understood that this causal aspect itself is demanded by certain
purposes of life. The oratory of those who denounce the physiological
theories as lacking idealism in reality undermines true moral
philosophy. There is no idealism which can really flourish merely by
ignoring the progress of science and confusing the issues. The true
values of the higher life cannot be safely protected by that thoughtless
idealism which draws its life from vagueness and which therefore has to
be afraid of every new discovery in scientific psychology. Our real
ideals do not lie at all in the sphere in which the problem of causally
explaining the psychological phenomena arises.

Our conscious experiences are thus indeed not only here and there, but
usually the products of chains of processes which go on entirely on the
physiological side. We have no reason at all to seek for those preceding
actions any mental accompaniment outside of consciousness, that means,
any subconscious mental states. Then, of course, this physiological
explanation also covers entirely those after-effects of earlier
experiences, especially emotional experiences, which the physician
nowadays likes to call subconscious "complexes." We shall see what an
important role belongs to these facts, especially in the treatment of
hysteria and psychasthenia, but the interpretation again ought to avoid
all playing with the conception of the subconscious. Emotional
experiences may produce there some strong stable dispositions in the
brain system which become mischievous in reenforcing or inhibiting
certain thoughts and actions without awakening directly conscious
experiences. The whole psychological switch system may have been brought
into disorder by such abnormal setting of certain parts, but the
connection of each resulting accident with the primary emotional
disturbances does not contradict the fact that all the causes lie
entirely in disturbances of the central paths. It is a change in the
neurons and their connections. To discover it we may have to go back to
early conscious experiences, but in the process itself there is no
mental factor, and therefore no subconscious emotion is responsible for
the mischief carried out.

Both groups of facts which we have studied so far, have dealt with
processes which were indeed not conscious but which we had no right to
call subconscious inasmuch as they contained no mental process at all
but only physiological dispositions and actions.