In the late nineteenth century, the intellectual and scientific climate for physiological psychology in Britain turned inhospitable. One reason for this change was the increasing popularity of new-Hegelianism and other strains of German Idealism, which lessened interest in the largely empiricist-based new psychology. A second, perhaps more important factor, was that psychologists elsewhere, especially in Germany and the United States, were outstripping British psychologists experimentally. Even the literary community, with a few notable exceptions, turned against some of the central ideas of physiological psychology. Walter Pater, for example, in the conclusion to The Renaissance, declaimed that “in a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.”1 Habit, instead of a tool for good action and a means to free the mind for higher activity, came to be seen as the source of prejudice and of stereotyped belief and behavior.
Although the new psychology quickly became old in Britain, it had a significant afterlife in the United States. Psycho-physiological discourse crossed the Atlantic and was developed during the last two decades of the nineteenth century by some of the founding fathers of American psychology, notably William James, George Trumbull Ladd, and James Mark Baldwin.2 It is possible that the British movement provided the point of departure and the conceptual framework for American contributions to psychology: the essential terms of American psychology were set by its British and not, as is often assumed, by its German predecessors. Many of the ideas that we normally attribute to James, for example—from the “stream of consciousness” to “ideomotor action,” to his concept of “selective interest” and “attention,” “habit” and the will—can be found in recognizable forms in the work of the British physiological psychologists. Victorian psychology helped to give American psychology its distinctive slant, namely its interest in pragmatic and education-focused approaches, marking its difference from the traditions of experimental psychology and psychoanalysis that became so strong in German-speaking countries.
One of the earliest to show the influence of the British movement on American thought was the country’s best-known doctor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, professor of physiology and anatomy, essayist, poet, and novelist. Holmes was instrumental in introducing the microscope to medical study in the United States, as William Carpenter had been in England.3 Holmes published a series of essays on new developments that placed him at the center of the national debates in a range of fields: medicine, natural science, psychology, and literature.4 In a letter to Holmes in 1874, Carpenter even credits him with coining the phrase “unconscious cerebration.”5 Holmes published a series of novels with medical themes, what he calls “medicated novels”: Elsie Venner (1861), The Guardian Angel (1867), and A Moral Antipathy (1885), each of which presents a character who poses diagnostic problems for the central doctor or physiologist figure to resolve.6 Holmes uses the condition of his characters to raise questions about psychological and physiological determinism and, as Peter Gibian writes, to “challenge generally conventional thinking about ‘the normal.’”7
The eponymous protagonist of Elsie Venner, for example, becomes a case study in responsibility.8 Elsie’s problem is that she sometimes seems to be taken over by a snake-like aspect of her personality; at such moments, she loses self-control.9 The central question of the novel is whether, as Holmes puts it, Elsie is “morally responsible for the ‘volitional’ aberrations” to which she is subject. In ways quite similar to his British contemporaries, Holmes explores the physiological cause of this slippage of her will in order to examine the relationship between physiological causation and moral responsibility.
Holmes particularly shares Henry James’s interest in kinds of awareness that are nonverbal. Like James, Holmes describes states of mind that are not part of “thought” or language. In The Guardian Angel (1867), for example, Holmes’s heroine experiences a moment of unconscious cerebration that is described through the metaphor of a developing photograph:
The artist who takes your photograph must carry you with him into his “developing” room, and he will give you a more exact illustration of the truth just mentioned. There is nothing to be seen on the glass just taken from the camera. But there is a potential, though invisible, picture hid in the creamy film which covers it. Watch him as he pours a wash over it, and you will see that the miracle wrought which is at once a surprise and a charm,—the sudden appearance of your own features where a moment before was a blank without a vestige of intelligence or beauty. In some such way the grave warnings of Master Byles Gridley had called up a fully shaped, but hitherto unworded, train of thought in the consciousness of Myrtle Hazard.10
Though invisible, the developing picture is already present in a fully formed potential state; like Myrtle’s process of recognition, it comes to view suddenly, “where a moment before was a blank.” Master Gridley, an aspiring physiological psychologist, articulates the theory of unconscious cerebration in his manuscript jottings for a book, “Thoughts on the Universe”:
The best thought, like the most perfect digestion, is done unconsciously.—Develop that.— Ideas at compound interest in the mind.—Be aye sticking in an idea,—while you’re sleeping it’ll be growing. Seed of a thought to-day,—flower to-morrow—next week—ten years from now, etc.—Article by and by for the … (404)
Gridley, who is himself “sticking in an idea,” has not managed to write a full treatise, but finds in the theory of unconscious cerebration the corroboration of his fantasy that his seed of thought—what Henry James calls the “germ”—will one day grow into a published article.
