Now let us represent the consciousness of an individual by a stick floating at the surface of the pool. On one end of the stick is written “Emotion and Sensation”; on the other, “Action and Influence.”
Please get this idea fixed up in your mind, before you read any further. Little precautions of this kind go a great way towards conferring clearness of understanding and preventing fogginess and misapprehension of a writer’s meaning. Get the vision fixed quite firmly; it is not a mere ornament, but a hook on which you are going, presently, to hang a weight, perhaps a heavy one.
We have supposed the stick lying flat on the surface of the water. As long as it does so, it represents a consciousness lying wholly in the present time.
Doctors and other teachers sometimes tell us very glibly that sanity and health, and all that deserves to be called “normal,” consist in being “adapted to one’s environment”; all which is not so they call “abnormal.” This mode of speaking is capable of being interpreted in two senses. As usually understood, it is very false, misleading the utterers even more than the hearers—as indeed slip-shod phrases of doubtful meaning usually do.
Let us look at our mind-picture of the floating stick.
As long as it lies horizontal it represents what we may call the commonplace condition of the consciousness, which is what some people really mean when they use such words as “sanity” and “health.”
The most commonplace consciousness wabbles slightly up and down at times; so that one end dips a little way back, or down, into the Past, and the other a little way forward, or up, into the Future.
