Such complicated processes go down to the simplest operations. Aubert indicates, for example, that in riding a horse at gallop you jump and only later observe whether you have jumped to the right or the left. And the physician Förster told Aubert that his patients often did not know how to look toward right or left. At the same time, everybody remembers how when he is doing it unconsciously, and it may often be observed that people have to make the sign of the cross, or the gesture of eating in order to discover what is right and what left, although they are unconsciously quite certain of these directions. Still broader activities are bound up with this unconscious psychosis, activities for us of importance when the accused later give us different and better explanations than at the beginning, and when they have not had the opportunity to study the case out and make additional discoveries, or to think it over in the mean time. They then say honestly that the new, really probable exposition has suddenly occurred to them. As a rule we do not believe such statements, and we are wrong, for even when this sudden vision appears improbable and not easily realizable, the witnesses have explained it in this way only because they do not know the psychological process, which, as a matter of fact, consisted of subconscious thinking. The brain does not merely receive impressions unconsciously, it registers them without the co-operation of consciousness, works them over unconsciously, awakens the latent residua without the help of consciousness, and reacts like an organ endowed with organic life toward the inner stimuli which it receives from other parts of the body. That this also influences the activity of the imagination, Goethe has indicated in his statement to Schiller: “Impressions must work silently in me for a very long time before they show themselves willing to be used poetically.” In other respects everybody knows something about this unconscious intellectual activity. Frequently we plague ourselves with the attempt to bring order into the flow of ideas--and we fail. Then the next time, without our having thought of the matter in the interval, we find everything smooth and clear. It is on this fact that the various popular maxims rest, e.g., to think a thing over, or to sleep on it, etc. The unconscious activity of thought has a great share in what has been thought out.