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SPIRITUALISM AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
AN EXPLANATION OF SPIRITUALIST PHENOMENA AND BELIEFS IN TERMS OF MODERN
KNOWLEDGE
BY MILLAIS CULPIN
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY PROFESSOR LEONARD HILL
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1920
[_All rights reserved_]
PREFACE
My object in writing this book is to present an explanation of so-called
occult phenomena concerning which credulity is still as busy as in the
days of witchcraft. The producers of these phenomena have been exposed
efficiently and often, but their supporters are as active as ever, and
show a simple faith which is more convincing than any argument.
Moreover, the producers themselves--mediums, clairvoyants,
water-diviners, seers, or whatever they may be--are sometimes of such
apparent honesty and simplicity that disbelief seems almost a sacrilege;
therefore part of my aim is to show how a man believing firmly in his
own honesty may yet practise elaborate trickery and deceit.
As the book is intended for readers presumably unacquainted with the
trend of modern psychology, it is necessary to point out how much of the
opinions set forth are accepted by workers at the subject.
The theory of dissociation has, as far as I know, no opponents. It was
applied by Pierre Janet to hysteria and water-divining, thought-reading,
etc., all of which he regarded as psychologically identical.[1]
[Footnote 1: See _L'Automatisme Psychologique_. Alcan; Paris.]
The theory of the unconscious, which we owe to Freud, of Vienna, is
still strongly opposed, and the influence, or even the existence, of
repressions is disputed by those who have not looked for them,
undoubted cases of loss of memory being regarded as something of quite
different nature. A growing number of workers, however, both here and in
America, appreciate the importance of these contributions to psychology.
The possible development of the hysteric from the malingerer by the
repression of the knowledge of deceit is an idea of my own, which is not
accepted by any one of importance.
These explanations are necessary in fairness to the reader, but I regard
appeals to authority on matters of opinion as pernicious, and try to
present my opinions in such a way as to allow them to be judged on their
merits.
Nevertheless, since I take for granted that supernatural phenomena are
not what their producers would have us believe, and at the same time
make no general attempt to prove their human origin, I must refer the
reader to books on the subject, viz., _Studies in Psychical Research_,
by the late Frank Podmore, which treats the spiritualists
sympathetically and weakens occasionally in its unbelief; _Spiritualism
and Sir Oliver Lodge_, by Dr. Charles Mercier, which is a direct and
vigorous attack upon them; and _The Question_, by Edward Clodd, a book
dealing with the subject historically from primitive man to 'Feda'.
Stuart Cumberland, in _Spiritualism--the Inside Truth_, records some of
the results of his vain search for spiritist phenomena that will bear
investigation; and in _The Road to Endor_ the authors relate the story
of a deliberate fraud that was accepted by their friends as a genuine
manifestation.
M. C.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
I. THE UNCONSCIOUS
II. COMPLEXES
III. FORGETTING AND REPRESSION
IV. DISSOCIATION
V. WATER-DIVINING
VI. SUGGESTION
VII. HYPNOTISM
VIII. DREAMS
IX. HYSTERIA
X. EXPERIMENTS, DOMESTIC AND OTHER
XI. ABOUT MEDIUMS
XII. THE ACCOUNTS OF BELIEVERS
XIII. THE EVOLUTION OF THE MEDIUM
CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION
BY PROFESSOR LEONARD HILL, F.R.S.
The body of man is made up of an infinite number of cells--minute masses
of living substance--grouped into organs subserving particular
functions, and held together by skeletal structures, bones and
containing membranes such as the horny layer of the skin which are
formed by the living cells. The whole is comparable to citizens grouped
in farms and factories subserving one or other function necessary for
the commonweal; and just as the city has its transport connecting the
whole, distributing food and the various products of the factories, a
drainage and scavenger system taking away the waste material, and a
telephone system through which operations can be ordered and
co-ordinated according to the needs of the commonweal, so has the body
its blood circulation, digestive and excretive systems, and a
co-ordinating nervous system. How small are the cells, how infinite
their number is shown by the fact that each drop of blood the size of a
pin's head contains five million red corpuscles; there are five or six
pints of blood in the body!
