Mechanisms of character formation Author:William Alanson White Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: . t -s. CHAPTER III . THE FORE-CONSCIOUS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS The unconscious as a part of consciousness may be a misnomer. Unconscious ideas may involve ... more »a contradiction in terms;1 and yet the term unconscious is fully iustinaKyye only start .out by understanding that L fci only and we do not particular spalfl Bin consciousness, conscious. Thel hypothesis and as such it has a nl m if it explains the We are familiar witlfl ) discontinuity of consciousness. I may say, for instance, in addressing a number of persons, that I -know of something that they all know, but that at that particular moment not one of them know that they know it and that they will at once recognise the truth of my statement the moment I tell them what it is. The multiplication table! Of course they knew it, but amoment before nothing was further from their several minds. Where was it though? Where did it come from at the moment my words brought it flashing into their consciousness? Where are our ideas during dreamless sleep? During anaesthesia? During periods of unconsciousness from fainting? No phenomenon of mental life is more striking than these temporary periods when mental life seems actually to cease to exist. Consciousness lapses for a period, during a faint, for example, and then makes its appearance again without having seemed to change in the leastaJt. Such experiences emphasise the disjH Consciousness and 1 "Such notions as 'solid solutions,' 'liquid crystals,' invisible 'light,' divisible 'atoms,' 'unconscious' mental life, seem mere foolishness until we realise that the work of science is not to avoid verbal contradiction, but to frame conceptions by which we can control the facts." (F. C. S. Schiller, "Studies in Humanism.") demonstrate that fl ciousness is not a requi...« less