Fantasia of the Unconscious

Fantasia of the Unconscious, by
D. H. Lawrence

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Lawrence
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Title: Fantasia of the Unconscious
Author: D. H. Lawrence

Release Date: February 24, 2007 [eBook #20654]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
by
D. H. LAWRENCE

New York Thomas Seltzer 1922 Copyright, 1922, by Thomas Seltzer,
Inc.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER
FOREWORD
I. INTRODUCTION
II. THE HOLY FAMILY
III. PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON
IV. TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS
V. THE FIVE SENSES
VI. FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND
VII. FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION
VIII. EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD
IX. THE BIRTH OF SEX
X. PARENT LOVE
XI. THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

XII. LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS
XIII. COSMOLOGICAL
XIV. SLEEP AND DREAMS
XV. THE LOWER SELF
EPILOGUE

FOREWORD
The present book is a continuation from "Psychoanalysis and the
Unconscious." The generality of readers had better just leave it alone.
The generality of critics likewise. I really don't want to convince
anybody. It is quite in opposition to my whole nature. I don't intend my
books for the generality of readers. I count it a mistake of our mistaken
democracy, that every man who can read print is allowed to believe that
he can read all that is printed. I count it a misfortune that serious books
are exposed in the public market, like slaves exposed naked for sale.
But there we are, since we live in an age of mistaken democracy, we
must go through with it.
I warn the generality of readers, that this present book will seem to
them only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the last.
I would warn the generality of critics to throw it in the waste paper
basket without more ado.
As for the limited few, in whom one must perforce find an answerer, I
may as well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus. That
statement alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably.
Finally, to the remnants of a remainder, in order to apologize for the
sudden lurch into cosmology, or cosmogony, in this book, I wish to say
that the whole thing hangs inevitably together. I am not a scientist. I am
an amateur of amateurs. As one of my critics said, you either believe or
you don't.

I am not a proper archæologist nor an anthropologist nor an ethnologist.
I am no "scholar" of any sort. But I am very grateful to scholars for
their sound work. I have found hints, suggestions for what I say here in
all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga and Plato and St. John the
Evangel and the early Greek philosophers like Herakleitos down to
Fraser and his "Golden Bough," and even Freud and Frobenius. Even
then I only remember hints--and I proceed by intuition. This leaves you
quite free to dismiss the whole wordy mass of revolting nonsense,
without a qualm.
Only let me say, that to my mind there is a great field of science which
is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science which proceeds in
terms of life and is established on data of living experience and of sure
intuition. Call it subjective science if you like. Our objective science of
modern knowledge concerns itself only with phenomena, and with
phenomena as regarded in their cause-and-effect relationship. I have
nothing to say against our science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to
regard it as exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in
knowledge seems to me just puerile. Our science is a science of the
dead world. Even biology never considers life, but only mechanistic
functioning and apparatus of life.
I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece
were the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded our
own era once, had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a
science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and
charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles.
I believe that this great science previous to ours and quite different in
constitution and nature from our science once was universal,
established all over the then-existing globe. I believe it was esoteric,
invested in a large priesthood. Just as mathematics and mechanics and
physics are