the murder, there is noticed confusion and delay, you may be sure that
the conscious mind is interfering with the subconscious mind. The
difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind is always
possible to detect, and if you are permitted to be thorough in your
experiments, you can make certain what is in the subconscious mind that
the conscious mind is trying to conceal.
Here, as everywhere in life, knowledge is power, and expert knowledge
confers mastery over the shrewdest untrained mind. The only trouble is
that under our present social system the trained mind is very apt to be
working in the interest of class privilege. The psychologist who is
employed by a great corporation, or by a police department, may be as
little worthy of trust as a chemist who is engaged in making poison
gases to be used by capitalist imperialism for the extermination of its
rebellious slaves. But what this proves is not that scientific knowledge
is untrustworthy, but merely that the workers must acquire it, they must
have their own organizations and their own experiments in every field.
To give knowledge to the masses of mankind, slow and painful as the
process seems, is now the most important task confronting the
enlightened thinker.
The method of psychoanalysis gives us also much insight into the
phenomena of genius, and the hope that we may ultimately come to
understand it. At present we are embarrassed because genius is so often
closely allied to eccentricity; the supernormal appears in connection
with the subnormal--and it is often hard to tell them apart. Great poets
and painters in revolt against a world of smug commercialism, adopt
irresponsibility as their religion; they live in a world of their own,
they dress like freaks, they refuse to pay their debts, or to be true to
their wives. They are followed by a host of disciples, who adopt the
defects of the master as a substitute for his qualities. And so there
grows up a perverted notion of what genius is, and wholly false
standards of artistic quality. There is nothing mankind needs more than
sure and exact tests of mental superiority; not merely the ability to
acquire languages and to solve mathematical equations, but the ability
to carry in the mind intense emotions, while at the same time shaping
and organizing them by the logical faculty, selecting masses of facts
and weaving them into a pattern calculated to awaken the emotion in
others. This is the last and greatest work of the human spirit, and to
select the men who can do it, and foster their activity, is the ultimate
purpose of all true science.
CHAPTER XVII
THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND
(Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to preserve and
develop its powers for the protection of our lives and the lives of
all men.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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