In a lecture titled “Mechanism in Thought and Morals” (1870), Holmes explicitly espouses the views of the physiological psychologists on reflexes: “The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes. Our definite ideas are stepping stones: how we get from one to the other, we do not know: something carries us; we do not take the step. … Some internal movement of which we are wholly unconscious, and which we know only by its ef-fect.”11 Using terms that recall Carpenter’s image of the free-reined horse, Holmes writes of train travel as a medium that allows new ideas to arrive unbidden:
Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni’s famous experiment,—fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer’s wagon,—all this without volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion as the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound up,—many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend, cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibus-team of every-day associations.12
Holmes anticipates the kind of “locomotive intoxication” that Henry James captures at the opening of The American, when Newman’s cab ride brings on his sudden idea. Just as Ernst Chladni’s plates transformed invisible but felt sound vibrations into a visible legible pattern on sand, Holmes describes his thoughts pleasantly coalescing into a pattern through the “mechanical impulses” of his brain.
One of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most famous students at Harvard Medical School was William James, who shared an intense interest in the British movement of physiological psychology. In the United States, William James became the most important disseminator of the new psychology, using it as a point of departure for his own ideas. In 1872, he used Carpenter’s Principles of Human Physiology as a textbook for the first course he taught.13 One year after Carpenter published Principles of Mental Physiology (1874), James taught a graduate course titled “The Relations between Physiology and Psychology,” in which he used Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology as a textbook.14 James not only used Carpenter’s Principles of Mental Physiology in his teaching in 1879 but in the same year he also wrote the first installment of the Principles of Psychology, an essay that later became the central chapter on “Will.” James’s earliest known publications, many of which are unsigned reviews, show that he was deeply interested in the British physiological psychologists: his third published piece, for example, was an unsigned review of “Recent Work on Mental Hygiene” (1874) for the Nation, in which he discusses Henry Maudsley and Carpenter.15 That same year he published a review solely on Carpenter’s Principles of Mental Physiology for the Atlantic Monthly.16 In 1875, he published a review of George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind, also in the Atlantic Monthly.17 Building on the work done in Britain, James began to articulate his own view on the topic of physiological psychology in his Lowell Institute lectures on “The Brain and the Mind” in 1878.18
Introductions to the Principles today claim that while the work is timeless, its physiology is outdated.19 It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate the importance of these elements drawn from the new psychology; they lie at the heart of William James’s exploration of the contest between contemporary physiological and philosophical views of the mind. James saw clearly that the main burden of physiological psychology was to dispute the purely mechanistic view of the mind, the “Automaton Theory.” He clung to his conviction in the efficacy of the mind, in the intuitive belief that our thoughts have something to do with the production of our actions. Carpenter offered James a useful model for his effort to maintain a role for volition in a physiological psychology. James was both impressed and dissatisfied with Carpenter’s arguments, eventually adopting and expanding Carpenter’s conception of “ideomotor action” as the basis for volition. Carpenter had argued that ideas could automatically produce action, without those actions being expressly willed. The “naive view,” according to which the will directly produced bodily movements, had to be discarded, James recognized.
