Recognized facts in common experience only need be appealed to, though different values will have to be placed upon some of these facts as their importance is made plain.
We begin with the fact of consciousness. What it is, we do not know. What it means and does, we know very largely and broadly. In itself, it is purely passive. It never acts. Like space, it is the “all container.” It is the background, the theatre of our intelligence.
With the individual intelligence, plus, or with consciousness, we have awareness. This is perception, or cognition, still negative.
These basic conditions, faculties and capacities, are like a company of soldiers on parade. Now comes the “word of command”—Attention!
Latent consciousness—awareness—now becomes concentrated, focalized on one point, one feeling, or emotion, or act. The soldiers “dress up,” glance down the line, and are ready to act. Then comes the action, the movement, the drill, or the fight.
The drill master is also a soldier, but he is in command. He is called the Will. Without him and his recognized authority, the soldiers may be a mob, or a rabble. With him, they “fall in line,” give “attention,” “dress up,” and are ready to act.
These are facts, and are basic and primary in our conscious awareness and attention in consciousness; the one negative, though inclusive; the other positive, and motor, or active.
In his “Psychotherapy” under the heading “The Subconscious,” Münsterberg has much to say upon the meaning and differentiation of awareness, attention, and recognition, but he fails to point out in direct relation, at this point, the primary power—the Will, moved by the Individual Intelligence.
Later in his work the will is recognized and frequently referred to, but from beginning to end he makes it incidental, rather than basic. When he comes to broad groups of psychic phenomena, or pathological symptoms, the sounding board of Rational Volition is cracked and there is where hypnosis slips in.
Broad as he has laid his foundations in physical and physiological synthesis, he loses sight of its importance in the psychological; regarding as an incident that which is a basic principle of prime importance. Schopenhauer went, perhaps, as far to the opposite extreme. Perhaps “the truth will be found in the middle of the road.”