The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

MODERN IDEAS OF CONDUCT

animus are loaded with false associations. Moreover these two things differ not in kind but in degree. For English use, we prefer to use anima for both sexes.

In the earlier psycho-analysis of both Freud and Adler, as we have said, the Unconscious was treated as largely or exclusively individual and its content was supposed to be merely personal experience, suppressed and forgotten. But Jung would insist upon a vast proportion of inherited. material in the unconscious. We cannot follow him all the way in this Lamarckian view. But though it seems impossible for ideas to be inherited as such, we can clearly inherit predispositions to particular ways of thinking. At their first onset in a human being’s life, many things are found to be attractive or repulsive in this way or that. Ideas are grasped or refused. The mind, one must conclude, is ready to receive or repel them. Just as all our brains and bodies are alike with small variations, so this “ general Unconscious,” this readiness to receive or resist, is alike for most members of our species.

On this sea of general unconscious preconception and sustained by it, floats our individual ego, with the persona it has gathered for itself in the full light of consciousness and its anima hidden below the surface. By such a figure—and again we remind ourselves and our readers that all this field of science is still at the metaphorical stage—we may convey this conception of the “collective Unconscious,” which all of us have practically in common. And from it also, just as much as from the suppressions of our own personal past, we draw values and dispositions for our dreams and imaginations and unwary actions ; some of us much more than others; we draw the forms of expression, the shapes in which we find ourselves disposed to clothe our gathering and accumulating personal response to the outer world.

The persona, says Jung further, is capable of “inflation ”°—that is to say, is capable of such an extension away beyond the natural ego into the collective Unconscious that the sense of personal identity becomes weakened and the individual confuses himself with his official functions or with the race or with the Deity. This inflation of the persona implies a process of devotion and self-forgetfulness. It may make a man a pedant or a saint. The anima may by a similar diffusion dissolve the boundaries of the ego in mystical ecstasies. “Inflation”? may have its desirable and admirable side; it is an open method of

escape from the distresses of individual frustration and it can be a method of reconciliation to honourable but contributory and inferior tasks. It has played and may still play a great part in the religious life. It may play an even greater part in the future development of our kind. A general inflation of the persona may be going on in most civilized communities.

So, very sketchily, we give the main lines of Dr. Jung’s account of the broad structure of our mental being. The reader must bear in mind that this is a speculative account. It is not an account of established and universally accepted views. But it marches with common experiences. It corresponds very closely to facts in the behaviour of people about us. What we are dealing with here is not so much science as thought on the borderland of science and literature. We give it because it is so richly suggestive, because it had at least the sort of truth that literature can convey, because it is interesting and helpful to record the vision of a particularly fine and powerful intelligence which has been devoted for many years to the task of peering into the teeming reflections and creations of the human mind.

It becomes manifest under such a scrutiny that, in the inner world, just as in the outer, the individuality comes and goes, that it changes, is now more and now less, now fainter and now intenser, that it assimilates and again rejects. We untrained people assert and believe so firmly in our complete unity and our unbroken identity because, when our identity weakens or changes or dissolves, we are by that very fact no longer there to observe and deny.

In the light of this shrewd rephrasing of conduct by Jung, we can speak of the conduct of life as the rule, development, and wary correction of the persona. When we talk of a man behaving well we mean that he is under the sway of an efficient and fine persona. A weak person is one with a fluctuating persona ; an impulsive man with poor self-control has a too vigorous anima. It is the disposition of most of us to rationalize the impulses that come up to effectiveness from the anima. We try to square them with the persona and may make considerable changes in the persona to do so. Clearly moral training and education are essentially attempts to mould the persona upon socially desirable lines, and most of the graver internal conflicts that give us hysteria, neurasthenia, and mental collapse are conflicts of the persona with the anima. Most, but not all, for both the anima and the persona may have

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