Dayan, P., Hinton, G. E., & Neal, R. (1995). The Helmholtz machine. Neural Computation , 7, 889–904.
web.archive.org
Unconscious conclusion is the term used by James P. C. Southall in his 1925 English translation of Helmholtz's Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Treatise on Physiological Optics, available here). Today, the concept is more widely referred to as unconscious inference, notably by Edwin G. Boring in his widely received 'History of Experimental Psychology', and Daniel T. Gilbert. Cf. Boring 1950, pp. 309-311.