 The Unconscious. Broad examines issues surrounding “the unconscious” at some length in The Mind and Its Place in Nature. His objective is to capture a (literal) sense in which an experiential mental state may be said to be unconscious. Although he rejects the view that the notion of unconscious experience is incoherent he argues that there is no compelling reason to assume that such actually exist. The assumption that there is a pure neural state with causal properties that are similar to those of a certain mental state is sufficient to explain the facts.