a vague uneasiness coming into
consciousness, that I had passed the terrace. On asking the way, I found
it was so; and the turning was where the uneasiness began. The night
before was pitch dark, and very wet, and anything seen from a close
carriage was quite unconsciously impressed on my mind."
Prof. Kirchener says: "Our consciousness can only grasp one quite clear
idea at once. All other ideas are for the time somewhat obscure. They are
really existing, but only potentially for consciousness, _i.e.,_ they
hover, as it were, on our horizon, or beneath the threshold of
consciousness. The fact that former ideas suddenly return to
consciousness is simply explained by the fact that they have continued
psychic existence: and attention is sometimes voluntarily or
involuntarily turned away from the present, and the appearance of former
ideas is thus made possible."
Oliver Wendell Holmes says: "Our different ideas are stepping-stones; how
we get from one to another we do not know; something carries us. We (our
conscious selves) do not take the step. The creating and informing
spirit, which is _within_ us and not _of_ us, is recognized everywhere in
real life. It comes to us as a voice that will be heard; it tells us what
we must believe; it frames our sentences and we wonder at this visitor
who chooses our brain as his dwelling place."
Galton says: "I have desired to show how whole states of mental operation
that have lapsed out of ordinary consciousness, admit of being dragged
into light."
Montgomery says: "We are constantly aware that feelings emerge
unsolicited by any previous mental state, directly from the dark womb of
unconsciousness. Indeed all our most vivid feelings are thus mystically
derived. Suddenly a new irrelevant, unwilled, unlooked-for presence
intrudes itself into consciousness. Some inscrutable power causes it to
rise and enter the mental presence as a sensorial constituent. If this
vivid dependence on unconscious forces has to be conjectured with regard
to the most vivid mental occurrences, how much more must such a
sustaining foundation be postulated for those faint revivals of previous
sensations that so largely assist in making up our complex mental
presence!"
Sir Benjamin Brodie says: "It has often happened to me to have
accumulated a store of facts, but to have been able to proceed no
further. Then after an interval of time, I have found the obscurity and
confusion to have cleared away: the
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