Having established so much, we can really approach the unconscious. By the unconscious we wish to indicate that essential unique nature of every individual creature, which is, by its very nature, unanalyzable, undefinable, inconceivable. It cannot be conceived, it can only be experienced, in every single instance. And being inconceivable, we will call it the unconscious. As a matter of fact, soul would be a better word. By the unconscious we do mean the soul. But the word soul has been vitiated by the idealistic use, until nowadays it means only that which a man conceives himself to be. And that which a man conceives himself to be is something far different from his true unconscious. So we must relinquish the ideal word soul.
If, however, the unconscious is inconceivable, how do we know it at all? We know it by direct experience. All the best part of knowledge is inconceivable. We know the sun. But we cannot conceive the sun, unless we are willing to accept some theory of burning gases, some cause-and-effect nonsense. And even if we do have a mental conception of the sun as a sphere of blazing gas—which it certainly isn’t—we are just as far from knowing what blaze is. Knowledge is always a matter of whole experience, what St. Paul calls knowing in full, and never a matter of mental conception merely. This is indeed the point of all full knowledge: that it is contained mainly within the unconscious, its mental or conscious reference being only a sort of extract or shadow.
It is necessary for us to know the unconscious, or we cannot live, just as it is necessary for us to know the sun. But we need not explain the unconscious, any more than we need explain the sun. We can’t do either, anyway. We know the sun by beholding him and watching his motions and feeling his changing power. The same with the unconscious. We watch it in all its manifestations, its unfolding incarnations. We watch it in all its processes and its unaccountable evolutions, and these we register.
For though the unconscious is the creative element, and though, like the soul, it is beyond all law of cause and effect in its totality, yet in its processes of self-realization it follows the laws of cause and effect. The processes of cause and effect are indeed part of the working out of this incomprehensible self-realization of the individual unconscious. The great laws of the universe are no more than the fixed habits of the living unconscious.
What we must needs do is to try to trace still further the habits of the true unconscious, and by mental recognition of these habits break the limits which we have imposed on the movement of the unconscious. For the whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious. We have to try to recognize the true nature and then leave the unconscious itself to prompt new movement and new being—the creative progress.
What we are suffering from now is the restriction of the unconscious within certain ideal limits. The more we force the ideal the more we rupture the true movement. Once we can admit the known, but incomprehensible, presence of the integral unconscious; once we can trace it home in ourselves and follow its first revealed movements; once we know how it habitually unfolds itself; once we can scientifically determine its laws and processes in ourselves: then at last we can begin to live from the spontaneous initial prompting, instead of from the dead machine-principles of ideas and ideals. There is a whole science of the creative unconscious, the unconscious in its law-abiding activities. And of this science we do not even know the first term. Yes, when we know that the unconscious appears by creation, as a new individual reality in every newly-fertilized germ-cell, then we know the very first item of the new science. But it needs a super-scientific grace before we can admit this first new item of knowledge. It means that science abandons its intellectualist position and embraces the old religious faculty. But it does not thereby become less scientific, it only becomes at last complete in knowledge.
CHAPTER III
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS
It is useless to try to determine what is consciousness or what is knowledge. Who cares anyhow, since we know without definitions. But what we fail to know, yet what we must know, is the nature of the pristine consciousness which lies integral and progressive within every functioning organism. The brain is the seat of the ideal consciousness. And ideal consciousness is only the dead end of consciousness, the spun silk. The vast bulk of consciousness is non-cerebral. It is the sap of our life, of all life.
We are forced to attribute to a star-fish, or to a nettle, its own peculiar and integral consciousness. This throws us at once out of the ideal castle of the brain into the flux of sap-consciousness. But let us not jump too far in one bound. Let us refrain from taking a sheer leap down the abyss of consciousness, down to the invertebrates and the protococci. Let us cautiously scramble down the human declivities. Or rather let us try to start somewhere near the foot of the calvary of human consciousness. Let us consider the child in the womb. Is the fœtus conscious? It must be, since it carries on an independent and progressive self-development. This consciousness obviously cannot be ideal, cannot be cerebral, since it precedes any vestige of cerebration. And yet it is an integral, individual consciousness, having its own single purpose and progression. Where can it be centered, how can it operate, before even nerves are formed? For it does steadily and persistently operate, even spinning the nerves and brain as a web for its own motion, like some subtle spider.
What is the spinning spider of the first human consciousness—or rather, where is the center at which this consciousness lies and spins? Since there must be a center of consciousness in the tiny fœtus, it must have been there from the very beginning. There it must have been, in the first fused nucleus of the ovule. And if we could but watch this prime nucleus, we should no doubt realize that throughout all the long and incalculable history of the individual it still remains central and prime, the source and clue of the living unconscious, the origin. As in the first moment of conception, so to the end of life in the individual, the first nucleus remains the creative-productive center, the quick, both of consciousness and of organic development.