In James’s elaboration of Carpenter’s notion, the will uses already existing automatisms by adding its weight, “selectively” strengthening or weakening already existing tendencies through the power of “attention.” Drawing on the same image of Chladni’s sand figures as Oliver Wendell Holmes had used in his description of the “train” of thought, James emphasizes that consciousness can direct the automatic mechanisms of the mind.
All the possibilities of representation, all the images are furnished by the brain. Consciousness produces nothing, it only alters the proportions. Even the miraculous action of free will can only consist in the quantitative reinforcement of representations already given qualitatively. A sonorous plate has no proper note of its own. It is most impossible by scraping it to reproduce twice an identical tone. The number of Chladni’s sand-figures it will furnish is as inexhaustible as the whimsies which may turn up in a brain. But as the physicist’s finger pressing the plate here or there determines nodal points that throw the sand into shapes of relative fixity, so may the accentuating finger of consciousness deal with the fluctuating eddies in the cerebral cortex.20
James was concerned with answering the same questions as Carpenter, and like Carpenter, he anchored the study of consciousness to experimental physiology and wanted to articulate a biologically grounded theory of mind that allowed for volition. He also turned to many of the same solutions as his predecessor, adopting the concepts of “ideomotor action,” “selection” and “attention,” and maintaining the importance of “habit” for psychology. In Varieties of Religious Experience, James also returns to some of the classic examples of the physiological psychologists to characterize the nature of the “gap” in our consciousness.
Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term. … Every one must know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one’s mind, striving to be filled out with words. (140)
James chooses the same kind of experience described by Frances Power Cobbe, Carpenter, and George Meredith of the mind’s search for an elusive name or idea, capturing also something of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s idea of feeling the internal movement of the unthought.
Particularly in his later work, James began to probe the sorts of questions about the range of modalities of consciousness that particularly characterized the treatment of the ideas of the new psychology in fiction, including the fiction of his brother Henry. William James invents several new phrases that seek to describe experiences related to unconscious cerebration, including “fields of consciousness,” “below the threshold,” “above the threshold,” “subconscious mental operations,” and “beyond the margin.” In The Will to Believe (1896), James compares the noncognitive realm of mental experience with light beyond the visible spectrum:
The ordinary consciousness Mr. Myers likens to the visible part of the solar spectrum; the total consciousness is like that spectrum prolonged by the inclusion of the ultrared and ultraviolet rays. In the psychic spectrum the “ultra” parts may embrace a far wider range, both of physiological and of psychical activity, than is open to our ordinary consciousness and memory.21
His metaphor captures the way in which there are types of mental activity that are invisible but nonetheless as real as ordinary consciousness. In Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James describes further what he calls the “field of consciousness”: “The important fact which this ‘field’ formula commemorates is the indetermination of the margin. Inattentively realized as is the matter which the margin contains, it is nevertheless there, and helps both to guide our behavior and to determine the next movement of our attention.”22
With the concept of the “field” and the “indetermination of the margin,” James expands the concept of consciousness in much the same way that Carpenter and Lewes sought to do. James similarly suggests that what is in or beyond the margin of consciousness—what we are not aware of—guides our behavior as well as the direction of our attention. Above all, James adopted the new psychology’s emphasis on the practical implications of psychological knowledge and its usefulness for the individual person. This tenet became a hallmark not just of Jamesian psychology but to some degree also of American psychology to the present day.
