Note F (305). Jung (Jb., Ill, p. 171) refers to Maeterlinck’s “inconscient supérieur” (in “La Sagesse et la Destinée”) as a prospective potentiality of subliminal combinations. He comments on it as follows: “I shall not be spared the reproach of mysticism. Perhaps the matter should none the less be pondered: doubtless the unconscious contains the psychological combinations that do not reach the liminal value of consciousness. Analysis resolves these combinations into their historical determinants for that is one of the essential tasks of analysis, i.e., to render powerless by disconnecting them, the obsessions of the complexes that are concurrent with the purposeful conduct of life. History is ignorant of two kinds of things: what is hidden in the past and what is hidden in the future. Both are probably to be attained with a certain measure of probability, the former as a postulate, the latter as a historical prognosis. In so far as to-morrow is contained in to-day, and all the warp of the future already laid, a deepened knowledge of the present could make possible a more or less wide-reaching and sure prognosis of the future. If we transfer this reasoning, as Kant has already done, to the psychologic, the following things must result; just as memory traces, which have demonstrably become subliminal, are still accessible to the unconscious, so also are certain very fine subliminal combinations showing a forward tendency, which are of the greatest possible significance for future occurrences in so far as the latter are conditioned by our psychology. But just as the science of history troubles itself little about the future combinations which are rather the object of politics, just so little are the psychological combinations the object of the analysis, but would be rather the object of an infinitely refined psychological synthesis, which should know how to follow the natural currents of the libido. We cannot do this, but probably the unconscious can, for the process takes place there, and it appears as if from time to time in certain cases significant fragments of this work, at least in dreams, come to light, whence came the prophetic interpretation of dreams long claimed by superstition. The aversion of the exact [sciences] of to-day against that sort of thought-process which is hardly to be called phantastic is only an overcompensation of the thousands of years old but all too great inclination of man to believe in soothsaying.”