HUMAN PERSONALITY

AND ITS SURVIVAL OF
BODILY DEATH

BY

FREDERIC W. H. MYERS

Cessas in vota precesque,

Tros, ait, Aenea, cessas? Neque enim ante dehiscent

Adtonitæ magna ora domus.—VIRGIL.

“Nay!” quoth the Sybil, “Trojan! wilt thou spare

The impassioned effort and the conquering prayer?

Nay! not save thus those doors shall open roll,—

That Power within them burst upon the soul.”

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1903

All rights reserved

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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PREFACE

THE book which is now at last given to the world is but a partial presentation of an ever-growing subject which I have long hoped to become able to treat in more adequate fashion. But as knowledge increases life rolls by, and I have thought it well to bring out while I can even this most imperfect text-book to a branch of research whose novelty and strangeness call urgently for some provisional systematisation, which, by suggesting fresh inquiries, further accumulation of evidence may tend as speedily as possible to its own supersession. Few critics of this book can, I think, be more fully conscious than its author of its defects and its lacunæ; but also few critics, I think, have yet realised the importance of the new facts which in some fashion the book does actually present.

Many of these facts have already appeared in Phantasms of the Living; many more in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research; but they are far indeed from having yet entered into the scientific consciousness of the age. In future years the wonder, I think, will be that their announcement was so largely left to a writer with leisure so scanty, and with scientific equipment so incomplete.

Whatever value this book may possess is in great measure due to other minds than its actual author's. Its very existence, in the first place, probably depends upon the existence of the two beloved friends and invaluable coadjutors to whose memory I dedicate it now.

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The help derived from these departed colleagues, Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney, although of a kind and quantity absolutely essential to the existence of this work, is not easy to define in all its fulness under the changed circumstances of today. There was indeed much which is measurable;—much of revision of previous work of my own, of collaborative experiments, of original thought and discovery. Large quotations purposely introduced from Edmund Gurney indicate, although imperfectly, how closely interwoven our work on all these subjects continued to be until his death. But the benefit which I drew from the association went deeper still. The conditions under which this inquiry was undertaken were such as to emphasise the need of some intimate moral support. A recluse, perhaps, or an eccentric,—or a man living mainly with his intellectual inferiors, may find it easy to work steadily and confidently at a task which he knows that the bulk of educated men will ignore or despise. But this is more difficult for a man who feels manifold links with his kind, a man whose desire it is to live among minds equal or superior to his own. It is hard, I say, for such a man to disregard altogether the expressed or implied disapproval of those groups of weighty personages to whom in other matters he is accustomed to look up.

I need not say that the attitude of the scientific world—of all the intellectual world—then was very much more marked than now. Even now I write in full consciousness of the low value commonly attached to inquiries of the kind which I pursue. Even now a book on such a subject must still expect to evoke, not only legitimate criticism of many kinds, but also much of that disgust and resentment which novelty and heterodoxy naturally excite. But I have no wish to exalt into a deed of daring an enterprise which to the next generation must seem the most obvious thing in the world. Nihil ausi nisi vana contemnereI have dared nothing except to slight empty things will certainly be the highest compliment which what seemed to us our bold independence of men {i-ix} will receive. Yet gratitude bids me to say that however I might in the privacy of my own bosom have ‘dared to contemn things contemptible,’ I should never have ventured my amateurish acquirements on a publication of this scale were it not for that slow growth of confidence which my respect for the judgment of these two friends inspired. Their countenance and fellowship, which at once transformed my own share in the work into a delight, has made its presentation to the world appear as a duty.

My thanks are due also to another colleague who has passed away, my brother, Dr. A. T. Myers, F.R.C.P., who helped me for many years in all medical points arising in the work.

To the original furnishers of the evidence my obligations are great and manifest, and to the Council of the S.P.R. I also owe thanks for permission to use that evidence freely. But I must leave it to the book itself to indicate in fuller detail how much is owing to how many men and women:—how widely diffused are the work and the interest which have found in this book their temporary outcome and exposition.

The book, indeed, is an exposition rather than a proof. I cannot summarise within my modest limits the mass of evidence already gathered together in the sixteen volumes of Proceedings and the nine volumes of the Journal of the S.P.R., in Phantasms of the Living and other books hereafter referred to, and in MS. collections. The attempt indeed would be quite out of place. This branch of knowledge, like others, must be studied carefully and in detail by those who care to understand or to advance it.

What I have tried to do here is to render that knowledge more assimilable by co-ordinating it in a form as clear and intelligible as my own limited skill and the nature of the facts themselves have permitted. I have tried to give, in text and in Appendices, enough of actual evidence to illustrate each step in my argument:—and I have constantly referred the reader to places where further evidence will be found.

{i-x}

In minor matters I have aimed above all things at clearness and readiness in reference. The division of the book into sections, with Appendices bearing the same numbers, will, it is hoped, facilitate the use both of syllabus and of references in general. I have even risked the appearance of pedantry in adding a glossary. Where many unfamiliar facts and ideas have to be dealt with, time is saved in the end if the writer explains precisely what his terms mean.

.        .        .        .        .        .        .

F. W. H. MYERS.    

EDITORIAL NOTE

This unfinished preface consists of several passages written at different times by the author, who died on January 17th, 1901. In 1896, he arranged that the completion of his book should be in the hands of Dr. Richard Hodgson in case of his death before its publication. In the meantime he had entrusted the general supervision of the press work and much of the detail in marshalling the Appendices to Miss Alice Johnson of Newnham College, Cambridge, who has therefore been associated with Dr. Hodgson also in the editorial work needed for the completion of the book, and much the greater part of the labour involved has fallen to her share. At the time of the author's death, Chapters I.–VI., part of Chapter VII., and the whole of Chapter VIII. were in the first proof, the rest of Chapter VII. and Chapter X. were ready for printing. Most of the Appendices were in type, but required much revision and rearrangement. The substance of nearly all Chapter IX. had been written, in one form or another, but had to be pieced together. The asterisks on p. 209 (Vol. II.) mark the end of the part which had been consecutively composed by the author. Some of the questions involved in that chapter would doubtless have been treated much more fully by him had he lived to complete it. Mr. Myers left on record his wish to express gratitude to Mr. F. N. Hales, of Trinity College, Cambridge, for help in the preparation of some Appendices, especially in Chapters II. and V.

RICHARD HODGSON.    
ALICE JOHNSON.           

