Note * — Chapter XI · A Sketch for a Psychology

For our immediate purpose, for a clearer understanding of values and for the avoidance of unnecessary confusions in criticism, it is necessary to break away from the set of ideas by which popular and academic psychology alike attempt to describe the mind. We naturally tend to conceive it as a thing of a peculiar spiritual kind, fairly: persistent though variable, endowed with attributes, three in number, its capacities namely for knowing, willing and feeling, three irreducible modes of being aware of or concerned with objects. A violent shock to this entity comes when we are forced by a closer examination of the facts to conceive it as doing all these three unconsciously as well as consciously. An unconscious mind is a fairly evident fiction, useful though it may be, and goings on in the nervous system are readily accepted as a satisfactory substitute. From this to the recognition of the conscious mind as a similar fiction is no great step, although one which many people find difficult. Some of this difficulty is due to habit. It wears off as we notice how many of the things which we believed true of the fiction can be stated in terms of the less fictitious substitute. But much of the difficulty is emotive, non-intellectual, more specifically religious, in origin.* It is due to desire, to fear, or to exaltation as the case may be, to emotion masquerading as thought, and is a difficulty not so easily removed.