nly "inferences made afterwards, from the experience" (Fantasia 15). The discussion here will, however, address Lawrence's system, insofar as it can be called a system, as he presented it in the latter works and then proceed to the novels to analyze the emergence of these ideas. Lawrence's friend J. Middleton Murry contended that in referring to the pure and passionate experience of writing the novels Lawrence "meant that the essential substance of them was his own immediate experience" (172). But, while the degree of autobiographical experience in the novels is important in some contexts, Murry's confirmation of this element can be taken here as an indication of how deeply felt Lawrence's ideas were, but without the necessity making reference to the specific extent to which personal experience was, in fact, involved in the evolution of the ideas.
The split between modern human beings and the unconscious was of very recent vintage and Lawrence was always at pains to emphasize the unnatural character of this alienation. He was always careful to explain that the disconnection from the source of energy and motivity was a modern phenomenon and that all human faculties and achievements were, in the normal run of things, natural. The change in modern humanity resulted from an overvaluing of, indeed an over dependence on, ideas (or ideals, as Lawrence called them). In Lawrence's view the greater part of consciousness is non-cerebral, or non-intellectual, but, as Murry put it, "intellectual mentality is a subsidiary mode of experience" and yet "the abstract and conceptual mode" has so strong a hold on modern individuals that "we are always tempted to believe that what cannot be clearly expressed in abstract and conceptual language has no reality" (189). But even mind which, in modern humanity, "leads away from nature and into self-conscious artifice" is not essentially opposed to nature but a part of it(Hochman 23). Mind can, howeve...