=Past and Present.= It matters not, then, in what state experiences
come to us, whether in sleep or delirium, intoxication or hypnosis, or
in the normal waking condition. They are conserved and may exert great
influence on our normal lives. It matters not whether the experiences
be full of meaning and emotion or whether they be so slight as to pass
unnoticed, they are conserved. It matters not whether these
experiences be mere sense-impressions, or inner thoughts, whether they
be unacknowledged hopes or fears, undesirable moods and unworthy
desires or fine aspirations and lofty ideals. They are conserved and
they may at a later day rise up to bless or to curse us long after we
had thought them buried in the past. The present is the product of the
past. It is the past plus an element of choice which keeps us from
settling down in the despair of fatalism and enables us to do
something toward making the present that is, a help and not a
stumbling-block to the present that is to be.


SOME HABITS OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS

=The Association of Ideas.= It is only by something akin to poetic
license that we can speak of lower and higher strata of mind. When we
carry over the language of material things into the less easily
pictured psychic realm, it is sometimes well to remind ourselves that
figures of speech, if taken too literally, are more misleading than
illuminating. When we speak of the deep-laid instinctive lower levels
of mind and the higher acquired levels, we must not imagine that these
strata are really laid in neat, mutually exclusive layers, one on top
of the other in the chambers of the mind. Nor must we imagine the
mental elements of instinct, idea, and memory as jumbled together in