ubconscious mind can be told in three words: there is
none. But it may need many more words to make clear what that means, and
to show where the misunderstanding of those who give to the subconscious
almost the chief role in the mental performance sets in. The psychology
of suggestion, for instance, which we have now fully discussed without
even mentioning the word subconscious, figures in most popular books in
the treatises of both physicians and ministers as a wonderful dominance
of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind alone receives the
suggestions and makes them effective, the subconscious mind controls the
suggestive processes in consciousness, and the subconscious mind comes
into the foreground and takes entire hold of the situation when the
hypnotic state sets in.

But we are always assured that there is no need of turning to the
mystery of suggestion and hypnotism to find that uncanny subpersonality
in us. We try to remember a name, or we think of the solution of a
problem; what we are seeking does not come to consciousness and now we
turn to other things; and suddenly the name flashes up in our mind or
the solution of the problem becomes clear to us. Who can doubt that the
subconscious mind has performed the act? While our attention was given
over to other questions, the subconscious mind took up the search and
troubled itself with the problem and neatly performed what our conscious
mind was unable to produce. Moreover in every situation we are
performing a thousand useful and well-adapted acts with our body without
thinking of the end and aim. What else but the subconscious mind directs
our steps, controls our movements, and adjusts our life to its
surroundings? And is not every memory picture, every reminiscence of
earlier experiences a sufficient proof that the subconscious mind holds
its own? The poem which we learned years ago did not remain somewhere
lingering in our consciousness, and if we can repeat it today, it must
be because our subconscious mind has kept it carefully in its store and
is ready to supply us when consciousness has need for it.

Surely if we think how this, our subconscious mind, is able to hold all
our memories and all our learning, and how it transacts all the work of
controlling our useful actions and of bringing up the right ideas, we
may well acknowledge that compared with it our conscious life is rather
a small part. It is as with the iceberg in the ocean; we know that on