The most prominent legacy of the physiological psychologists in Britain is the work of D. H. Lawrence, who seeks to defend the idea of a “pristine unconscious” against the “sack of horrors” that, in his view, characterized Freud’s conception of the unconscious. In his Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence makes explicit some of the reasons for his resistance to “the Freudians,” whom he criticized above all for driving a wedge between the mind and the body.23 Drawing on the psycho-physiological language of “plexuses,” “ganglia,” “nerve-centres,” and “currents of feeling,” Lawrence uses physiological terms to create a new idiom for the nondeliberate, noncerebral, and nonverbal aspects of human experience. His use of this idiom links him with the British physiological psychologists along with the novelistic tradition that emerged from their work. Lawrence transforms the “sensational consciousness” and “body consciousness” of the physiological psychologists, for example, into the metaphorically rich phrase, “blood consciousness.”24 In asserting the vital role of the body, Lawrence has come to be seen as an outlier among his modernist contemporaries, whose hallmark has been taken by many to be a preoccupation with self-consciousness. As the Freudian idea of the unconscious gained greater popularity, Lawrence saw himself as a rival of Freud—“the psychiatric quack,” as he called him.25 In his attempt to recuperate a “pristine unconscious” as a part of a larger alternative view of the unconscious, Lawrence turned to the work of the physiological psychologists. The British mental scientists appealed to him for their claim that reflexive processes are the source not only of some of our most sophisticated thinking but also of some of our most moral behavior.26
Instead of “re-explaining Freud in terms of biology,” as one critic says of Lawrence, or of offering a reversal of Freud, even a revision of Freud, I believe Lawrence attempted to renew the intrinsic relation of body and mind. What critic James Cowan called Lawrence’s “anatomical nonsense,” may, then, be grounded in the views of late-nineteenth-century psychology, already increasingly outdated and forgotten.27 Many of the ideas developed from British physiological psychology can be found in Lawrence’s books on psychology as well as in his early literary writing, before he had much if any contact with Freudian psychoanalysis, and above all in his characteristic idiom of the body in his fiction. In an early letter to the artist Ernest Collings, he declares, for example: “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.”28 Drawing on the same image of the horse—more free without the bit and bridle of the intellect—used by Carpenter, Lawrence ascribes to blood and body the ability to believe, feel, and even to speak. There is undoubtedly a metaphoric richness in all of Lawrence’s descriptions of this type, yet he very likely also means this quite literally, in the spirit of the earlier physiological psychologists.
The psycho-physiologists, too, had insisted on the vital role of “feeling,” articulating emotional and physiological modes of cognition; they also declared this type of cognition in many ways superior to reason-based intellect. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, furthermore, Lawrence insists on the literalness of physiological descriptions of consciousness: “When the ancients located the first seat of consciousness in the heart, they were neither misguided nor playing with metaphor,” he claims.29 When he writes, for example, “Now I flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the parts,” he might be echoing the ideas of George Henry Lewes: “It is the man, and not the brain, that thinks; it is the organism as a whole, and not one organ, that feels and acts.”30 While asserting the importance of the body, Lawrence refuses a reductive physiological materialism. In an early letter to Bertrand Russell, Lawrence gives an account of a kind of nonmental consciousness: “Now I am convinced of what I believed when I was twenty—that there is another seat of consciousness than the brain and the nerve system: there is a blood-consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental consciousness.”31
For Lawrence the intuitive knowledge of the body, of “blood-consciousness,” is also potentially redemptive: think of Lady Chatterley’s assertion that “I believe in the resurrection of the Body,” Mrs Morel’s capacity to escape from the control of conscious will, or in The Trespasser (1912), the way Helena’s feet seem to move independently of her conscious will, freeing her from Siegmund’s embrace.32 Lady Chatterley, in a characteristic example, has difficulty understanding consciously her attraction for Mellors: “In spite of herself she had had a shock. After all, merely a man washing himself! Commonplace enough, Heaven knows … Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her in the middle of her body … It lay inside her. But with her mind she was inclined to ridicule.”33 Here, as so often in Lawrence’s fiction, the body has a truer knowledge than the mind. As he writes in his 1929 introduction to Pansies, he is striving to capture and explore bodies that are “sensual, instinctive, and intuitive.”34 Lawrence uses the language of neurological anatomy to develop a “language of the feelings” that can capture the nonmental and nonverbal modes of knowledge where “feeling” and “knowledge” intersect. In Women in Love, for example, we read that “black, electric comprehension … rapid vibrations ran through his blood and over his brain, he was no longer responsible … Every one of his limbs was turgid with electric force, and his back was tense like a tiger’s.”35 Birkin has become all reflex, revealing a nonmental, nonintellectual, and physical awareness that puts his sense of responsibility in abeyance.