The living substance, e.g. of a nerve cell, appears as a watery
substance crowded with a countless number of granules, which are so
small that only the light dispersed around each is visible under the
highest power of the microscope when illuminated by a beam of light
against a dark ground, just as the halo of each dust particle in the air
is made visible by a beam of light crossing a dark room, and just as
these dust particles are in dancing motion due to the currents of air,
so are the particles in the living substance ceaselessly kept dancing by
the play of inter-molecular forces. From the dead substance of the cells
the chemist extracts various complex colloidal substances, e.g.
proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and various salts, and these in their
turn he can resolve into chemical elements. The interplay of energy
between the multitude of electrically charged granules inside the cell,
and the environment outside keeps up the dance of life, the radiant
energy of the sun, and the atomic energy of the elements being the
ultimate source of the energy transmutations exhibited by both living
and non-living matter.
In the living cell there is an interplay of the energy of masses of
molecules forming the granules, of single molecules in watery solution,
of atoms which compose the molecules, and of electrons, the various
groupings of which compose the atoms of the elements. The elements
themselves are now recognised to be transmutable through simplification
and rearrangement of their electronic structure, and to be evolved out
of one primordial electronic unit, a unit of energy, unknowable in
nature, out of the groupings and transmutations of which arise all
manner of living and non-living forms, the apparently indestructible
stable materials being no less in a state of flux and evolution than the
most unstable. The complexity of the transmutations of energy and
ultimate unknowableness and mystery of their cause are no less in the
case of a drop of water or a particle of dirt than in that of a living
cell. The scientific conception of the universe, the very opposite of
materialism, approaches pantheism.
The living substance of a uni-cellular organism, similarly the congery
of cells forming the body of man, has evolved the power of sensing and
of moving towards, or away from life-giving or destroying sources of
energy. Special sense-organs, receptive of one or other form of energy
have been evolved through the aeons of the struggle for existence,
together with nervous and muscular systems, to enable him to preserve
his life in the midst of the shocks and thrills of his environment.
There are also evolved inner senses, and a sympathetic nervous system
which knits all parts of the body in harmonious action; the community of
action also being brought about by the circulating fluids of the body,
the blood and the lymph, to which each living cell gives and from which
each cell takes. For communion with the environment, eyes for visual,
and sense organs in the skin for thermal radiant energy have been
perfected, ears for sound waves travelling through air, taste organs for
substances in solution, smell organs for particles of substances
floating in the atmosphere, touch organs for sensing movements of
masses.
The receptive cells of the special sense organs are composed of watery,
granular, living substance and elaborate mechanisms have been evolved
for converting one or other form of energy into such a form that it can
be received by the living substance, e.g. the intricate structure of the
eye with its focussing lenses, retinal cells laden with pigment
sensitive to light, the ear with its drum membrane vibrating in unison
with sound waves in the air, its chain of transmitting osicles, and
complicated receiving organ placed in the spiral turns of the cochlea.
Be it noted, the receptive cells of the sense organs are immersed in
fluid, and each sense organ is specifically sensitive, i.e. only to that
form of energy which it has been evolved to receive through countless
ages of evolution.
The nervous system is composed of myriads of nerve cells, and of nervous
fibres, which are long and exceedingly slender processes of these cells
formed of similar substance, each shielded and insulated by a double
coat. The nerve cells and the nerves are arranged in an ordered plan
which has been unravelled by ingenious methods. They connect all parts
of the body one with another. Think of the whole telephone system of
Britain linked up together with millions of receivers, thousands of
local exchanges, hundreds of central exchanges, etc., the nervous system
with its sense organs, sensory nerves, lower and higher nerve centres
and motor nerves, is infinitely more intricate than that. The whole
forms an interlacing feltwork formed of watery nerve cells and
processes, and not only receives sensory stimuli and transmits them as
motor impulses, but is more or less permanently _modified_ by each
sensory thrill which enters it, memorising each, more or less, for
longer or shorter time according to its character or intensity. Thus the
response of the nervous system to sensory excitation changes with
education, habits form and character develops from birth to manhood, to
decay again from manhood to old age, ceaselessly changing, but becoming
graved on a certain plan. The making thereof depends on inborn qualities
of the living substance--the conjugate product of the male and female
parents, this moulded by environmental conditions, both in utero and
after birth, by food, and the ceaseless instreaming of sensations.
Depending on the nutrition of the cortex of the great brain, abrogated
by narcotics, absent in sleep, consciousness of our being flickers from
moment to moment, the product of the instreaming of sensations from the
outer world and from our own body, and of memories of past sensations,
aroused, by some present sensation. Conscious judgement arises from the
balancing of present sensations with memorised sensations and leads to
purposeful actions.
