Conscience & Fanaticism: An Essay on Moral ValuesPitt-Rivers, George Henry Lane Fox
Philosophy
Conscience & Fanaticism: An Essay on Moral Values
Pitt-Rivers, George Henry Lane Fox
Conscience; Ethics; Fanaticism
Another writer in a recent publication makes use of an analogous
illustration by describing human personality as an iceberg, the great
bulk of which is always invisible and submerged.[45]
The matter is further complicated by the fact that within the domain of
the subconscious there exists a vitality which cannot be traced to a
cerebral or somatic source. Stated in broad terms it may be said that
mind, or the sum total of Personality, must be viewed in two
interactionary aspects: the primary consciousness and secondary
consciousness, or the conscious and the subconscious or subliminal or
(in a special sense) subjective, according to the various terms used by
different writers to express the same thing.
For the purpose of greater lucidity, it has usually been found that this
dual aspect of mind can be best expressed by treating the whole mental
organization as consisting of two minds, each endowed with separate and
distinct attributes and powers; each capable, under certain conditions,
of independent action. It may be that a truer idea would be conveyed if
the mind-whole was described as possessing certain attributes and powers
under some conditions, and certain other attributes and powers under
other conditions. As my object, here, is to enter no further into
psychological questions than is necessary for the elucidation of those
ethical considerations which are dependent upon them, I shall give a
short account of those theories which, in the light of present
knowledge, appear best founded and afford most assistance in connexion
with the subject of morality.
Thomas J. Hudson, whose hypothesis I shall make use of to illustrate my
meaning, assumed for practical purposes that man has two minds. In
making use to some extent of Hudson's theory, I do so not because it is
necessarily correct, for his hypothesis was, admittedly, to a certain
extent provisional; but because it was the first practical working
hypothesis on which all psychic and hypnotic phenomena could be based,
and because it has largely been used as a basis for subsequent
elaborations.
In 1892, Hudson, in his "Law of Psychic Phenomena," said: "In more
recent years the doctrine of duality of mind is beginning to be more
clearly defined, and it may now be said to constitute a cardinal
principle in the philosophy of many of the ablest exponents of the new
psychology." To-day when psychotherapeutics have claimed the attention
of students of pathology, and when at last the medical profession has
almost throughout enlisted the co-operation and help of hypnotism, there
are far fewer people who would deny the existence of that substratum of
consciousness, distinct from the manifestation of the normal waking
mind, which is so profitably studied in the phenomena of somnambulism,
hypnotism and lunacy.
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