=Personality as the survival of organized antecedent experiences.=—Of course all our past mental experiences do not persist as organized complexes. The latter, after they have served their purpose, tend to become disaggregated, just as printer’s type is disaggregated or distributed after it has served its purpose in printing. In the organization and development of personality the elements of the mental experiences become sifted, as it were. Normally, in the adaptation of the individual to the environment, the unessential and useless, the intermediate steps leading to the final and useful, tend to drop out without leaving surviving residua, while the essential and useful tend to remain as memories capable of recall. In the unconscious these remain more or less permanently fixed as limited ideas, sentiments, and systems of complexes. Further, those complexes of experiences which persist not only provide the material for our memories, but tend, consciously or unconsciously, to shape the judgments, beliefs, convictions, habits, and tendencies of our mental lives. Whence they came, how they were born, we have long ceased to remember. We often arrive at conclusions which we imagine in our ignorance we have constructed at the moment unaided out of our inner consciousness. In one sense this is true, but that inner consciousness has been largely determined by the vestiges furnished by forgotten experiences. Many of these we imbibed from our environment and the experiences of our fellows; in this sense we are all plagiarists of the past. Furthermore, we react, to a large extent, to our environment in a way that we do not thoroughly understand because these reactions are determined by the impulses of unconscious complexes organized with innate dispositions. Indeed, our reactions to the environment, our moral and social conduct, the affective reactions of our sentiments, instincts, feelings, and other conative tendencies, our “habits,” judgments, points of view, and attitudes of mind—all that we term character and personality—are predetermined by the mental experiences of the past by which they are developed, organized, and conserved in the unconscious. Otherwise all would be chaos. We are thus the offspring of our past and the past is the present. This same principle underlies what is called the “social conscience,” the “civic” and “national conscience,” patriotism, public opinion, what the Germans call “Sittlichkeit,” the war attitude of mind, etc. All these mental attitudes may be reduced to common habits of thought and conduct derived from mental experiences common to a given community and conserved as complexes in the unconscious of the several individuals of the community.[153]