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cognitions and percepts compete with each other for a limited resource – consciousness – and only the ‘fittest’ survive in awareness.
    Herbart can also be credited for introducing the now familiar concept of
repression.
Clearly, the ‘fittest’ thoughts and objects of perception must exert some kind of force to keep the weaker ones below the awareness threshold. Therefore, forgetting is not a passive process, but an active process. Forgotten information must be continuously inhibited, or it would simply fight its way back into consciousness.
    The proper scientific investigation of the awareness threshold began with the advent of Gustav Fechner’s
Psychophysics —
a new discipline that attempted to use mathematics to describe the limits of perception. It ís ironic that Fechner, now canonised in the history of psychology as a very rigorous scientist, was also the author of works such as
Nanna, or on the Soul-life of Plants
(1848), and
Zand-Avesta, or on the Things of Heaven and the Beyond
(1851).
    In 1850 Fechner started to employ mathematics to quantify perception. He determined the smallest intensity of a stimulus that could be perceived consciously. This then served as a zero point on a scale and represented what he called the
absolute threshold,
fechner plotted the relationship between physical and subjective stimulus intensities above the absolute threshold and expressed them in a logarithmic formula, now known as Fechner’s Law. This work was eventually published in 1860 as
Elements of Psychopnysics.
If the unconscious were a country, then Fechner had succeeded in mapping its border; however, it was the physician and painter Karl Gustav Carus who declared that country independent in 1846, with the publication of
Psyche -
the first attempt to provide a complete and objective theory of unconscious mental life. It is the progenitor of all subsequent works that deal exclusively with the nature of the unconscious.
    Instead of conceptualising the unconscious as a unitary phenomenon, Carus distinguished three different levels, each varying with respect to degree of accessibility. Moreover, he began to list what he considered to be the defining features of the unconscious. For example, he suggested that the unconscious is constantly flowing (thus, if an idea sinks into the unconscious it will continue to evolve and develop); indefatigable (unlike the conscious mind which needs periods of rest); and the unconscious has its own laws (although these are very different from those that govern conscious mental activity). Cams also showed a continuing commitment to romanticism by suggesting that the unconscious was a repository of ancient wisdom, connecting all of humanity.
    A later successor to Cams was Eduard von Hartmann, whose
Philosophy of the Unconscious
(1869) overlapped with
Psyche,
but was better argued on account of frequent references to factual evidence. Like Carus, von Hartmann described different levels of the unconscious, ranging from the absolute unconscious (which corresponds with romanticism’s world soul) to the psychological unconscious (which underlies the consciousness of every individual).
    Although the works of Carus and von Hartmann have not been greatly influential, they mark the beginning of a new epoch. From the middle of the nineteenth century the unconscious was established as a topic worthy of independent study. A topic that merited its own literature.
    In 1884, the American psychologists Charles Peirce and Joseph Jastrow published an academic paper titled On small differences of sensation’, it was a report on the seemingly uninspiring and dry topic of weight discrimination; however, in fact, Peirce and Jastrow’s modest study is the first investigation of what would one day be known as subliminal perception.
    Peirce and Jastrow gave their experimental subjects weights and asked them to judge which was the heaviest. This task was extremely difficult because the weights were almost – but