mind, and find unconscious purpose to be an indispensable link in
every instinctive action. With this, therefore, the conception of a
mental mechanism, dead and predestined from without, has disappeared,
and has become transformed into the spiritual life inseparable from
logic, so that we have reached the sole remaining requirement for the
conception of an actual instinct, which proves to be a conscious
willing of the means towards an unconsciously willed purpose. This
conception explains clearly and without violence all the problems
which instinct presents to us; or more truly, all that was
problematical about instinct disappears when its true nature has been
thus declared. If this work were confined to the consideration of
instinct alone, the conception of an unconscious activity of mind
might excite opposition, inasmuch as it is one with which our
educated public is not yet familiar; but in a work like the present,
every chapter of which adduces fresh facts in support of the
existence of such an activity and of its remarkable consequences, the
novelty of the theory should be taken no farther into consideration.

Though I so confidently deny that instinct is the simple action of a
mechanism which has been contrived once for all, I by no means
exclude the supposition that in the constitution of the brain, the
ganglia, and the whole body, in respect of morphological as well as
molecular-physiological condition, certain predispositions can be
established which direct the unconscious intermediaries more readily
into one channel than into another. This predisposition is either
the result of a habit which keeps continually cutting for itself a
deeper and deeper channel, until in the end it leaves indelible
traces whether in the individual or in the race, or it is expressly
called into being by the unconscious formative principle in
generation, so as to facilitate action in a given direction. This