years the
science has undergone a great change. A revolution has taken place in
it which seems likely to provoke a revolution equally profound in the
wider limits of our common life. From a preoccupation with the
conscious it has turned to the Unconscious (or subconscious), to the
vast area of mental activity which exists outside the circle of our
awareness. In doing so it has grasped at the very roots of life
itself, has groped down to the depths where the "life-force," the elan
vital, touches our individual being. What this may entail in the
future we can only dimly guess. Just as the discovery of America
altered the balance of the Old World, shifting it westward to the
shores of the Atlantic, so the discovery and investigation of the
Unconscious seems destined to shift the balance of human life.

Obviously, this is no place to embark on the discussion of a subject of
such extreme complexity. The investigation of the Unconscious is a
science in itself, in which different schools of thought are seeking to
disengage a basis of fact from conflicting and daily changing theories.
But there is a certain body of fact, experimentally proven, on which
the authorities agree, and of this we quote a few features which
directly interest us as students of autosuggestion.

The Unconscious is the storehouse of memory, where every impression we
receive from earliest infancy to the last hour of life is recorded with
the minutest accuracy. These memories, however, are not inert and
quiescent, like the marks on the vulcanite records of a gramophone;
they are vitally active, each one forming a thread in the texture of
our personality. The sum of all these impressions is the man himself,
the ego, the form through which the general life is individualised.
The outer man is but a mask; the real self dwells behind the veil of
the Unconscious.

The Unconscious is also a power-house. It is dominated by feeling, and
feeling is the force which impels our lives. It provides the energy
for conscious thought and action, and for the performance of the vital
processes of the body.

Finally the Unconscious plays the part of supervisor over our physical
processes. Digestion, assimilation, the circulation of the blood, the
action of the lungs, the kidneys and all the vital organs are
controlled by its agency. Our organism is not a clockwork machine
which once wound up will run of itself. Its processes in all their
complexity are supervi