We have then this picture of a precarious and rather unstable self in relation to an unconscious which is not shut in at the lower levels, or at the upper levels either, but is open at both ends, so that communications with other minds or a Mind outside itself are possible. This leaves us in an uncomfortable philosophical position, because such a conception just doesn’t fit satisfactorily into the generally accepted world picture at the present time. The problem is being discussed by two eminent contemporary philosophers, C. D. Broad of Cambridge and H. Haverley Price of Oxford, neither of whom has come up with a satisfactory answer.
At the moment, then, we have to accept a kind of ambivalent notion about human nature. For most practical purposes we have to think in terms of something like a neutral monism, with the mind and body being aspects of the same substance. But we also have to think in the light of the facts of parapsychology, that to some extent mind is independent of body and can exist in a kind of psychic medium; that ideas may have a life of their own and may enter our idea system in a way which is very peculiar and difficult to understand; and that ideas may perhaps persist in existing long after the bodies connected with the minds in which the ideas were originally invented have died. There may be a kind of reservoir of this mental life into which we plunge; and above this, enveloping it and interpenetrating it, we may also have to postulate something which William James spoke of as ‘cosmic consciousness’ and which Bergson called ‘Mind’.
I will leave this subject on this very unsatisfactory note, as an unresolved philosophical problem, for the good reason that I don’t know how to resolve it and I don’t think at present anybody else knows how to resolve it. But I feel quite sure that it will be resolved sooner or later. Meanwhile, we have to go on as best we may with this oddly anomalous situation in which we find ourselves.
The end
