I observed that the poor old War seemed to be getting blamed for a good deal that I was taught in my childhood was due to original sin.
“Oh, I’m not questioning your Calvinism. Original sin is always there, but the meaning of civilisation was that we had got it battened down under hatches, whereas now it’s getting its head up. But it isn’t only sin. It’s a dislocation of the mechanism of human reasoning, a general loosening of screws. Oddly enough, in spite of parrot-talk about shell-shock, the men who fought suffer less from it on the whole than other people. The classes that shirked the War are the worst—you see it in Ireland. Every doctor nowadays has got to be a bit of a mental pathologist. As I say, you can hardly take anything for granted, and if you want detective stories that are not childish fantasy you’ll have to invent a new kind. Better try your hand, Dick.”
“Not I. I’m a lover of sober facts.”
“But, hang it, man, the facts are no longer sober. I could tell you—” He paused and I was expecting a yarn, but he changed his mind.
“Take all this chatter about psychoanalysis. There’s nothing very new in the doctrine, but people are beginning to work it out into details, and making considerable asses of themselves in the process. It’s an awful thing when a scientific truth becomes the quarry of the half-baked. But as I say, the fact of the subconscious self is as certain as the existence of lungs and arteries.”
“I don’t believe that Dick has any subconscious self,” said Mary.
“Oh yes, he has. Only, people who have led his kind of life have their ordinary self so well managed and disciplined—their wits so much about them, as the phrase goes—that the subconscious rarely gets a show. But I bet if Dick took to thinking about his soul, which he never does, he would find some queer corners. Take my own case.” He turned towards me so that I had a full view of his candid eyes and hungry cheekbones which looked prodigious in the firelight. “I belong more or less to the same totem as you, but I’ve long been aware that I possessed a most curious kind of subconsciousness. I’ve a good memory and fair powers of observation, but they’re nothing to those of my subconscious self. Take any daily incident. I see and hear, say, about a twentieth part of the details and remember about a hundredth part—that is, assuming that there is nothing special to stimulate my interest. But my subconscious self sees and hears practically everything, and remembers most of it. Only I can’t use the memory, for I don’t know that I’ve got it, and can’t call it into being when I wish. But every now and then something happens to turn on the tap of the subconscious, and a thin trickle comes through. I find myself sometimes remembering names I was never aware of having heard, and little incidents and details I had never consciously noticed. Imagination, you will say; but it isn’t, for everything that that inner memory provides is exactly true. I’ve tested it. If I could only find some way of tapping it at will, I should be an uncommonly efficient fellow. Incidentally I should become the first scientist of the age, for the trouble with investigation and experiment is that the ordinary brain does not observe sufficiently keenly or remember the data sufficiently accurately.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “I’m not at all certain I haven’t noticed the same thing in myself. But what has that to do with the madness that you say is infecting the world?”
“Simply this. The barriers between the conscious and the subconscious have always been pretty stiff in the average man. But now with the general loosening of screws they are growing shaky and the two worlds are getting mixed. It is like two separate tanks of fluid, where the containing wall has worn into holes, and one is percolating into the other. The result is confusion, and, if the fluids are of a certain character, explosions. That is why I say that you can’t any longer take the clear psychology of most civilised human beings for granted. Something is welling up from primeval deeps to muddy it.”
“I don’t object to that,” I said. “We’ve overdone civilisation, and personally I’m all for a little barbarism. I want a simpler world.”
“Then you won’t get it,” said Greenslade. He had become very serious now, and was looking towards Mary as he talked. “The civilised is far simpler than the primeval. All history has been an effort to make definitions, clear rules of thought, clear rules of conduct, solid sanctions, by which we can conduct our life. These are the work of the conscious self. The subconscious is an elementary and lawless thing. If it intrudes on life two results must follow. There will be a weakening of the power of reasoning, which after all is the thing that brings men nearest to the Almighty. And there will be a failure of nerve.”
I got up to get a light, for I was beginning to feel depressed by the doctor’s diagnosis of our times. I don’t know whether he was altogether serious, for he presently started on fishing, which was one of his many hobbies. There was very fair dry-fly fishing to be had in
