Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/257

 is almost impossible for a European to differentiate the faces in a Chinese throng, although the Chinese have just as individual facial formations as the Europeans, but the similarity of their strange facial expression is much more evident to the remote onlooker than their individual differences. But when we live among the Chinese then the impression of their uniformity disappears more and more, and finally the Chinese become individuals also. Individuality belongs to those conditional actualities which are greatly overrated theoretically on account of their practical significance. It does not belong to those overwhelmingly clear and therefore universally obtrusive general facts upon which a science must primarily be founded. The individual content of consciousness is, therefore, the most unfavorable object imaginable for psychology, because it has veiled the universally valid until it has become unrecognizable. The essence of consciousness is the process of adaptation which takes place in the most minute details. On the other hand, the unconscious is the generally diffused, which not only binds the individuals among themselves to the race, but also unites them backwards with the peoples of the past and their psychology. Thus the unconscious, surpassing the individual in its generality, is, in the first place, the object of a true psychology, which claims not to be psychophysical.

Man as an individual is a suspicious phenomenon, the right of whose existence from a natural biological standpoint could be seriously contested, because, from this point of view, the individual is only a race atom, and has a significance only as a mass constituent. The ethical