We must insist on this last point, for here we have the central difficulty, and the source of theOf unconscious mental states in general. Artificial difficulty raised round the problem of the unconscious. ambiguities which surround the problem of the unconscious. The idea of an unconscious representation is clear, despite current prejudice; we may even say that we make constant use of it, and that there is no conception more familiar to common sense. For every one admits that the images actually present to our perception are not the whole of matter. But, on the other hand, what can be a non-perceived material object, an image not imagined, unless it is a kind of unconscious mental state? Beyond the walls of your room, which you perceive at this moment, there are the adjoining rooms, then the rest of the house, finally the street and the town in which you live. It signifies little to which theory of matter you adhere; realist or idealist, you are evidently thinking, when you speak of the town, of the street, of the other rooms in the house, of so many perceptions absent from your consciousness and yet given outside of it. They are not created as your consciousness receives them; they existed, then, in some sort; and since, by hypothesis, your consciousness did not apprehend them, how could they exist in themselves unless in the unconscious state? How comes it then that an existence outside of consciousness appears clear to us in the case of objects, but obscure when we are speaking of the subject? Our perceptions,
