Furthermore, we react, to a large extent, to our environment in a way that we do not thoroughly understand because these reactions are determined by the impulses of unconscious complexes organized with innate dispositions. Indeed, our reactions to the environment, our moral and social conduct, the affective reactions of our sentiments, instincts, feelings, and other conative tendencies, our “habits,” judgments, points of view, and attitudes of mind—all that we term character and personality—are predetermined by the mental experiences of the past by which they are developed, organized, and conserved in the unconscious. Otherwise all would be chaos. We are thus the offspring of our past and the past is the present.
This same principle underlies what is called the “social conscience,” the “civic” and “national conscience,” patriotism, public opinion, what the Germans call “Sittlichkeit,” the war attitude of mind, etc. All these mental attitudes may be reduced to common habits of thought and conduct derived from mental experiences common to a given community and conserved as complexes in the unconscious of the several individuals of the community.[[153]]
Through education, whether scholastic, vocational, or social, we inherit the experiences of our predecessors and become “... the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.” But the conceptions of one age can never represent those of a preceding age. The veriest layman in science today could not entertain the conceptions underlying many hypotheses formulated by the wisest of the preceding age—of a Galileo, a Descartes, or Pascal. Lucretius, in the first century B. C., argued, with what for the time was great force, that the soul of man was corporeal and that it “must consist of very small seeds and be inwoven through veins and flesh and sinews; inasmuch as, after it has all withdrawn from the whole body the exterior contour of the limbs preserves itself entire and not a tittle of the weight is lost.”
Lucretius gave much thought to this problem, but to-day the least cultured person, who has never reflected at all on psychological matters, would recognize the foolishness of such a conception and reject the hypothesis.[[154]] He would call it common-sense which guided him, but common-sense depends upon the fact that in the unconscious lie memories, the reasons for and origin of which we do not remember; these nullify such an hypothesis. These contradicting ideas, sifted out of those belonging to the social education, have become fixed as dormant or organized memories, and determine the judgments and trends of the personal consciousness. These memory vestiges may work for good or evil, shape our personal consciousness into a useful or useless form, one that adapts or unfits the organism to its environment. In the latter case they drive the organism into the field of pathological psychology.
[138]. I am using this word in the general sense of any mental experience as in the common phrase, “the association of ideas,” and not in the restricted sense of Titchener as the equivalent of a perception.
[139]. I use this word “complex” in the general sense in which it is commonly used and not with the specific meaning given to it by the Zurich school, which limits it to a system of ideas to which a strong affective tone is attached and which, because of its personally distressing character, is repressed into the subconscious.
[140]. Which may be psychical, although not psychological.
[141]. Sisters of Napoleon, by M. Joseph Turquan.
[142]. McDougall (Social Psychology) regards jealousy as a complex emotional state in which anger, tender emotion, and other innate dispositions are factors.