This corrosive and pseudo-objective intellectualism, then, is the second form of false super-consciousness. It deprives man of genuine surrender to value, of true union with anything that is. A man of this type, we might say, is forever loitering around all sorts of objects, asking questions unceasingly. Also, he is apt to distrust his every impression; and if anything begins to take hold of him he withdraws from direct contact to watch everything again from the outside. Nor, in so doing, is he unlikely to yield to the temptation of self-analysis. He will thus lapse into the first category of false self-consciousness.

True consciousness sees the valid aspect of things

True consciousness has nothing to do with either of these two states. It means, first, that the rational intentional relation to being takes precedence over all mere associations of images and physiologically conditioned reactions. The nonconscious are at the mercy of all kinds of fortuitous impressions. If they had a bad night, for instance, they will consequently see the world in drab and depressing colors. They fail to surmount that purely arbitrary impression, void of all validity; no, they give it credence, and behave accordingly. They are incapable of putting themselves at a proper objective distance from a physiologically conditioned, empty mood; they hand themselves over to the latter, and are disappointed with the surrounding world. That world suddenly appears to them in an entirely changed light, owing to the unreasoned trust they place in that deceptive mood.

Or again, a certain situation happens to remind them of some former experience of an unpleasant character; and, in this case they do not heed the fact that in its objective contents the new situation has no kinship whatever with that former one. These people develop a hopeless uneasiness and aversion on the ground of sheer association of images.

Accordingly their attitudes lack objectivity and conformity with reality. A person who is conscious in the more proper sense of the term will, on the contrary, orient his essential behavior so as to answer the objective meaning—the relevant content—of the situation. He is not so fully submerged in himself, not so completely a servant of his nature, as to seriously consider invalid, illegitimate, and incidental aspects. He can distinguish valid impressions from invalid ones. Here the mental form of meaningful intentional object-reference has asserted itself successfully against psycho-physical impulses or purely associative prejudices.

It is, indeed, the prime characteristic of intellectual maturity (“majority”) that in our mental life the structural trait of intentional reference comes to prevail over the power of mere associations of ideas, and states of mind. In infantile thought, associations and body-conditioned states of mind still play a very great part; more important still, impressions thus gleaned are not then clearly distinguished from impressions legitimately founded in the things themselves. Also, mere images of fantasy freely fuse with, and are more or less assimilated into, the concepts of reality. There is as yet no clear-cut distinction between imagination and fact.