Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/503

No. 3.] a railway ticket, I may be subconsciously building the house to which this momentary act is accidentally related through a thousand links. To recognize in the subconscious thoughts and wishes those which reach (or try to reach) farthest outward, seems to me not only illuminating but ventilating to this conception so commonly shrouded in mystery.

It is subconsciousness in this sense, a subconscious wisdom, in fact, which relates a man to his widest horizon and constitutes his ethical and religious nature. " In moral conduct the stimulus has receded the farthest, and such conduct is behavior toward the more universal entities, toward truth, honor, virtue, and the like" (p. 146).

This view of the subconscious, however, and of the ethical principle, seems to me hardly consistent, not to say identical, either with Freud's view and practice, or with the previously noted principles of Holt. If a repressed wish or a traumatic memory is subconscious, in Freud's usage, it is not such as refers to objective facts lying beyond the usual conscious border; nor is it such as can be directly discerned in any actual behavior. Let us call to mind Freud's methods. He does not, indeed, rely upon direct introspection for revealing the subconscious wishes. He states his problem thus: "To find out something from the patient that the doctor did not know and the patient himself did not know." He learns to distrust hypnosis partly because not all patients can be hypnotized, and partly because its results are unreliable. He comes to the conclusion that all memories accessible to hypnotic states are accessible also to normal states; if certain memories fail to emerge it is because of a resistance, due to the hypothetical process of Verdrängung or repression. Hence his methods are aimed at removing the resistance and aiding the patient to recognize and confess his own wishes. To accomplish this he does, in fact, examine such behavior, and also such experiences, as may offer a clue to the lost motive: he analyzes dreams, slips of the tongue, types of imagination and association, the various subtle ways in which we all 'betray ourselves.' "In this way," he says, "I succeeded, without hypnosis, in learning from the patient all that was