Points of great importance are involved in the determination of the conditions of C., or the circumstances attendant on the manifestation of mental excitement; in other words, the stimulants of our emotional and intellectual wakefulness. The most general and fundamental condition of our becoming conscious, as regards influences external to the mind, is change. The even continuance of one impression tends to unconscious ness; and there are a number of facts that show that if an influence were present in one unvarying degree from the first moment of life to the last, that influence would be to our feeling and knowledge as if it did not exist at all. This important point is more fully illustrated under CONDITIONED.
in a work entitled Contributions to Mental Philosophy, by Immanuel Hermann Fichte --the son of the renowned Johann Gottlieb Fichte—tranSlated by Mr. Morell (Long mans, 1859), the attempt is made to establish the existence of a preconscious mind, distinct from our conscious life, and not dependent like that upon the bodily organiza tion.
It appears that Fichte considers the power of germination and growth—or that energy, whatever it is, that unfolds the germ and conducts it to a completely formed organization—as a function of the mind or soul; which is almost to revert to the views of the ancient philosophers, with whom the soul was the " vital principle," or the peculiarity that distinguished organized beings from minerals. Aristotle spoke of the soul of plants as well as of animals, or of man. Fichte couples this power of germina tion with the following things—namely, the instincts; the processes of intelligence that we seem to go through without being aware of the steps, as in the sudden inspira tions of men of genius; with all the mysterious phenomena of second-sight, clairvoy ance, etc.; and the aggregate of this he erects into a preconscious mind or soul, the con trast of C. as above defined. For thsvarieties or divisions of our conscious states, see