Lawrence explores the implications that the primacy of this nonintellectual, primal, physical awareness has for volition. It is here that he sees the starkest difference between his views and those of his Freudian contemporaries. He insists that intuitive reflexive consciousness offers truer, fuller, and more pure knowledge and motive than the mind. His focus, he writes, is “true, pristine unconscious, in which all our genuine impulse arises—a very different affair from that sack of horrors which psychoanalysts would have us believe, he writes, is [the] source of motivity.”36 As we have seen, the British new psychologists had similarly maintained the purity of that inner world, arguing that it is the source not only of some of our most sophisticated problem solving but also of some of our most moral and creative behavior. Most closely related to the Victorian debate, however, is how Lawrence takes up the sensations and the implications of a muscular activity of the will. Early in Women in Love, for example, the sisters take up the question of the nature of voluntary and involuntary nervous control in their debate about Gerald’s shooting accident, in which his brother died: “Perhaps there was an unconscious will behind it,” says Ursula. Similarly—with shades of Middlemarch’s Madame Laure, the actress who claims that though her foot really slipped she “meant to do it”—when Birkin finds he has suddenly drunk a full glass of champagne before him, he wonders “‘Did I do it by accident, or on purpose?’ … And he decided that, according to the vulgar phrase, he had done it ‘accidentally on purpose.’”37 Lawrence returns repeatedly to the complex relationship between our unconscious motives and actions and our conscious behavior.
Not only prior to and separate from conscious intellectual awareness, “blood consciousness,” Lawrence claims, is “untranslatable” and inherently nonverbal. “The unconscious is never an abstraction, [is] never to be abstracted. It is never an ideal entity. It is always concrete,” he writes, by definition not to be captured directly in language.38 He is fascinated with the moment of recognition of the unconscious, the glimpses of instinctive knowledge: in his novels, he so often focuses on the process of continually becoming conscious of things one had not realized. He declares in the foreword to Women in Love: “This struggle for verbal consciousness should not be left out in art.”39 Lawrence complains that modern fiction and thought has bypassed this facet of consciousness, glorifying only the “mental consciousness,” in the place of “blood consciousness.” They fail to show “the whole consciousness of man working together in oneness: instinct, intuition, mind, intellect all fused into one complete consciousness.40 Lawrence’s references to “blood consciousness,” “ganglia,” and “nerve-centers,” often dismissed as esoteric references and metaphors, or simply as bad biology, should be seen as intrinsic to his larger artistic aims and interests: considering them as an engagement with British physiological psychology allows us to recognize their importance for our reading of Lawrence. Understanding not just the ways in which Lawrence sought to counter Freud, but also his rootedness in a British tradition of physiological psychology is, I believe, one step toward charting an alternative narrative of the history of the unconscious: a psychology beyond psychoanalysis.
A new field called “consciousness studies” has emerged in recent years, bringing together people working in philosophy of mind, neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science. One area of new research considers intuitive cognition mechanisms, types of mental processing that fall outside a narrow definition of reasoned thinking, variously called today “creative,” “quasi-rational,” “divergent,” “intuitive,” “tacit,” and “unconscious.”41 Such works as Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: Thinking without Thinking have brought some of this research to a broad readership. In ways that mirror the spread of ideas in the nineteenth century, cognitive science is increasingly permeating public discourse in the form of a “practical neuroscience” that serves as a guide for everyday living. With new tools, such as electroencephalography monitors and functional magnetic resonance imaging that allow scientists to measure brain activity, neuroscientists are working to identify the neural correlates of consciousness, starting to explain how physical events in the brain give rise to subjective experience. In doing so, they are taking up many of the same questions about consciousness as the Victorian physiological psychologists did, yet with an experimental sophistication that eluded their nineteenth-century counterparts.
