Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/35

Rh theory, which, starting with the fact that the field of attention includes a penumbra as well as a focus, holds that the penumbral items of experience can be combined and elaborated while remaining within the penumbra, and thus, when the focus of attention shifts to them, can appear as ready made. (3) The theory of a detached subconsciousness. This phrase was devised, I believe, by a persistent critic of the theory, the late Professor Pierce. It covers all views that assert that each of us has a double or secondary self, an understratum of psychic existence, possessed of powers and character of its own that outrun and are separate from the ordinary. Here belongs the notion, widespread of late, that God is present to us as this substratum of our self or as an obscure second self."

There is no question that there is a large element of truth in the first and second types of theory. There is more question as to the third. The psychologists are rather shy of this hypothesis, which is due to the fact that, in the nature of the case, it is not possible scientifically either to establish or disprove it. It belongs rather to the realm of philosophy than to that of psychology. But there is no good reason to doubt that at least it points in the direction of a truth. The individual personality, while it has a certain separateness, is rooted in the universe. The human organism is both psychical and physical; and there is no good reason to suppose that in this two-fold constitution it is essentially different from the universe in which it is rooted. So far as we can see, the universe, as at present constituted, is also psycho-physical, whatever may be one s metaphysical theory as to the ultimate priority of the psychical or physical. As an organism of this general type, the individual is somehow mysteriously dove-tailed into the universal order. From that part of the universe which we know as physical come flowing into the physical organism of man below the level of consciousness elements and influences which profoundly influence this aspect of his being. There is no good reason to doubt that likewise from that part of the universe