we do not acknowledge these subconscious motives. We like to believe
that all our decisions are based on reason, and so we invent plausible
arguments for our attitudes and our actions, arguments which we
ourselves implicitly believe. This process of substituting a plausible
reason for a subconscious one is known as rationalization, a process
which every one of us engages in many times a day.

It is indeed true that the child is father to the man. Those first
impressionable years, when we believed implicitly whatever any one
told us and when through ignorance we reacted emotionally to ordinary
experiences, are molding us still, making us the men and women we are
to-day, coloring with childish ideas many of the attitudes of our
supposedly reasoning life. Bergson says:

The unconscious is our historical past. In reality the past is
preserved automatically. In its entirety probably it follows us
at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from
our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is
about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness
that would fain leave it outside.

=Spontaneous Outbursts.= "How do we know all this?" some one says.
"What is the evidence for these sweeping statements? If we cannot
remember, how can we discover these strange memories that are so
powerful but so elusive? If they are below the level of consciousness,
are they not, in the very nature of the case, forever hidden from
view, in the sphere of the occult rather than that of science?"

The answer to these questions is determined by one important fact; the
line between the conscious and subconscious minds does not always