VII
THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
VII
THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
Intellect, then, is only a part of the life-consciousness. Henri Bergson and William James have both agreed that the other parts deserve our respect, and demand the attention of all practical people. They are Instinctive Consciousness and Torpid Consciousness. Bergson, so well known on the Continent, gives in L’Evolution Créatrice a brilliant outline of the relations of the intellectual, instinctive, and torpid states. Briefly, he pictures vital consciousness as the centre from which the three diverge in different radiations. The intellect which covers an enormous field and can grapple successfully with the superficial appearances we call facts, finds its present culmination in mankind. The instinct which dawns in the consciousness as vision, and deals only with one or two things, but knows them perfectly through and through to their deepest causes, finds its culmination in insects, especially in the elaborate societies of ants and bees. The torpid state which, without external motion, like deep sleep, is most creatively powerful, most enduring, and most in touch with the first beginnings of organic life, finds its culmination in the vegetable kingdom. The psychologists’ idea, then, for the practical future of our race is that it should turn its attention to the cultivation of these two modes of consciousness which have hitherto been lamentably neglected in all schemes of education.
Bergson says that there are many questions the intellect can ask but can never answer, which the instinct could answer, but, unprompted by the intellect, would never ask.
The practical turn psychology has taken lately has a very deep significance for women. For the adolescent girl and the woman with child are the very types of the power of mysterious torpid consciousness which is so little understood by the most learned men. The ancients have believed that a mother’s impressions stamp themselves on the child and determine its type. I mean, for instance, that a woman surrounded by Burne-Jones’s pictures would be likely to have children resembling that type. The whole matter is one of the deepest interest, and one guiding principle stands out from all our uncertainties on the subject, which is, that a woman with child should not use up her vitality in other directions, that she should for the time being live the life of a fruit tree, and nourish herself, and sun herself without care and without intellectual distractions.