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In connection with the investigation of our mental operations there arises the question, whether these are to be deemed coextensive with consciousness. Are there unconscious mental processes?
The problem under different forms has occupied the attention of philosophers from Leibniz to J. S. Mill, while the phenomena of hypnotism, "multiple personality", and abnormal forms of mental life have brought the question of the relation between the unconscious and the conscious processes in the human organism into greater prominence. That all forms of mental life, perception, thought, feeling, and volition are profoundly affected in character by nervous processes and by vital activities, which do not emerge into the strata of conscious life, seems to be indisputably established. Whether however, unconscious processes which affect conclusions of the intellect and resolutions of the will, but are in themselves quite unconscious, should be called mental states, or conceived as acts of the mind, has been keenly disputed. In favour of the doctrine of unconscious mental processes have been urged the fact that many of our ordinary sensations arise out of an aggregate of impressions individually too faint to be separately perceivable, the fact that attention may reveal to us experiences previously unnoticed, the fact that unobserved trains of thought may result in sudden reminiscences, and that in abnormal mental conditions hypnotized, somnambulistic, and hysterical patients often accomplish difficult intellectual feats whilst remaining utterly unaware of the rational intermediate steps leading up to the final results. On the other side it is urged that most of those phenomena can be accounted for by merely subconscious processes which escape attention and are forgotten; or, at all events, by unconscious cerebration, the working out of purely physical nervous processes without any concomitant mental state till the final cerebral situation is reached, when the corresponding mental act is evoked. The dispute is probably, at least in part, grounded on differences of definition. Still whatever terminology we may find it convenient to adopt, the fact remains, that our most purely intellectual operations are profoundly influenced by changes which take place below the surface of consciousness.
Editor: Haselhurst
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