Beneath the conscious world an infinite host of functions are carried
out unconsciously, functions depending on the nervous connection of one
part with another, just as the common people carry out a host of actions
through the telephone system without the cognisance of the government
which is seated at the highest central exchange.
To find food, satisfy the sexual instinct, escape enemies, gain shelter
from excessive physical changes of environment, the special senses and
nervous system have then been evolved and perfected in the intricacy of
their mechanism through vast aeons of evolution. There is evidence that
man has for some million years trod the earth; but the senses of sight,
hearing, smell, taste, touch were evolved in the vast procession of
lower animals which preceded him for those millions of years which reach
back and ever back to the first generation of life.
The realisation of these facts saves the physiologist from being
deceived, either by fraudulent tricks or those natural chances of human
occurrence which occasion the belief of the credulous in telepathy. He
recognises that the human nervous system is built on a common plan, and
that it is to be expected that the sensory stimuli received from a given
environmental condition will often arouse the same train of thought in
two or more people, standing together, especially in those who
habitually associate. Such coincidences of thought, which astonish the
ignorant, are due to natural law. Human experience shows that
judgements of fundamental importance which would, if transmittable to
another at a distance by telepathy, win a fortune, save a defeat, etc.,
are never so transmitted. The Stock Exchange and the army in the field
must have their telephone and telegraph systems and messengers. No more
concentrated will to send information, which might bring succour, say
from the artillery, could be given than by men in peril of their lives
in the trenches, when the enemy came swarming over the top, but we know
that with the wires cut and the human messengers killed no succour came.
Neither does it come to the liner which, in full proud course with its
freight of thousands of souls strikes an iceberg, unless the wireless
mechanism be installed and operated so that the S.O.S. signal is
despatched. Otherwise it sinks without trace, as the Germans advised
their 'U' boats to let their victim merchant ships sink.
The phenomena of wireless telegraphy and of radio-active elements have
led people to think that some direct means of communication of energy
from one brain to another may be possible, that is without intervention
of the special senses. There is not the least evidence in favour of this
view; the evolution of the senses is wholly against it. It is true that
all vital activity is accompanied by electrical change--by a flow of
electrons--in the living matter, the nervous impulse itself may be so
transmitted. Such electrical change by a special evolution of structure
is magnified in the electric organ of certain fishes and used by them as
a weapon of offence. It is then sensed just as an electric shock from a
battery is sensed, and the intensity of the shock lessens inversely as
the square of the distance. There is no evidence that the minute
electrical changes accompanying nervous action in man are transmittable
to a distance through space; the nerves are evolved to confine and
convey these as nerve impulses to suitable receivers within their body
whereby function is co-ordinated.
A radio-active element enters into the composition of the living matter,
e.g. potassium. A nutritive fluid can be prepared from a watery solution
of sodium calcium and potassium salts capable of keeping the excised
heart of the frog in action. The place of potassium in this fluid can be
taken by the energy radiated from radio-active material placed suitably
near the weak solution of the other two salts which contains the heart.
Too strong a radiation kills the heart. Wonderful as this new discovery
is it is comparable with the well-known fact that the radiant energy of
the sun--either heat rays or the cold ultraviolet rays of intense
chemical action--while beneficent, when properly graded, kill the living
substance which is over-exposed to them. Hence the evolution of the
green colour of plants and the pigment in the skin of animals, which
acts as screens.
It has recently been shown that trees pick up the long waves used in
wireless telegraphy, and can be used as receivers, but there is no
evidence that animals are sensitive to these waves. No one knew either
of their existence or of that of magnetic storms until instruments were
invented suitably tuned to pick up the waves of energy and demonstrate
them to one or other of man's special senses--sight, hearing or touch.
Every invention of science goes to prove that knowledge enters only
through the avenue of the senses, which are tuned to the receipt of
certain forms of energy. Other forms of energy to which the senses are
not tuned must be converted by instrumental means into a form of energy
which can be sensed.
Contrary then to scientific evidence is the supposition that waves of
energy proceed directly through space from the watery granular living
substance of one brain, confined within skull and skin, and passes into
the similar substance of another. If any such direct transmission and
reception of energy were possible why were aeons spent in the evolution
of sense organs, and why is the labour of men spent in perfecting the
means of communication of his thoughts by observation of the movements
of expression, by speech, writing, semaphore, heliograph, telegraph and
telephone and by waves of energy sent through wires or wireless space?
