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Is has now for some considerable time been apparent that psycho-analytic research has rendered necessary a psychological amplification of logical theory in at least two respects: first, the manner in which the (intellectual) apprehension of reality is liable to be influenced by conation and affection; secondly, the manner in which the characteristics of unconscious thought (lack of contact with reality, absence of sense of contradiction, disregard of time, liability to condensation, displacement, etc.) contrast and interact with the processes of conscious thought, with which alone the science of logic has been concerned in the past. The problems belonging to this second class have been to some slight extent touched upon by Freud in his fourth series of collected papers, while the more general psychological problems of the first class have been occasionally treated by writers on social psychology and (from the philosophical point of view) by the pragmatists. But anything in the nature of a systematic or comprehensive treatment of the bearing of modern psychology (including Psycho-Analysis) on logic is still lacking; so that the reader will turn with all the greater interest to a book on the Logic of the Unconscious Mind by an author who has already in previous volumes devoted herself to a general exposition of the scope and significance of Psycho-Analysis.
Miss Bradby is herself apparently well aware of the importance and magnitude of the task she has undertaken. "The student of logic to-day", she says in her Introduction, "is called upon to give the subject a fresh start, and this he is enabled to do by the discoveries of Psycho-Analysts concerning the Unconscious Mind. Equipped with a new understanding of human motives, he has to look at people's reasoning, his own and others', and see what connecting principles may be observed, what general laws are actually in operation". She is also fully cognizant, apparently, of the vast significance of the unconscious me