ness is the idea of the personality, which is certainly
a content. The personality, the actor of our actions, is thus never
anything but an object in psychology, and consciousness never anything
but a subject. Consciousness itself is thus in no way altered when the
idea of the personality is changing. Only if all this is carelessly
confused, if consciousness is sometimes treated as meaning subject of
consciousness, and at another time as meaning the content of
consciousness, and again at another time the unified organization of the
content, and at still another time the connection of the content with
the personality, and if finally all that is confused with the purposive
reality of the immediate personal life--only then, do we find the way
open to those tempting theories of the subconscious personality.

* * * * *

If, instead, we stick to the scientific view, we find the following
facts. First, we have everywhere with us the fact that the earlier
experiences may again enter into consciousness as memory images or as
imaginative ideas, that is, in the order in which they are experienced a
long time before or in a new order, either with a feeling of
acquaintance or without it. Certainly at no time is the millionth part
of what we may be able to reproduce present in our consciousness. Where
are those words of the language, those faces of our friends, those
landscapes, and those thoughts; where have they lingered in the time of
their seclusion? Scientific psychology has no right to propose any other
theory as explanation but that no mental states at all remain and that
all which remained was the disposition of physiological centers. When I
coupled the impression of a man with the sound of his name, a certain
excitement of my visual centers occurred together with the excitement of
my acoustical centers; the connecting paths became paths of least
resistance, and any subsequent excitement of the one cell group now
flows over into the other. It is the duty of physiology to elaborate
such a clumsy scheme and to make us understand in detail how those
processes in the neurons can occur and it is not the duty of psychology
to develop detailed physiological hypotheses. Psychology has to be
satisfied with the fact that all the requirements of the case can be
furnished by principle through physiological explanation. Least of all
ought we to be discouraged by the mere complexity of the process. If a
simp