In _The Road to Endor_, we read how two clever officers, E. H. Jones and
C. W. Hill, giving the whole time of a tedious captivity to evolving
tricks of the business, successfully fooled a hundred of their
fellow-officer prisoners, men of intelligence and education, into belief
in telepathy. In the appendix of their book there is given a portion of
their telepathy code to show the sort of system which may be worked, a
code which allowed the communication of the names of hundreds of common
articles, numbers, the names of all the officers in the camp, etc. They
could use the code with, or without speaking; perfection in its use, the
authors say, involved a good deal of memory work and constant practice.
'Nothing but the blankness of our days, and the necessity of keeping our
minds from rusting could have excused the waste of time entailed by
preparation for a thought-reading exhibition. It is hardly a fitting
occupation for free men.' What these officers could do obviously the
professional conjurer can do, no less the humbug and quack who swindles
money out of the credulous and superstitious. Let no one give credence
to telepathy till he or she has read this most amusing and educative
book. The authors no less humbugged the camp by planchette writing
whereby they transmitted messages supposed to come from disembodied
spirits. They fooled not only their fellow-prisoners with these spirit
messages, but the Turkish interpreter and Commandant of the camp,
gaining thereby important concessions. They planned a daring method of
escape which depended on exciting the cupidity of the Commandant and on
a hunt for buried treasure, occupying many months of preparation, and
only failing at the last through the unwitting interference of a brother
officer. Some of their 'spirit' messages were actually transmitted
through the Commandant to the War Office in Constantinople, so implicit
became his obedience. What these two officers affected is unequalled by
anything in Sir Oliver Lodge's evidence as set forth in _Raymond_. They
give details of how they used chance remarks and trivial facts heard and
memorised months beforehand, and of how they observed and were guided by
the slightest variation in tone of answer or movement of their victims,
which expressed interest and excitement or the reverse, and so built up
a story of some past action which clinched belief. The hits were
striking and memorised, and the misses unnoticed, forgotten--for such is
the tendency of the human mind. Such are the methods of the professional
medium, and in _The Road to Endor_ they lie unravelled and fully
exposed.
The physiologist recognises the tendency of those with unstable, nervous
temperaments--e.g. hysterical girls--to gain interest and cause
excitement at any cost of trouble in developing methods of deceit. Hence
the ghostly visitations of houses, the mysterious bell-ringings,
rappings, spillings of water, etc. I, myself, have personally come
across and investigated two of these cases--one of a young, educated
woman who played pranks on the house of her hosts, pouring water into
their beds, etc.; the other of a servant-maid who caused the
disappearance of meat from the larder, and dirtying the cat's feet made
it make foot-marks on a perpendicular wall leading to the larder window,
who spirited away the gardener's firewood and wrote mysterious letters
in a feigned hand, the imprint of which were found in her blotting-book,
and who reported she saw a mysterious woman prowling round the house.
The few eminent scientists who have expressed their belief in
spiritualism are mostly physicists, e.g. Crookes, Oliver Lodge and W.
Barrett--men who have not made a life-study of physiology and nervous
disorders, who are not familiar with the attainments and methods of
conjurers and professional impostors, and are shielded in their
laboratories and home life from close acquaintance with human deceit and
cunning. Their familiarity with the transmission of waves of energy in
dead material, and through space leads them to concepts which cannot
justly be applied to living beings. To the physiologist, who recognises
the majestic unity of natural phenomena, belief in telepathy and
spiritualism appear a form of materialism as gross as the ju-ju
superstition of the Benin native.
Nothing can excite greater contempt than the mean trivialities which are
served as communications from that infinite, silent universe wherein the
energy of individual life sinks on death.
The belief in spiritualism works grave harm on ignorant, credulous
people of nervous temperament, and fills the pockets of rascally
impostors. Its practice should then be as sternly suppressed by the law
as any other fraud and imposture. Dr. Culpin, in his valuable and
thoughtful treatment of this subject, shows, _inter alia_, how the
medium requires no less to be protected from deception and ruin of his
own soul than does his dupe.
SPIRITUALISM AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
CHAPTER I
THE UNCONSCIOUS
From the moment of waking till we fall asleep again our thoughts are
busy, one thought following another all day long without a break and
each being in some way related to the preceding one. Memories come up
into the stream, the outer world is constantly affecting it through our
senses, and we tend to think that all our mind-work is done in this
'stream of consciousness'.
