; for the dreams are
well disguised. His waking makes them scurry back, sometimes leaving no
trace of their lawless wanderings. So the unconscious thoughts of the
day have become sleep-consciousness by play acting.
CONSCIOUSNESS IN DELIRIUM
At this time of our study it will suffice to say that in delirium and in
insanity, which we might very broadly call a prolonged delirium, the
toxic brain becomes a house in disorder. The censor is sick, and
sequence and coherence are lost as the thronging thoughts of the
unconscious mind press beyond the portals into consciousness, disordered
and confused. We shall later find, however, that this very disorder
falls into a sort of order of its own, and a dominant emotion of pain or
ecstasy, of depression or fear, of exaltation or depreciation calls
steadily upon the stored away incidents and remembered, related
feelings of the past and interprets them as present reality. The censor
of the sick brain is stupefied by toxins, shock, or exhaustion, and the
citadel he is supposed to guard is thronged with besiegers from every
side. The strongest--_i. e._, those equipped with most associations
pertinent to the emotional status at the time--win out, occupy the brain
by force, and demand recognition and expression from all the senses,
deluding them by their guise of the reality of external matter.
We find consciousness, then, determined by all past experience, by an
external world, and by its organ of expression--the _brain_.
Consequently, our psychology leads us into anatomy and physiology,
which, probably, we have already fairly mastered. In rapid review, only,
in the following chapter we shall consider the organs of man's
consciousness, the brain, spinal cord, and the senses, and try to
establish some relation between the material body and its mighty
propelling force--the _mind_.