§ 77. =Consciousness and The Subconscious.=—“Consciousness,” says Professor Ward, “is the vaguest, most protean, and most treacherous of psychological terms”; and Bain, writing in 1880, distinguished no less than thirteen meanings of the word; he could find more to-day! The =ambiguity= of the term seems to be due, in the last resort, to _the running together of two fundamental meanings_, the one of which is scientific or psychological, the other logical or philosophical. _In the latter, the logical meaning, consciousness is awareness or knowledge_, and ‘conscious of’ means ‘aware of’; _in the former, the scientific meaning, consciousness is mental experience_, experience regarded from the psychological point of view, and one can no more use the phrase ‘conscious of’ than one can use ‘mental of.’ If you think how natural it is to say ‘I was conscious of so-and-so,’ you will realise that the logical meaning is generally current; and if you remember that we have the terms ‘mind,’ ‘mental process,’ as names of mental experience, you will see that in psychology the word ‘consciousness’ is unnecessary; we have, in fact, not used it in this book,—until we came upon the popular expression ‘self-consciousness’ in § 76. We have avoided the word, however, not only because it is unnecessary, but also because the logical or philosophical meaning that it tends to suggest is directly harmful in psychology. For _the psychologist has nothing in the world to do with knowledge or awareness_; he stands, in this regard, upon precisely the same level as the physicist or the chemist. Look up the word _atom_ in a dictionary; you find, perhaps, that it is ‘an ultimate indivisible particle of matter’; and you would smile if you read ‘knowledge of an ultimate indivisible particle of matter.’ Look up _metal_; and you find ‘an elementary substance possessing such and such properties’; you would think it absurd to say ‘an awareness of an elementary substance’ possessing those properties. But now think of _sensation_, which is an elementary mental process (p. 65): you would probably not smile if you found ‘the first stage of knowledge; the elementary way of knowing some phenomenon of the outside world’; and that is because you are thoroughly accustomed to regard consciousness as awareness, and conscious processes as processes which are aware of something beyond themselves. Yet it is every whit as absurd, from the scientific point of view, to make sensation a ‘stage of knowledge’ or a ‘way of knowing’ as it is to define the atom as ‘knowledge’ or the metal as ‘an awareness.’ Science takes experience for granted, deals with the nature of things given (p. 4); so that questions about ‘knowing’ or ‘being aware of’ lie beyond the range of science, whether the particular science is psychology or physics.