But beneath our stream of consciousness lies a deep sea of memories,
feelings, and directive influences. All our previous experience is
buried there, and no man knows how much he knows. Every one has
experienced the sudden recollections which come up unsought when a
sight, a sound, or a scent makes association with something long past
and apparently forgotten; and not only our memories of things, places,
and people, but our past mental processes themselves lie in this deep
sea of the _unconscious_, to help or hinder us in the present or
future.
I speak of the unconscious, though there are objections to the use of
the word, which may lead to such a contradiction of terms as
'unconscious knowledge'. It is much more than a storehouse of memories:
it is the seat of mental processes which take place unknown to us and
are revealed at times in strange and unexpected ways. It comes into
contact with the stream of consciousness, and, as we so often find in
attempting to classify natural phenomena, there are no well-marked lines
of demarcation between one and the other, though the extremes are
definite enough.
The unconscious is not always a willing servant and often refuses to
obey the wishes of its owner. Every one has at some time vainly tried to
recall a name which is 'on the tip of the tongue', and one name after
another is tried till perhaps the right one comes up and leaves us
wondering where the difficulty was. There is, according to the teaching
of some psychologists, always a reason for this failure to remember,
though even an apparently ordinary example may need a skilful analysis
to show how the failure arose and why the other names presented
themselves. Slips of the tongue are likewise dependent upon unconscious
influences, and, although I was once sceptical, a few examinations of my
own slips have convinced me of the truth of this little theory. Here is
an example of one of them, such as occurs often enough and would
ordinarily be passed over without further examination:--
Sitting one evening with friends who were interested in this subject, I
read aloud a paragraph from the book I was reading, and was asked the
name of the author. My answer, after a slight pause, was 'Robert Brown';
it was immediately corrected by one of my friends, who pointed out that
the author was Robert Smith (the names are fictitious), and called upon
me for an explanation of the mistake. The first question was, 'Who is
Brown?' and the only Brown I knew was a man concerning whom I had a few
days before received a letter with information about him which led me to
regard him with strong dislike. The next point was that we had been
recently discussing the private life of Robert Smith, and I had
manifested dislike towards his actions. Then I remembered that when I
was asked the name of the author there had flashed into my consciousness
the feeling that he was not precisely the sort of man I liked. Although
the rest of the chain of thought was unknown to me at the time, yet it
became plain, under my friends' cross-examination, that this feeling of
dislike had called up the name of the other victim of my displeasure,
though questions from my friends were necessary before I could remember
to whom the other name referred.
The last point is quite characteristic, for there seems to be a definite
resistance in the mind of the perpetrator of the slip against piecing
together his thought processes, and the aid of some one else is
necessary to enable, or force him, to do it; then he feels compelled to
acknowledge the hidden thoughts. The difficulty in recognising and
admitting the cause of such slips is due to their being so often the
expression of feelings which the owner does not like to publish to the
world or perhaps even acknowledge to himself.
But the unconscious is not always, or even often, such a useless
intruder upon our everyday life. It economises our energies, and often
takes us by short cuts to ends which would otherwise need continued
reasoning. 'Intuition' is the product of previous experience, and rises
into the consciousness as a finished judgement without the owner of the
gift being aware of the factors concerned in its formation. One kind of
intuition is improperly called in my profession 'clinical instinct',
but, unlike instinct, it is a result of training and experience, and is
never seen without them. Here is an example which came under my notice:
An ophthalmic house-surgeon, busy with new patients, sees a man aged
about thirty-five, who complains of failing sight, and without further
investigation he writes on the man's book, 'Tobacco amblyopia?' and
sends him in to his chief. Later on his chief asks him, 'How did you
spot this case?' and the house-surgeon answers, 'I don't know, but he
looked like it'. The chief agrees that there is something which can be
seen but not described in the looks of a sufferer from this complaint.
Now this house-surgeon, though keen on his work, had seen only a few
cases of that disease, and I do not now accept his explanation of how he
'spotted' it. A man of thirty-five may find his sight failing from
various causes, but the common ones are not many. If the cause had been
'long-sight', he would have complained that he could not see to read;
certain general diseases causing loss of sight at that age would perhaps
have visible symptoms; the man was too young for cataract, and his eyes
looked healthy. In short, tobacco amblyopia was a reasonable guess, and,
when we remember that the disease is caused by smoking strong pipe
tobacco, and that the man who smokes that tobacco generally smells of
it, it is fair to suppose that it was not the evidence of his eyes alone
that guided the house-surgeon in his guess, though he was not conscious
of any train of reasoning nor was he aware of the smell of stale
tobacco.