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GLOSSARY

[NOTE.—The words and phrases here included fall under three main heads:—

(1) Words in common philosophical or medical use, to which no new shade of meaning is given in this inquiry, e.g. ecmnesia. Introducing a few of these words for the ordinary reader's convenience, I have generally taken the definition from Hack Tuke's Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (London: Churchill, 1892), which is the most authoritative—almost the only—English work of its kind.

(2) Words or phrases in themselves not new, but used in psychical research with some special significance;—as, for instance, “systematised anæsthesia,” “negative hallucination.” These two phrases are constantly used by writers on hypnotism: but mere familiarity with the words themselves would not explain their meaning in that context to a reader fresh to hypnotic discussions.

(3) A few words, distinguished by an asterisk, for which I am myself responsible. I must leave it to my readers to judge how far these words are likely to be useful. But I would suggest that when a subject so novel as ours is made the subject of discussion in many countries, there is a convenience in using words of Greek or Latin derivation, which can be adapted to all languages, and can be made to bear a clearly defined signification.]

Aboulia. —Loss of power of willing. I have used the word hyperboulia to express that increased power over the organism, resembling the power which we call will when it is exercised over the voluntary muscles, which is seen in the bodily changes effected by self-suggestion.

After-image.—The picture of an object seen after removing the gaze from the object. It is called positive when it reproduces, negative when it reverses the true illumination or colours of the actual object. After-images are regarded as retinal or entoptic, belonging to the interior of the eye. After-images must be distinguished from memory-images, which may appear spontaneously, or may be summoned by an effort of will, long after the original sight of the object.

Agent.—The person on whose condition a telepathic impression seems to be dependent; who seems to initiate the telepathic transmission.

Agraphia.—See Aphasia

Alexia.—See Aphasia

Alternation of personality.—See disintegration of personality.

Anæsthesia, or the loss of sensation generally, must be distinguished from analgesia, or the loss of the sense of pain alone. Many hypnotic subjects are {i-xiv} analgesic but not anæsthetic. Systematized anæsthesia or negative hallucination signifies the condition of an entranced subject who has been told (for instance) that Mr. A. is not in the room, while he is in reality present. The subject may thus be said to have a negative hallucination, or to have been deprived of a certain group or system of perceptions, in that he fails to see Mr. A. Other words descriptive of the general sensory condition are dysæsthesia, impaired or painful sensation; paræsthesia, erroneous or morbid sensation; hyperæsthesia, unusually keen sensation, which may or may not be a morbid symptom. Hyperæsthesia may be peripheral, when it affects nerve-endings near the surface of the body, or central, when the excessive sensitiveness belongs to the central sensorium;—such parts, namely, of the brain as are concerned in receiving or generating sensory images and impressions. Hemi-anæsthesia means anæsthesia of half the body, the median line (down the middle of the body) separating normal sensation from absence of sensation. Anæsthetic zones or patches (formerly deemed characteristic of witches) are common in hysteria. Cœnesthesia means that consensus or agreement of many organic sensations which is a fundamental element in our conception of personal identity. Finally, I have suggested the word *panæsthesia to express the undifferentiated sensory capacity of the supposed primal germ.

Analgesia.—Insensibility to pain.

Aphasia.—Incapacity of coherent utterance, not caused by structural impairment of the vocal organs, but by lesion of the cerebral centres for speech. Distinguished from congenital or acquired aphonia, due to paralysis or imperfect approximation of the vocal cords, and also from hysterical mutism, when the patient is obstinately and involuntarily silent, although the vocal organs are uninjured and the cerebral centres of speech are only functionally affected, with no visible lesion. All the four forms of verbalisation are subject to separate disorders of the type of aphasia. Lack of power to write words is called agraphia or agraphy; lack of power to understand words written, Alexia or word-blindness; lack of power to understand words uttered, word-deafness. In each case the trouble may lie in the brain and not in the organ of sense or other organs. For instance, a man's sight even for printed musical notes may be unimpaired, while yet he is unable to understand printed words.

Aphonia.—Incapacity of uttering sounds.

Attaque de sommeil.—This French term is more correct than the word “trance,” to express those spontaneous lapses into prolonged and profound sleep which sometimes occur in hysterical subjects.

Automatism.—The words automatism and automatic are used in somewhat different senses by physiologists and psychologists. Thus Sir M. Foster says (Foster's Physiology, 5th edition, p. 920), “We speak of an action of an organ or of a living body as being spontaneous or automatic when it appears to be not immediately due to any changes in the circumstances in which the organ or body is placed, but to be the result of changes arising in the organ or body itself and determined by causes other than the influences of the circumstances of the moment. The most striking automatic actions of the living body [are] those which we attribute to the working of the will and which we call voluntary or volitional.” That is to say, to the physiologist an action is “self-moved” when it is determined, not by the environment, but by the organism itself. The word thus becomes hardly more than a synonym for spontaneous. The psychologist, on the other hand, regards an action as “self-moved” when it is determined {i-xv} in an organism apart from the central will or control of that organism Thus when an act at first needing voluntary guidance, by practice comes to need such guidance no longer, it is called “secondarily automatic.” I have used the word in a wider sense, as expressing such images as arise, as well as such movements as are made, without the initiation, and generally without the concurrence, of conscious thought and will. Sensory automatism will thus include visual and auditory hallucinations; motor automatism will include messages written without intention (automatic script) or words uttered without intention (as in “speaking with tongues,” trance-utterances, &c.). I ascribe these processes to the action of submerged or subliminal elements in the man's being. Such phrases as “reflex cerebral action,” or “unconscious cerebration,” give therefore, in my view, a very imperfect conception of the facts.

Automnesia.—Spontaneous revival of memories of an earlier condition of life.

Autoscope.—Any instrument which reveals a subliminal motor impulse or sensory impression; e.g. a divining rod, a tilting table, or a planchette reveals by its visible motion the imperceptible, involuntary, and unconscious muscular action of the person holding or touching it; a crystal or other speculum externalises the subliminal impressions of the person who sees visions in it.

Bilocation.—The sensation of being in two different places at once, namely, where one's organism is, and a place distant from it, involving some degree of perception (whether veridical or falsidical) of the distant scene.

Catalepsy.—“An intermittent neurosis, characterised by the patient's inability to change the position of a limb, while another person can place the muscles in a state of flexion or contraction as he will.”—(Tuke's Dict.) Catalepsy may also be induced as a stage of hypnotism; although Charcot's view, which erected catalepsy, lethargy, somnambulism (their relative positions sometimes varied) into three typical or necessary stages in a hypnotic trance, is now commonly considered to have been a too hasty generalisation from the habits—largely imitative—of the group of hypnotic patients at the Salpêtrière (a hospital in Paris).

