We must infer the subconscious from what it does.  Things happen,—­there must be a cause.  Some of the things that happen presuppose imagination, reason, intelligence, will, emotion, desire, all the elements of mind.  We cannot see this mind, but we can see its products.  To deny the subconscious is to deny the artist while looking at his picture, to disbelieve in the poet while reading his poem, and to doubt the existence of the explosive while listening to the report.  The subconscious is an artist, a poet, and an explosive by turns.  If we deny its existence, a good portion of man’s doings are unintelligible.  If we admit it, many of his actions and his afflictions which have seemed absurd stand out in a new light as purposeful efforts with a real and adequate cause.

=The Submerged Nine Tenths.= The more deeply psychologists and physicians have studied into these things, the more certainly have they been forced to the conclusion that the conscious mind of man, the part that he can explore at will, is by far the smaller part of his personality.  Since this is to some people a rather startling proposition, we can do no better than quote the following statement from White on the relation of consciousness to the rest of the psychic life: 

Consciousness includes only that of which we are aware, while outside of this somewhat restricted area there lies a much wider area in which lie the deeper motives for conduct, and which not only operates to control conduct, but also dictates what may and what may not become conscious.  Stanley Hall has very forcibly put the matter by using the illustration of the iceberg.  Only one-tenth of the iceberg is visible above water; nine-tenths is beneath the surface.  It may appear in a given instance that the iceberg is being carried along by the prevailing winds and surface currents, but if we keep our eyes open we shall sooner or later see a berg going in the face of the wind, and, so, apparently putting to naught all the laws of aerodynamics.  We can understand this only when we come to realize that much the greater portion of the berg is beneath the surface and that it is moving in response to invisible forces addressed against this submerged portion.

Consciousness only arises late in the course of evolution and only in connection with adjustments that are relatively complex.  When the same or similar conditions in the environment are repeatedly presented to the organism so that it is called upon to react in a similar and almost identical way each time, there tends to be organized a mechanism of reaction which becomes more and more automatic and is accompanied by a state of mind of less and less awareness.[17]

[Footnote 17:  White:  Mechanisms of Character Formation.]