Our instincts and unguided passions,
the features which most identify us with the physical world, are
coming more and more to be the subjects of modern poetry.
IV
Nature, meanwhile, that part of the universe which is not consciously
guided, has become within a century our favorite field of scientific
study. The very word science is popularly appropriated to naturalistic
investigation. Of course this is a perversion. Originally it was
believed that the proper study of mankind was man. And probably we
should all still acknowledge that the study of personal structure is
as truly science as study of the structure of physical objects. Yet so
powerfully is the tide setting toward reverence for the unconscious
and the sub-conscious that science, our word for knowledge, has lost
its universality and has taken on an almost exclusively physical
character.
Perhaps there was only one farther step possible. Philosophy itself,
the study of mind, might be regarded as a study of the unconscious.
And this step has been taken. Books now bear the paradoxical title
"Philosophy of the Unconscious," and investigation of the sub-
conscious processes is perhaps the most distinctive trait of
philosophy to-day. More and more it is believed that we cannot
adequately explore a person without probing beneath consciousness.
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