Census of Hallucinations.—An inquiry undertaken to determine the frequency of hallucinations in sane and healthy persons; described in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. x. (See 612 A.)

Centre of Consciousness.—The place where a percipient imagines himself to be. The point from which he seems to himself to be surveying some phantasmal scene.

Chromatism.—See Secondary Sensations.

Clairaudience.—See Clairvoyance.

Clairvoyance (Lucidite).—The faculty or act of perceiving, as though visually, with some coincidental truth, some distant scene; used sometimes, but hardly properly, for transcendental vision, or the perception of beings regarded as on another plane of existence. Clairaudience is generally used of the sensation of hearing an internal (but in some way veridical) voice. I have preferred to use the term telæsthesia for distant perception. For the faculty has seldom any close analogy with an extension of sight; the perception of distant scenes being often more or less symbolical and in other ways out of accord with what actual sight would show in the locality of the vision. On the other hand, telæsthesia merges into telepathy, since we cannot say how far the perception of a distant scene may in essential be the perception of the content of a distant mind.

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Cœnesthesia.—See Anæsthesia.

Coincidental.—This word is used when there is some degree of coincidence in time of occurrence between a supernormal incident and an event at a distance, which makes it seem probable that some causal connection exists between the two. An apparition, for instance, seen at or about the time when the person whose phantasm is seen dies, is a coincidental apparition.

Collective.—Applied to cases where two or more persons together perceive a hallucination or phantasm.

Control.—This word is used of the intelligence which purports to communicate messages which are written or uttered by the automatist, sensitive, or medium. The word is used for convenience' sake, but should not imply that the source of the messages need be other than the automatist's own subliminal intelligence.

*Cosmopathic.—Open to the access of supernormal knowledge or emotion, apparently from the transcendental world, but whose precise source we have no means of defining.

Cryptomnesia.—Submerged or subliminal memory of events forgotten by the supraliminal self.

Crystal-gazing.—The act of looking into a crystal, glass ball, or other speculum, or reflecting surface, with the object of inducing hallucinatory pictures. The person doing this is called a seer or scryer. The pictures, of course, exist in the mind and not in the crystal. See Shell-hearing.

Delusion and Delusive.—Applied generally to all cases whether of hallucination or illusion, when there is no corresponding reality whatever;—i.e. when the case is not coincidental or in any other way veridical.

*Dextro-cerebral (opposed to *Sinistro-cerebral); of left-handed persons, as employing preferentially the right hemisphere of the brain.

Diathesis.—Habit, capacity, or disposition. (In Medicine, a permanent condition of the body which renders it liable to certain special diseases or affections; a constitutional predisposition or tendency.) See Psychorrhagic diathesis.

Dimorphism.—In crystals, the property of assuming two incompatible forms; in plants and animals, difference of form between members of the same species. Used of a condition of alternating personalities; a kind of psychical dimorphism in which memory, character, faculty, &c., present themselves at different times in different forms in the same person. Similarly, polymorphism is the property of assuming many forms.

Discarnate.—Disembodied, opposed to incarnate. Used of that part of man which still subsists after bodily death.

Disintegration of personality.—Used of any condition where the sense of personality is not unitary and continuous; especially when secondary and transitory personalities intervene; as, for instance, when a hysterical subject calls herself at one time Rose, at another Adrienne, &c., with separate chains of memory for each condition.

Dissolutive.—Opposed to Evolutive; of changes which tend not towards progress but towards decay.

Dynamogeny.—The increase of nervous energy by appropriate stimuli; often opposed to inhibition.

Dysæsthesia.—See Anæsthesia.

Ecmnesia.—A gap in memory: “a form of amnesia [forgetfulness] in which there is a normal memory of occurrences prior to a given date, with loss of {i-xvii} memory of what happened for a certain time after that date.”—(Tuke's Dict.). It should be added that the gap of memory may include some period of time previous to the shock or accident which caused it.

Ecstasy.—A trance during which the spirit of the automatist partially quits his body, entering into a state in which the spiritual world is more or less open to its perception, and in which it so far ceases to occupy its organism as to leave room for an invading spirit to use it in somewhat the same fashion as its owner is accustomed to use it. See Possession.

*Entencephalic.—On the analogy of entoptic; of sensations, &c., which have their origin within the brain, not in the external world.

Eugenics.—The science of improving the race.

Externalise.—This word is used to represent the process by which an idea or impression on the percipient's mind is transformed into a phantasm apparently outside him.

Falsidical.—See Hallucination.

Glossolaly.—“Speaking with tongues,” i.e. automatic utterance of words not belonging to any real language.

Hallucination.—Any supposed sensory perception which has no objective counterpart within the field of vision, hearing, &c., is termed a hallucination. Hallucinations may be delusive or falsidical, when there is nothing whatever to which they correspond; or veridical, when they correspond (as those of which we treat generally correspond) to real events happening elsewhere. A pseudohallucination is a quasi-percept not sufficiently externalised to rank as a “full-blown” hallucination. Contrast with illusion and delusion.

Hemi-anæsthesia.—See Anæsthesia.

Heteræsthesia.—A form of sensibility decidedly different from any of those which can be referred to the action of the known senses—e.g. the perception of a magnetic field, specific sensibilities to running water, crystals, metals (See Metallæsthesia), &c.

Hyperboulia.—See Aboulia.

Hyperæsthesia.—See Anæsthesia.

Hypermnesia.—Defined in Tuke's Dict. as “over-activity of the memory, a condition in which past acts, feelings, or ideas are brought vividly to the mind, which, in its natural condition, has wholly lost the remembrance of them.” In my view the subliminal memory retains these remembrances throughout, and their supraliminal evocation implies an increased grasp of natural faculty. *Panmnesia would imply a potential recollection of all impressions.

*Hyperpromethia.—Supernormal power of foresight; attributed to the subliminal self as a hypothesis by which to explain premonitions without assuming either that the future scene is shown to the percipient by any mind external to his own, or that circumstances which we regard as future are in any sense already existent.

Hypnagogic.—Illusions hypnagogiques (Maury) are the vivid illusions of sight or sound—“faces in the dark,” &c.—which sometimes accompany the oncoming of sleep. To similar illusions accompanying the departure of sleep, as when a dream-figure persists for a few moments into waking life, I have given the name *hypnopompic.

Hypnogenous.—See Hysterogenous.

*Hypnopompic.—See Hypnagogic.

Hypnotism.—See Mesmerism.

