Proposition 1: Etymology of Consciousness

Raymond Williams · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 8 pages

Eight pages, and *the only file in this section that is a piece of linguistic scholarship rather than theosophical writing. It is excerpted from Raymond Williams's essay on the word unconscious in Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, second edition, London: Fontana Press, 1988, pages 320 to 324. An editorial note points readers to the anthology Compassion: The Spirit of Truth*, the first of the site's Major Works, for the difference between higher and lower conscience.

The method is the one Keywords is known for: each sense of a word is numbered, defined in a left-hand column, and illustrated in the right-hand column by a dated quotation, so the reader watches the meaning move. Conscious is traced into English in the early seventeenth century from the Latin conscius, from con, together, and scire, to know — and the earliest senses are not the modern one at all. Sense one is a kind of animism in which inanimate things are described as aware of human actions, illustrated by Emerson on Stonehenge in 1856. Sense two is knowing something with another, quoted from Hobbes in 1651: where two or more men know of one and the same fact they are said to be conscious of it one to another. Only then come self-awareness, quoted from Ussher in 1620, and active reflection, quoted from Locke in 1690, followed by the vain or calculating self-conscious in Pope, the merely awake sense in Lytton, and the classifying sense of thinking or rational beings in Watts. Consciousness is then taken through the same treatment, including the collective sense that developed from the mid-nineteenth century in phrases such as national consciousness and class consciousness. The last pages deal with unconscious, separating the physical sense — a man knocked unconscious, or in sleep, fainting, coma or epilepsy — from Freud's, whose three elements are set out in order: what is dynamically repressed from awareness, what can be made conscious only by hypnosis or psychoanalysis, and what is not under voluntary control without being limited to physical causes.

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