Editing The Catholic Church Reacts (section)

===MIND AND CONSCIOUSNESS===
In connection with the investigation of our mental operations there arises the question, whether these are to be deemed coextensive with consciousness. Are there unconscious mental processes? The problem under different forms has occupied the attention of philosophers from Leibniz to J. S. Mill, whilst in recent years the phenomena of hypnotism, "multiple personality", and abnormal forms of mental life have brought the question of the relation between the unconscious and the conscious processes in the human organism into greater prominence. That all forms of mental life, perception thought, feeling, and volition are profoundly affected in character by nervous processes and by vital activities, which do not emerge into the strata of conscious life, seems to be indisputably established. Whether however, unconscious processes which affect conclusions of the intellect and resolutions of the will, but are in themselves quite unconscious, should be called mental states, or conceived as acts of the mind, has been keenly disputed. In favour of the doctrine of unconscious mental processes have been urged the fact that many of our ordinary sensations arise out of an aggregate of impressions individually too faint to be separately perceivable, the fact that attention may reveal to us experiences previously unnoticed, the fact that unobserved trains of thought may result in sudden reminiscences, and that in abnormal mental conditions hypnotized, somnambulistic, and hysterical patients often accomplish difficult intellectual feats whilst remaining utterly unaware of the rational intermediate steps leading up to the final results. On the other side it is urged that most of those phenomena can be accounted for by merely subconscious processes which escape attention and are forgotten; or, at all events, by unconscious cerebration, the working out of purely physical nervous processes without any concomitant mental state till the final cerebral situation is reached, when the corresponding mental act is evoked. The dispute is probably, at least in part, grounded on differences of definition. If, however, the mind be identified with the soul, and if the latter be allowed to be the principle of vegetative life, there can be no valid reason for denying that the principle of our mental life may be also the subject of unconscious activities. But if we confine the term mind to the soul, viewed as conscious, or as the subject of intellectual operations, then by definition we exclude unconscious states from the sphere of mind. Still whatever terminology we may find it convenient to adopt, the fact remains, that our most purely intelectual operations are profoundly influenced by changes which take place below the surface of consciousness.
ORIGIN OF MENTAL LIFE

A related question is that of the simple or composite character of consciousness. Is mind, or conscious life, an amalgam or product of units which are not conscious? One response is offered in the "mind-stuff" or "mind-dust" theory. This is a necessary deduction from the extreme materialistic evolutionist hypothesis when it seeks to explain the origin of human minds in this universe. According to W. K. Clifford, who invented the term "mind-stuff", those who accept evolution must, for the sake of consistency, assume that there is attached to every particle of matter in the universe a bit of rudimentary feeling or intelligence, and "when the material molecules are so combined as to form the film on the under-side of a jelly fish, the elements of mind-stuff which go along with them are so combined as to form the faint beginnings of sentience. When the matter takes the complex form of the living human brain, the corresponding mind-stuff takes the form of human consciousness, having intelligence and volition" (Lectures and Essays, 284). Spencer and other thorough-going evolutionists are driven to a similar conclusion. But the true inference is rather, that the incredibility of the conclusion proves the untenableness of the materialistic form of evolution which these writers adopt. There is no evidence whatever of this universal mind-stuff which they postulate. It is of an inconceivable character. As Professor James says, to call it "nascent" consciousness is merely a verbal quibble which explains nothing. No multiplicity and no grouping or fusing of unconscious elements can be conceived as constituting an act of conscious intelligence. The unity and simplicity which characterize the simplest acts of the mind are incompatible with such a theory.