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Hysteria.—“A disordered condition of the nervous system, the anatomical seat and nature of which are unknown to medical science, but of which the symptoms consist in well-marked and very varied disturbances of nerve-function” (Ency. Brit.). For further definition and discussion, see below, Chapter II.

Hysterical blindness, contractures, mutism, œdema, paralysis, &c., signify affections not dependent on any discoverable lesion, but on the defects of nervous co-ordination characteristic of hysteria. Such affections, even when of long standing, may quite suddenly disappear.

Hysterogenous zones.—Points or tracts on the skin of a hysterical person pressure on which will induce a hysterical attack. Hypnogenous zones are regions by pressure on which hypnosis is induced in a hysterical person, by a similar process of self-suggestion.

Ideational.—Used of impressions which convey some distinct notion, but not of sensory nature.

Idiognomonic.—Not symptomatic of any other condition; indicative only of itself.

Idiopathic.—Symptomatic of some special morbid state or condition, which exhibits no other symptom—e.g. idiopathic somnambulism is sleep-walking not associated with any other disease.

Illusion.—The misinterpretation of some object actually present to sight, hearing, &c., as when a hanging coat is taken for a man, a ringing in the ears for the sound of a bell, &c.

Imaginal.—A word used of characteristics belonging to the perfect insect or imago;—and thus opposed to larval;—metaphorically applied to transcendental faculties shown in rudiment in ordinary life.

Induced.—Of phantasms, &c., intentionally produced.

Levitation.—A raising of objects from the ground by supposed supernormal means: especially of living persons; asserted in the case of St. Joseph of Copertino, and many other saints; of D. D. Home, and of W. Stainton Moses.

Medium.—A person through whom communication is deemed to be carried on between living men and spirits of the departed. As commonly used in spiritist literature, this word is liable to the objection that it assumes a particular theory for phenomena which admit of explanation in various ways. It is often better replaced by automatist or sensitive.

Mesmerism.—This is the oldest widely-recognised word for a large group of phenomena discussed below in Chapter V. The name need imply nothing more than the fact that Mesmer was the conspicuous introducer of many of the phenomena to the European public. But it is also specially used to imply something of his theory of their production, by a vital effluence from the mesmeriser, conveyed partly by mesmeric passes, or wavings of the hands. The term Animal Magnetism implies a somewhat different theory. The term Hypnotism, when first started by Braid, was again meant to imply a theory of the genesis of these phenomena, but it is now generally used with no theoretical implication.

Message.—Used for any communication, not necessarily verbal, from one to another stratum of the automatist's personality, or from an external intelligence to one or other stratum of the automatist. Thus any automatic script may be called a message, even if incoherent.

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Metallæsthesia.—A form of sensibility alleged to exist which enables some hypnotised or hysterical subjects to discriminate between the contacts of various metals by sensations not derived from their ordinary properties of weight, &c.

Metastasis.—Change of the seat of a bodily function from one place (e.g. a brain-centre) to another.

*Metetherial.—That which appears to lie after or beyond the ether; the metetherial environment denotes the spiritual or transcendental world in which the soul exists.

*Methectic.—Of communications between one stratum of a man's intelligence and another; as when he writes messages whose origin is in his own subliminal self. Some word is needed to express this novel conception: and Plato's use of the word μέθεξις, participation (Parm. 132 D), suggests methectic as the most appropriate term of Greek origin.

Mirror-writing (écriture renversée, Spiegel-schrift). Writing so inverted, or, more exactly, perverted, as to resemble writing reflected in a mirror, or blotted off on to a sheet of blotting paper. This form of writing is natural to some left-handed persons. It also frequently appears in automatic script.

Mnemonic chain.—A continuous series of memories, especially when the continuity persists after an interruption. See Disintegration of personality.

Monition.—A message involving counsel or warning, when that counsel is based upon facts already in existence, but not normally known to the person who receives the monition.

Motor.—Used of an impulse to action not carrying with it any definite idea or sensory impression.

Negative hallucination.—See Anæsthesia.

Number forms.—See Secondary Sensations.

Objectify.—To externalise a phantom in three dimensions; to see it as a solid object fitted into the waking world.

*Panæsthesia.—See Anæsthesia.

*Panmnesia.—See Hypermnesia.

Paræsthesia.—See Anæsthesia.

Paramnesia.—See Promnesia.

Paraphasia.—The erroneous and involuntary use of one word for another, or of one syllable for another. Cf. Aphasia

Percipient.—The correlative term to Agent; the person on whose mind the telepathic impact falls; or more generally, the person who perceives any motor or sensory impression.

Phantasm and Phantom.—Phantasm and phantom are, of course, mere variants of the same word; but since phantom has become generally restricted to visual hallucinations, it is convenient to take phantasm to cover a wider range, and to signify any hallucinatory sensory impression, whatever sense—whether sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, or diffused sensibility—may happen to be affected.

Phantasmogenetic centre.—A point in space so modified by the presence of a spirit that it becomes perceptible to persons materially present near it. The conception of psychical excursion or invasion implies that some movement bearing some relation to space as we know it is accomplished; that the invading spirit modifies a certain portion of space, not materially nor {i-xx} optically, but in such a manner that specially susceptible persons may perceive it. Cf. psychorrhagy.

Phobies (term adopted from the French).—Irrational restricting or disabling pre-occupations or fears; morbid aversions for certain things or actions, e.g. agoraphobia, fear of open spaces; mysophobia, fear of uncleanliness.

Photism.—See Secondary Sensations.

Point de repère.—Guiding mark. Used of some (generally inconspicuous) real object which a hallucinated subject sometimes sees along with his hallucination, and whose behaviour under magnification, &c., suggests to him similar changes in the hallucinatory figure.

Polymorphism.—See Dimorphism.

Polyzoism.—The property, in a complex organism, of being composed of minor and quasi-independent organisms (like the polyzoa or “sea-mats”). This is sometimes called “colonial constitution,” from animal colonies; but the metaphor implied is not always suitable. The word polypsychism is sometimes used to express the psychical aspect of polyzoism.

Possession.—A developed form of motor automatism, in which the automatist's own personality disappears for the time, while there is a more or less complete substitution of personality, writing or speech being given by another spirit through the entranced organism.

Post-hypnotic.—Used of a suggestion given during the hypnotic trance, but intended to operate after that trance has ceased.

Precognition.—A knowledge of impending events supernormally acquired.

Premonition.—A supernormal indication of any kind of event still in the future.

*Preversion.—A tendency to characteristics assumed to lie at a further point of the evolutionary progress of a species than has yet been reached; opposed to reversion.