This suggests that a stimulus may act upon our thoughts without our
being conscious of the origin of the feeling produced, and this is what
happens in connection with that well-known sensation, felt on visiting a
new place, that one has been there before. If a close examination is
made it will be found that there is really something--a picture, a
scent, or even so slight a stimulus as a puff of warm air--which has
stirred a memory in the unconscious; this memory fails to reach the
consciousness in its entirety, or it would immediately be recognised as
caused by the particular stimulus, but in its incomplete form it appears
as a memory of nothing in particular. Such a memory being inconceivable
it is at once joined on to the whole scene, and one feels 'I've surely
been here before'. This feeling may be regarded as an intuition in its
most useless and incomplete form, but its theoretical importance will be
seen later.
Women exercise intuition more than do men, and up to a point this gives
them an advantage, though it may annoy the male who prefers to find his
reasons on the surface and call them logical.
'The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know and know full well,
I do not like thee, Dr. Fell',
is a perfect example of intuition, and a full analysis of the
unconscious of the poet would undoubtedly recall a wealth of reasons
why. Still, intuition is likely to be a fallible guide, and the man who
wishes to avoid trouble with his personal dislikes must always be
prepared to check it by whatever conscious knowledge and reasoning power
he may possess. The lines quoted above would be a poor defence against a
charge of assault.
The person who is guided by intuition in some accustomed situation may
be incapable of understanding why another person has not that power. I
saw an example of this when I was making a short journey in the North
Queensland bush with a white boy who had been reared in that district,
but was a stranger to the particular locality in which we then were. It
was a rainy day, and we were bound for a place which could be reached by
following a stream down to the main river and then travelling up the
latter, and this route I proposed to take. My companion showed
astonishment at this, and said, pointing as it were along the other side
of the triangle, 'But that's the way.' I agreed, but told him that I
couldn't find the way and should get 'bushed' if I tried. He could not
understand, but we set off for a ride of some nine to ten miles through
fairly dense timber with the boy as guide. In vain I asked him how he
kept his course; in similar circumstances I should have marked a tree as
far ahead as possible and ridden towards it, marking another before I
reached the first, and so on. All he could say was, 'That's the way',
and I puzzled him by my questions more than he puzzled me by his ability
to go straight to our destination.
The sense of direction is of course well known amongst animals, and I
have often in my bush-days confidently trusted my horse to take me to
his and my home on the darkest of nights. Although one talks of the
'sense of direction', there is no need to assume anything more than
ordinary sense perceptions interpreted by the unconscious workings of
the mind. The man who is over-anxious about his capabilities cannot
allow his unconscious to take charge of his thoughts in this way. I was
always afraid of being lost in the bush and always preoccupied with the
need for carefully watching my course; therefore, although I could find
my way, I never developed a 'sense of direction'.
To sum up, the unconscious is a collection of mental processes,
memories, desires, and influences of infinite variety which are not
always or even often perceived as such by our conscious mind, but the
presence of which may and does influence our thoughts and actions. By
its aid we obtain results the factors of which are unknown to us, and of
which we fail to recognise the origin, and in it is stored not only what
we remember but also what we forget. It is in relation to our stream of
consciousness and normally blends with it, but the more independently we
can allow it to operate the more surely does it reach its end in certain
cases.
I must add that Freud introduces a _foreconscious_ to indicate the
mind-contents which are accessible to the consciousness, but are not of
it, but for the sake of simplicity I have avoided the use of that word.
The reader must bear in mind that such terms are used to describe not
phenomena, but conceptions. Newspapers, the voices of men in the train
or the street, marks on ballot-papers, are all phenomena, but 'public
opinion' is only a conception useful to facilitate the expression of
ideas. If one asks, 'Where is this unconscious and what does it look
like?', I can only answer by asking, 'Where is this "public opinion" and
what does it look like?'
The same caution is necessary in regard to other phrases. The stream of
consciousness and dissociation are conceptions only, and are not
intended to indicate the existence of things having relation to each
other in space; the words are used as convenient means to sum up
processes which I hope to show really take place.