PHILOSOPHY OF MIND introspection: something we can see when we look within; something to which we have ourselves direct access, but which others can learn of only indirectly, by accepting our verbal testimony or making causal inferences from our physical behaviour Second, whatever Locke and Hume may have thought, the philosophy of mind does not operate by scrupulous observation of internal phenomena but by the examination of the concepts that we make use of in expressing our experience The hollowness of Descartes’s notion of consciousness was exposed, later in the twentieth century, by the work of Wittgenstein (who admired James as a particularly honest and candid exponent of the Cartesian tradition) But in James’s own lifetime, what appeared to be the most serious challenge to the work of the experimental psychologists came from a different quarter: from the picture of the mind presented by Freudian psychoanalysis The Freudian Unconscious In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Freud states as one of the two main foundations of his theory that the greater part of our mental life, whether of feeling, thought, or volition, is unconscious Before deciding whether we should accept this principle we need to look closely at what is meant by ‘unconscious’ There are several possible senses of the word, and depending on which sense we take, Freud’s thesis may turn out a truism or a piece of hardy speculation It is obvious that at any given moment only a tiny fraction of what we know and believe is present to consciousness in the sense of being an object of our immediate attention For more than sixty years I have known the nursery rhyme ‘Three Blind Mice’ and have believed that the battle of Waterloo took place in 1815; but the occasions on which I have recited the rhyme or adverted to the date have been few and far between The distinction between knowledge and its exercise was already made by Aristotle as a distinction between first and second actuality Knowing Greek, he said, was an actuality in comparison with the simple ability to learn languages with which all humans are endowed But knowledge of Greek was only a first actuality, an ability that is exercised only when I am speaking, hearing, reading, or thinking in Greek That was the second actuality A parallel distinction can be made with regard to one’s wishes, 202