Proleptic.—Anticipatory; assuming a knowledge of a fact not yet communicated. A dream is called proleptic when it assumes some fact which is only made known to the dreamer later in the dream. For instance, a person in one's dream may ask one a riddle, and not tell one the answer for some time; yet a knowledge of that answer must have existed in one's mind all the time, since one did in fact ask the riddle oneself.

*Promnesia.—The paradoxical sensation of recollecting a scene which is only now occurring for the first time; the sense of the déjà vu. The term paramnesia, which is sometimes given to this sensation, should, I think, cover all forms of erroneous memory, and cannot without confusion be used to express specifically this one anomalous sensation.

Pseudo-hallucination.—See Hallucination.

*Psychorrhagy.—A special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the phantasm of a person easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a psychical element, definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion of space. Cf. Phantasmogenetic centre.

*Psychorrhagic diathesis.—A habit or capacity of detaching some psychical element, involuntarily and without purpose, in such a manner as to produce a phantasm.

Psychotherapeutics.—“Treatment of disease by the influence of the mind on the body” (Tuke's Dict.). All suggestion of course comes under this head.

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Quasi-percept.—The more or less objectified phantasm, which the percipient does, in a certain sense, perceive.

Reciprocal.—Used of cases where there is both agency and percipience at each end of the telepathic chain, so that (in a complete or developed case) A perceives P, and P perceives A also.

*Retrocognition.—Knowledge of the Past, supernormally acquired.

Secondary Personality.—It sometimes happens, as the result of shock, disease, or unknown causes, that a man or a woman experiences an alteration of memory and character, amounting to a change of personality, which generally seems to have come on during sleep. The new personality is in that case termed secondary. It generally disappears after a time, or alternates with the original, or primary, personality.

Secondary Sensations (Secundärempfindungen, audition colorée, sound-seeing, synæsthesiæ, &c.).—With some persons every sensation of one type is accompanied by a sensation of another type; as, for instance, a special sound may be accompanied by a special sensation of colour or light (chromatisms or photisms). This phenomenon is analogous to that of number-forms,—a kind of diagrammatic mental pictures which accompany the conception of a progression of numbers. See Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty.

Shell-hearing.—The induction of hallucinatory voices, &c., by listening to a shell. Analogous to crystal-gazing.

Spectrum of consciousness.—A comparison of man's range of consciousness or faculty to the solar spectrum, as seen by us after passing through a prism or as examined in a spectroscope.

Spiritualism or Spiritism.—A religion, philosophy, or mode of thinking, based on the belief that the spirits of the dead communicate with living men. Since the words spiritualisme and spiritualiste have long been used in France for a school of philosophy opposed to materialism, there is some advantage in choosing the word Spiritism for the belief in spirit intercourse.

Stigmatisation.—The production of blisters or other cutaneous changes on the hands, feet, or elsewhere, by self-suggestion or meditation. These marks were said to have been produced on St. Francis of Assisi, on Louise Lateau, &c., by meditation on the sufferings of Christ. Similar marks are producible by suggestion in some hypnotic subjects, and even vesication (the formation of blisters) seems to have been thus induced.

Subliminal.—Of thoughts, feelings, &c., lying beneath the ordinary threshold (limen) of consciousness, as opposed to supraliminal, lying above the threshold. Excitations are termed subliminal when they are too weak to rise into direct notice; and I have extended the application of the term to feeling, thought, or faculty, which is kept thus submerged, not by its own weakness, but by the constitution of man's personality. The threshold (Schwelle) must be regarded as a level above which waves may rise,—like a slab washed by the sea,—rather than as an entrance into a chamber.

Suggestion.—The process of effectively impressing upon the subliminal intelligence the wishes of the man's own supraliminal self or of some other person. The mechanism of this process is obscure, nor is it known why some persons are much more suggestible than others. Self-suggestion (sometimes called auto-suggestion by a barbarism easily avoidable in English) means a suggestion conveyed by the subject himself from one stratum of his personality to another, without external intervention.

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*Supernormal.—Of a faculty or phenomenon which goes beyond the level of ordinary experience, in the direction of evolution, or as pertaining to a transcendental world. The word supernatural is open to grave objections; it assumes that there is something outside nature, and it has become associated with arbitrary interference with law. Now there is no reason to suppose that the psychical phenomena with which we deal are less a part of nature, or less subject to fixed and definite law, than any other phenomena. Some of them appear to indicate a higher evolutionary level than the mass of men have yet attained, and some of them appear to be governed by laws of such a kind that they may hold good in a transcendental world as fully as in the world of sense. In either case they are above the norm of man rather than outside his nature.

Supraliminal.—See Subliminal.

Synæsthesia.—See Secondary Sensations.

Synergy.—A number of actions correlated together, or combined into a group.

Telekinesis.—Used of alleged supernormal movements of objects, not due to any known force.

*Telepathy and *telæsthesia.—It has become possible, I think, to discriminate between these two words somewhat more sharply than when I first suggested them in 1882. Telepathy may still be defined as “the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense.” The distance between agent and percipient which the derivation of the word—“feeling at a distance”—implies, need, in fact, only be such as to prevent the operation of whatever known modes of perception are not excluded by the other conditions of the case. Telepathy may thus exist between two men in the same room as truly as between one man in England and another in Australia, or between one man still living on earth and another man long since departed. Telæsthesia—perception at a distance—may conveniently be interpreted in a similar way, as implying any direct sensation or perception of objects or conditions independently of the recognised channels of sense, and also under such circumstances that no known mind external to the percipient's can be suggested as the source of the knowledge thus gained.

*Telergy.—The force exercised by the mind of an agent in impressing a percipient,—involving a direct influence of the extraneous spirit on the brain or organism of the percipient.

Veridical.—See Hallucination.

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EXPLANATION OF PLAN OF ARRANGEMENT AND SYSTEM OF REFERENCES

In each volume of the book the argument runs on continuously through the Chapters placed at the beginning of the volume. A few illustrative cases are included in these Chapters, but the great mass of cases, together with detailed discussions of individual points, are placed in the Appendices corresponding to the Chapters, at the end of each volume (in vol. i. from p. 298 onwards), in order not to interrupt the argument.

The Appendices are divided according to the Chapters to which they belong, as “Appendices to Chapter II.,” “Appendices to Chapter IV.,” &c. (Chapters I. and III. having no Appendices); see page-headings in last part of volume.