The Victorian idea of “thinking without thinking” has perhaps most in common with today’s interest in rapid unconscious thought within the cognitive sciences. The nineteenth-century concept of unconscious cerebration is a portmanteau term that describes a group of nonanalytic decision methods, including, in today’s terminology, mental short cuts, internalized skills, what Gerd Gigerenzer calls “fast and frugal heuristics,” and what Antonio Damasio refers to as “somatic markers,” a sort of “gut feeling” or emotional encoding in the brain.42 These ideas today have led to a redefinition of the role of rationality within cognitive science, treading a path between irrationality and reason much like the one the Victorians sought. Nineteenth-century literature, both scientific and nonscientific, reflected a similar interest in articulating a way of knowing that transcends the limits of conscious thought and the directed pursuit of learning. Victorian writers such as Laycock and Carpenter advocated training and improvement of the mechanisms of “latent thought” in much the same way that cognitive scientists today are working toward articulating practical “heuristics” and theories of decision making that capitalize on the adaptive unconscious.
A primary goal of current research into consciousness is studying the relationship between neural events and consciousness.43 Such work has also renewed attention to questions central to the Victorian debates, such as the nature and experience of volition: the neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet, for example, showed that we unconsciously decide to act well before we think we have made the decision to act.44 As in the Victorian debates over decision making and reflex action, such findings suggest that we may know less than we think we do about our own minds and exert less control over them than we believe we do. Work on unconscious neural processes is offering increasingly detailed accounts of “implicit” capacities that can exert influence on behavior, such as habit and “blindsight,” the ability to perceive things using the brain’s subcortical—and not conscious—visual system.45 Cognitive neuroscience promises further experimental insights into the distinctions between implicit and explicit memory and deliberate and automatic action of the sort that lay at the heart of the Victorian debates.
The functional view of consciousness that I believe shapes Victorian psycho-physiology has striking similarities to the recent contemporary approach to the mind as an embodied dynamic system in philosophy and psychology.46 Attending to the way we as embodied organisms interact with an ever-changing environment, this view does not locate cognition “inside” the mind, brain, or nervous system. Rather, cognition is conceived as a dynamic, interactive process. Acknowledging the embodied and “situated” experience, this view asserts a reciprocal form of causality in which every part of a system is always present in each behavior of that system.47 Instead of dealing with static properties—individual components of the mind, or the structure of organs—their focus is on the changes of states over the course of time; in particular, functions. I have argued that some of the most exciting and comprehensive scientific revisions of the understanding of “thinking” in the Victorian period present a similar view: physiological psychologists emphasized dynamic processes and functions—the activity of the mind, rather than its structure or essence. As seen most clearly in the work of Herbert Spencer, mind was identified with motion, not with matter. The Victorians, too, considered mind, above all, in terms of an unfolding relationship of adaptation between the organism and its environment.
The engagement of Victorian novelists and scientists with the problems and potential of nonreasoned thought offers a fruitful basis for rethinking questions of consciousness today. I have shown how radically Victorian writers reconceptualized the mind, most notably by giving a significant role to unconscious and automatic processes. Both scientific and literary writers attempted to “thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought,” as George Eliot’s narrator in Daniel Deronda aims to do. The central question that I have considered is how Victorian narrative fiction put the epistemology of the new psychology and its interest in “thinking without thinking” to the test. I have shown how, for Victorians, fiction was seen to operate in a similar epistemological mode, granting special access to these aspects of mind and thereby becoming for readers a way of practicing and training lateral thinking. Cutting across different modes of investigation—literary and scientific—nineteenth-century writers worked in tandem to explore some of the most difficult questions about the nature of consciousness and unconsciousness—questions that still challenge us today.