Applied Psychology for Nurses | Page 7

the external world. But it is, primarily and in its
elements, the brain evolved through thousands of centuries of pushing
up to man's level through the sea of animal life, and hundreds of
centuries more of the development of man's brain to its present
complete mechanism through experience with constantly changing
environment.
Hence, when the baby sees light and responds by tightly shutting his
eyes, then later by opening them to investigate, his sensation is what it
is because through the aëons of the past man has established a certain
relation to light through experiencing it. To go further than this, and to
find the very beginning, how the first created life came to respond to
environment at all, is to go beyond the realm of the actually known.
But that he did once first experience his environment, and establish a
reaction that is now racial, we know.
So our baby soon shows certain "instinctive" reactions. He reaches out
to grasp. He sucks, he cries, he looks at light and bright objects in
preference to dark, he is carrying out the history of his race, but is
making it personal. He has evolved a new life, but all his ancestors
make its foundation. The personal element, added to his heritage, has
made him different from any and all of his forebears. But he can have
no consciousness except as a bit from the vast inherited accumulation

of the past of his ancestors, of all the race, steps forth to meet a new
environment.
And again you ask, "How came the first consciousness?"
And again I answer, "It is as far back as the first created or evolved
organism which could respond in any way to a material world; and only
metaphysics and the God behind metaphysics can say."
We only know that careful laboratory work in psychology--experiments
on the unconscious--today prove that our conscious life is what it is,
because of: first, what is stored away in the unconscious (i. e., what all
our past life and the past life of the race has put there); second, because
of what we have accepted from our environment; and this comprises
our material, intellectual, social, and spiritual environment.
CONSCIOUSNESS IS COMPLEX
The one fact we want at this stage of our inquiry is simply this: that
consciousness, awaking at birth, very soon becomes complex. However
single and simple in content immediate consciousness may be, it is so
intimately linked with all preceding experience that a pure sensation is
probably never known after the first second of life. As the sensation is
registered it becomes a basis for comparison. That first sensation,
perhaps, was just a feeling of something. The next is a feeling of
something that is the same, or is not the same, as the first. So
immediately perception is established. The baby consciousness
recognizes that the vague feeling is, or is not, that same thing. And
from perception to a complex consciousness of perceptions, of ideas, of
memories and relations, and judgments, is so short a step that we
cannot use our measuring rods to span it.
Thus through the various stages of life, from infancy to maturity, the
conscious is passing into the unconscious, only to help form later a new
conscious thought. Hence the conscious thought is determined by the
great mass of the unconscious, plus the external world.
But every thought, relegated to the unconscious, through its association

there--for it is plastic by nature--comes back to consciousness never
quite the same, and meets never quite the same stimulus. And as a
result a repeated mental experience is never twice exactly the same. So
the conscious becomes the unconscious and the unconscious the
conscious, and neither can be without the other.
Our problem is to understand the workings of the mind as it exists
today, and to try to find some of its most constructive uses; and on that
we shall focus attention. To that end we must first examine the various
ways in which consciousness expresses itself.
We have recognized two distinct mental states--the conscious and the
unconscious--and have found them constantly pressing each on the
other's domain. Our study of consciousness reveals the normal in the
aspects of sleeping and waking, also various abnormal states.
Consciousness may become excited, depressed, confused, delirious, or
insane. We shall consider later some of the mental workings that
account for these abnormal expressions. At present let us examine the
mind's activities in sleep and in delirium.
CONSCIOUSNESS IN SLEEP
Sleep seldom, if ever, is a condition of utter unconsciousness. We so
frequently have at least a vague recollection, when we wake, of
dreaming--whether or not we remember the dream material--that we are
inclined to accept sleep as always a state of some kind of mental
activity, though waking so often wipes the