The Chapters are divided into numbered sections. In these numbers, the hundreds correspond to the number of the Chapter; thus, in Chapter I. the sections are numbered from 100 onwards; in Chapter II. they are numbered from 200 onwards, and so on. The result of this is that the numbers of sections run on continuously through each Chapter, with a break in the series at the end of each chapter; e.g. the last section of Chapter I. (p. 33) is 128, and the first section of Chapter II. (p. 34) is 200.

To facilitate reference to the sections, their numbering is repeated in the inner corners of the page-headings.

The Appendices are also numbered, to correspond with the sections which they are intended to illustrate; the numbers of the Appendices being distinguished from the numbers of the sections by letters being added to the former. Thus the first Appendix is numbered 207 A (see p. 298), this being an illustration of section 207.

Some of the sections have more than one illustrative Appendix; in that case, the same number is repeated with a different letter. Thus section 223 (p. 60) has two Appendices, which are numbered 223 A and 223 B (pp. 305 and 306). On the other hand, many sections have no Appendices corresponding to them. The result is that the numbering of the Appendices is not continuous, but has many gaps in it. The numbering of the Appendices—like that of the sections—is repeated in the inner corners of the page-headings.

Whenever, therefore, a reference occurs to a number alone, this is to be found among the sections; but when a reference is to a number with a letter, it is to be found among the Appendices.

In the Syllabuses which immediately follow, the references to the Appendices are given in connection with the sections to which they belong.

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SYLLABUSES

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

100. Man has never yet applied the method of science to the problem of his own survival of death.

101. There has been much belief in survival,—both definite belief and vague belief,—but nevertheless no attempt to test that belief by observation and experiment.

102. In fact, the very importance of the belief has barred methodical inquiry; men have adopted it as a faith, and have then been reluctant to analyse it. The Christian Church has absorbed the question into theology, and has treated theology as based on tradition and intuition, not on fresh experiment.

103. From time to time various significant phenomena have occurred, which recall traditional marvels, but are now gradually being brought into line with the results of modern science; e.g. Witchcraft has been greatly elucidated by modern investigations into hysteria.

104. Mesmerism foreshadowed hypnotic suggestion and psychotherapeutics.

105. Swedenborg originated the notion of science in the spiritual world, and must be regarded as a true and early precursor of our enquiry into the nature of trance-manifestations.

106. Sir W. Crookes was the first who seriously endeavoured to apply scientific tests to the alleged supernormal influence of the spiritual on the material world. On these alleged facts, a scheme of belief known as Modern Spiritualism has been founded.

107. Next a group of Cambridge friends became convinced that the questions at issue could only be decided through experiment and observation of contemporary phenomena. On this basis the S.P.R. was founded. The first definite and important point towards which all the evidence converged was the thesis of Telepathy, the evidence for which was set forth in Phantasms of the Living.

108. Telepathy, rendered probable, leads on to evidence of man's survival of death; but we need first a searching review of the capacities of his incarnate personality.

109. Contrasted views of Personality from which we start. Reid: the old-fashioned view of a single unitary personality.

110. Ribot: the modern view that the self is a co-ordination.

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111. The new evidence adduced in this book, while supporting the conception of the composite structure of the Ego, does also bring the strongest proof of its abiding unity, by showing that it withstands the shock of death.

112. The words supraliminal and subliminal may be used to express the mental life which goes on above and below the ordinary threshold of consciousness. The subliminal (or ultramarginal) mental life is sufficiently complex and continuous to justify us in speaking of a subliminal Self.

113. This view may be attacked, on the one hand, as being too elaborate for the facts; on the other hand, as ascribing to some part of our own personality perceptions and impulses which are really due to extraneous and perhaps discarnate minds.

114. The theory of the subliminal self need not, however, be pushed so far as altogether to negative spirit-intervention; in fact, the two views support each other.

115. The study of these subliminal workings is the more necessary now that we realise the slow and complex evolution of man, with the probable lapse from consciousness of much that was once vividly present.

116. The difference between old and new conceptions of consciousness is like the difference between the old simple conception of sunlight and our present conception of the ray fanned out into a spectrum, and barred with lines of varying darkness.

117. Just as the solar spectrum has been prolonged by artifice beyond both red and violet ends, so may the spectrum of conscious human faculty be artificially prolonged beyond both the lower end (where consciousness merges into mere organic operation) and the higher end (where consciousness merges into reverie or ecstasy).

118. Sketch of the general line of inquiry to be pursued in this book—an advance from the analysis of normal to the evidence for supernormal faculty, ending with a discussion of the nature of the proof acquired as to the persistence of human personality after bodily death.

119. Of the chapters following on this first or introductory one, the second will contain a discussion of the ways in which human personality disintegrates and decays.

120. The third, utilising the insight thus gained, will discuss the line of evolution which enables man to maintain and intensify his true normality.

121. The fourth will discuss man's normal alternating phase of personality—sleep, and introduces us to certain supernormal phenomena, which sometimes occur in that state.

122. The fifth chapter will deal with hypnotism, considered as an empirical development of sleep. Hypnotic suggestion intensifies the physical recuperation of sleep, and aids the emergence of those supernormal phenomena which ordinary sleep and spontaneous somnambulism sometimes afford.

123. From hypnotism we pass on in the sixth chapter to a range of experiment and observation of still wider scope, namely, to the consideration of all the sensory messages which the subliminal sends upwards to the supraliminal self; phantasmal externalisations of internal vision and audition. Many of these messages are telepathic—involve, that is to say, direct transmission of thought from one living person to another.

124. Nor does such transmission cease with the bodily death of the transmitting {i-xxvi} agent. The seventh chapter shows that veridical messages may be given phantasmally to mortal men by spirits after bodily death.

125. The eighth chapter introduces another class of subliminal messages—those unwilled writings and utterances which may be styled motor automatisms. Automatic writing, especially, furnishes the opportunity for experiments more prolonged and continuous than the phantasms or pictures of sensory automatisms can often give.

126. These motor automatisms, moreover, as the ninth chapter shows, are apt to become more complete, more controlling, than sensory automatisms. They culminate in the possession of the sensitive by some extraneous spirit, who writes and talks through the temporarily vacated organism, giving proof of his own surviving identity.

127. The conceptions thus gained will be seen to have bearings on the fundamental problems of the relation of spiritual phenomena to Space, to Time, and to the material world.

128. Finally, we shall resume in a tenth chapter, or Epilogue, some of the reflections, philosophical or religious, to which these new facts inevitably give rise.

