er than mere sense data. We--meaning every member of every sapient
race--think consciously, and we know what we are thinking. This is not to
say that all our mental activity is conscious. The science of psychology
is based, to a large extent, upon our realization that only a small
portion of our mental activity occurs above the level of consciousness,
and for centuries we have been diagraming the mind as an iceberg,
one-tenth exposed and nine-tenths submerged. The art of psychiatry
consists largely in bringing into consciousness some of the content of
this submerged nine-tenths, and as a practitioner I can testify to its
difficulty and uncertainty.

"We are so habituated to conscious thought that when we reach some
conclusion by any nonconscious process, we speak of it as a 'hunch,' or an
'intuition,' and question its validity. We are so habituated to acting
upon consciously formed decisions that we must laboriously acquire, by
systematic drill, those automatic responses upon which we depend for
survival in combat or other emergencies. And we are by nature so unaware
of this vast submerged mental area that it was not until the first century
Pre-Atomic that its existence was more than vaguely suspected, and its
nature is still the subject of acrimonious professional disputes."

There had been a few of those, off and on, during the past four days, too.

"If we depict sapient mentation as an iceberg, we might depict nonsapient
mentation as the sunlight reflected from its surface. This is a
considerably less exact analogy; while the nonsapient mind deals,
consciously, with nothing but present sense data, there is a considerable
absorption and re-emission of subconscious memories. Also, there are
occasional flashes of what must be conscious mental activity, in dealing
with some novel situation. Dr. van Riebeek, who is especially interested
in the evolutionary aspect of the question, suggests that the introduction
of novelty because of drastic environmental changes may have forced
nonsapient beings into more or less sustained conscious thinking and so
initiated mental habits which, in time, gave rise to true sapience.

"The sapient mind not only thinks consciously by habit, but it thinks in
connected sequence. It associates one thing with another. It reasons
logically, and forms conclusions, and uses those conclusions as premises
from which to arrive at further conclusions. It groups associations
together, and generalizes.