CHAPTER II

DISINTEGRATIONS OF PERSONALITY

200. Each man is at once profoundly unitary and almost infinitely composite.

201. I believe that the unifying principle of his personality is an indwelling soul, and that souls have actually been observed in operation apart from the organisms which they possess, both while those organisms are still living and after they have decayed.

202. Our aim must be to draw from a study of the disintegrations of human personality some hints which may tend towards its more complete integration.

203. We shall have to discuss consciousness in various ways, and we shall find it convenient to use the word conscious as equivalent to potentially memorable. That will be in our view a conscious act which we imagine as capable of forming under any conceivable circumstances (not necessarily on this planet) a link in a mnemonic chain. We must, therefore, feel no prepossession against any given arrangement or division of the total mass of consciousness which exists within us.

204. As to the mode of original integration of consciousness up to the human level science can tell us nothing; we must wait for the discovery of laws affecting the spiritual world.

205. We have, therefore, no right to assume that all our psychical operations will fall at the same time, or at any time, into the same central current of perception. More probably natural selection has determined what elements shall rise above the conscious threshold. In processes of disintegration these needed elements sink below the threshold again.

206. The series of these degenerations seems to pass through a certain {i-xxvii} critical point where the demarcation between the phases of personality is sufficiently marked to involve a trance-state in passing from one to the other. We begin with minor and partial disaggregations—insistent ideas and the like.

207. These fixed ideas show themselves amenable to psychological rather than to physiological treatment, and are best described as small displacements of the normal level of voluntary control. 207 A. Janet's cases of forgotten terrors giving rise to hysterical attacks.

208. They thus lead up to hysteria, which consists essentially in an undue “permeability of the psychical diaphragm,” or confused interchange of elements which should lie above and elements which should lie below the threshold of waking consciousness.

209. In hysteria the field of consciousness is narrowed, so that hysterical anæsthesia is not a real loss of sensibility, but a mere distraction of attention from the affected part.

210. Anæsthetic patches are determined not by anatomical demarcations, but by caprices of the hypnotic stratum—dream-like self-suggestions emanating from partially intelligent subliminal centres.

211. The fragments of perceptive power over which the hysteric has lost control still exist below the threshold, and are capable of being again raised by suggestion into waking consciousness.

212. Example from the recovery by hysterics of their normal field of vision on the presentation of an exciting object.

213. Examples of the partial regression of specific senses in the hysteric to the vagueness of primitive irritability.

214. Similar dissociation of the sense of personality from purposive movements.

215. But a hysteric who squeezes the dynamometer like a weak child can exert great muscular force under the influence of emotion.

216. Hysteria, however, does not necessarily show initial weakness of mind. It may result from the shock of painful circumstances upon natures originally intelligent and refined.

217. Case of Miss Lucy R., as given by Drs. Breuer and Freud.

218. Case of Fräulein Anna O., by the same physicians.

219. Gradual transformation of hysterical malady in this case into a secondary personality.

220. The subliminal convictions or fixed ideas which become morbid when they are encysted in the mind may become sources of power and influence when they are worked in with the products of supraliminal reason, as in martyrs, reformers, &c.

221. From these cases of isolation of certain emotional groups from the psychical complex I pass on to more profound cleavages;—our best starting point for the study of these lies among the phenomena of dreams—especially in their dramatic character. 221 A. R. L. Stevenson's dream of possessing a double personality.

222. In some cases the new personality seems a dramatisation of some dominant morbid emotion. 222 A. Janet's case of “demoniacal possession.”

223. Somnambulisms, developing from accesses of sleep-waking, may merge into dimorphic personalities. 223 A. Dyce's case. 223 B. Mesnet's case.

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224. Somewhat similar are post-epileptic alternations of personality. 224 A. Case of Sörgel.

225. Other alternations—though possibly post-epileptic in origin—seem dimorphic or allotropic rather than degenerative. 225 A. Case of Ansel Bourne, in which the memory of the secondary state was recovered through hypnotism.

226. Two similar cases, in which the secondary state was perhaps to be referred to a form of hysteria. 226 A. Proust's case. 226 B. Boeteau's case.

227. Case reported by Sidis in which an accident was followed by amnesia and the development of two personalities.

228. A case of the “ambulatory” type, apparently associated with a definite physical lesion. 228 A. Drewry's case.

229. In some cases the alternating state seems due to lack of sufficient vitality to maintain the normal personality without intermission. 229 A. Skae's case.

230. Allied with these degenerative alternations are the factitious alternations which are developed in hysterical persons by hypnotic suggestion or self-suggestion. Janet's cases: 230 A. Léonie; 230 B. Lucie. 230 C. Jules Janet's case: Marceline R.

231. In other cases the secondary state is in some ways an improvement on the primary. 231 A. Case of Félida X. 231 B. Barrett's case.

232. In the case of Mary Reynolds, the second state showed a childish gaiety and insouciance, and the two states gradually coalesced into a third phase superior to both. 232 A. Details of the case.

233. An extreme example of dissociations dependent on time-relations; complex ecmnesia with subjacent hypermnesia. 233 A. Case of Louis Vivé.

234. Example of a subliminal self showing a grotesque hostility to the ordinary self. 234 A. Morton Prince's case of “Sally Beauchamp.”

235. Osgood Mason's case of Alma Z., in whom the recurring secondary personality was always associated with immediate and marked improvement in the physical condition.

236. In the case of Mollie Fancher, there were several secondary personalities with a childish character fitted to each; and her case shows indications of supernormal faculty. 236 A. Newbold's review of the case.

237. The case of Anna Winsor presents a contrast and conflict between positive insanity on the part of the organism generally with wise and watchful sanity on the part of a single limb—the right arm—which appeared to become the permanent possession of the sane secondary personality. 237 A. Barrows' report on the case.

238. The “Watseka Wonder” must be regarded as a pseudo-possession determined by suggestion in a hysterical child. 238 A. Details of the case.

239. This series illustrates the complex and separable nature of the elements of human personality. Hysteria the most delicate form of psychical dissection.

240. Hysteria exhibits acquisitions as well as losses of faculty.

241. If the elements of emergence increase, and the elements of submergence diminish, the permeability of the psychical diaphragm may mean genius instead of hysteria.

242. And the sleeping phase may develop into sleep-waking conditions with manifestations of submerged faculty, which hypnotism can fix and utilise.

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243. As the hysteric stands in relation to ordinary men, so do we ordinary men stand in relation to a not impossible ideal of sanity and integration.

244. We may be as unable to conceive of the ideal beyond us as the hysteric is unable to conceive, except by fitful flashes, our normal sanity.

245. We have, at any rate, learnt the lesson of our profound modifiability; and we have seen that it is by appeals to the subliminal self that we have the best chance of being modified in the directions that we desire.

CHAPTER III

GENIUS

300. Our study, in the last chapter, of the disintegrations of personality will teach us to seek our type of normal manhood in some example of strongly centralised control over as many elements of the personality as possible.

301. It has been suggested that the nervous development of our race tends rather to degeneracy; and Professor Lombroso, for instance, regards “the man of genius” as an aberrant and almost a morbid type.

302. I hold, on the other hand, that Genius may be best defined as a capacity of utilising powers which lie too deep for the ordinary man's control; so that an inspiration of genius is in truth a subliminal uprush of helpful faculty.

303. But before proceeding further we must clearly realise that by no means all that is subliminal in us is potentially “inspiration”; but that what lies beneath the threshold is at least as mixed in quality as what lies above.

304. The descriptive metaphor of highest-level, middle-level, and lowest-level centres, useful in distinguishing great classes of nervous activities, may be extended to different forms of automatic or subliminal manifestation.

305. I explain these inequalities by the assumption of a soul which exercises an imperfect and fluctuating control over the organism, along two main channels, only partly coincident; and I claim the title of genius for states in which some rivulet is drawn into supraliminal life from the undercurrent stream. And as psychologists we are bound to define genius by the mode of its operation;—not by the pleasure-giving properties of the result achieved;—by the source, not the quality, of the output.

306. Now as to normality, I urge that in a constantly evolving species the norm is best represented by the farthest evolutionary stage yet reached.

307. Comparison of genius to an intensification of the glow of a banded spectrum.

308. The form of genius, or of subliminal uprush, most easily measurable is the gift of the “calculating boy.” This gift is usually first observed in childhood, and often disappears in a few years.

309. Table of principal Arithmetical Prodigies.

310. These “prodigies”—who are not “degenerates”—are generally unable to explain their own methods, which remain purely subliminal. Case of Mr. Blyth. Details of some other cases.

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311. Further cases of similar definiteness of subliminal cooperation. Experiences of Mr. W. Higton.

312. Sir John Herschel's “Geometrical Spectres,” which he regarded as “evidence of an intelligence distinct from that of our ordinary personality.”

313. Vaguer impressions of subliminal mentation. Case quoted from Dr. Paul Chabaneix.

314. Co-ordination of the sleeping and waking phases of existence. R. L. Stevenson's elaboration of stories in his dreams.

315. On the other hand, Lombroso's collection of anecdotes of the degeneracy of men of genius is on several grounds very weak evidentially.

316. Nervous diseases are no doubt relatively more prominent in modern life, mainly on account of the diminution of diseases due to hunger, filth, and exposure.

317. Rapid nervous development also induces a perturbation which masks evolution, as more advanced forms of faculty come into play.

318. The planetary scheme of man's evolution regards as mere by-products such joys and powers as are not due to that survival of the fittest which adapts man for success in the material world.

319. But, in fact, the history of life on earth has been a history not merely of adaptation to an environment known once for all, but of gradual discovery of the environment. The dawn of new faculty has again and again manifested a wider Cosmos to which life must react.

320. And thus the higher gifts of genius are no by-products, but are fresh perceptions of truth, and lie in the main stream of human evolution.

321. Yet since the output of genius is largely subliminal, and thus nearer to the extra-terrene source of life, it may sometimes be out of harmony with terrene existence; just as imaginal characteristics in the larva may be out of harmony with larval existence.

322. Thus, for example, subliminal mentation, while capable, with great poets, of using words much after the manner of music, does not, on the other hand, seem to be so closely and inevitably linked with speech as is mental action above the conscious threshold.

323. Speech and writing are summarisations of certain forms of complex gesture, inevitably inadequate to symbolise our whole psychical being.

324. Certain other forms of symbolism,—as observation and experiment seem to show,—are often more natural than speech for subliminal self-expression.

325. In this fact, indeed, one may roughly say, lies the need and the genesis of Art, which abandons logical definiteness of statement for the sake of a nearer approach to truth hidden in the ideal world.

326. The internal audition which externalises itself in poetry or music;—the internal visualisation which externalises itself as plastic art;—these represent for us something truer and more permanent than the products of supraliminal thought.

327. We are here in danger of transcending our definition of genius as the crystallisation by subliminal uprushes of the content of supraliminal thought. But genius is inevitably linked both with trance and with automatism.

328. The flash of genius is a brief automatism, and certain prolonged efforts of genius remind us of the complexity of cerebral re-growth,—the “substitution of function” which takes place beneath the conscious level.

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329. The talent of improvisation also, as with George Sand, may reach a point almost indistinguishable from automatism.

330. In some cases, as with M. de Curel, the act of invention merges into a quasi-hallucinatory perception of the imagined personages.

331. We may then naturally ask what is the relation of the man of genius to the sensitive? Do his inspirations bring with them any supernormal knowledge? He may get true impressions, although not definite impressions, of a supersensory world.

332. For evidence on this point we must consult the utterances of philosophers or poets.

333. In Wordsworth's Prelude we find an honest and deliberate attempt to answer this very question.

334. The subliminal uprush may bring to the poet a vague but genuine consciousness of the spiritual environment.

335. And similarly to the lover it may bring a consciousness of that universal link of spirit with spirit which is the generalisation of telepathy. The controversy as to the planetary or cosmical scope of the passion of Love is, in fact, central to our whole subject.

336. The planetary view, eloquently illustrated by Professor Pierre Janet, regards the sexual instinct as the nucleus of reality around which baseless fancies gather.

337. On the other hand, the Platonic view (as expressed in the Symposium and elsewhere) regards earthly passion as the initiation and introduction into cosmic sanctity and joy.

338. Platonic Love represents in effect what would now be rather termed Religion; an attitude of devotion and worship towards an Eternal Goodness and Beauty.

339. The psychical type to which we have applied the name of genius may thus be recognised in every region of thought and emotion, and appears essential to the evolution of the race.

340. But whence comes this wisdom of the subliminal Self? Within what limits can these favourable “sports” occur?

341. My own argument, while not insisting on Platonic reminiscences, yet assumes a Soul in man and in the Universe an answering Spirit. These are familiar religious postulates, but we must extend the idea of indrawal from the spiritual world to the whole range of our psychical phenomena.

342. That process of indrawal appears healthy and joyous; it is to the child, not to the madman, that genius is near akin.

343. And men of genius, among whom we must reckon the group of saints, have made a palmary experiment on the development of our race,—a sane and fruitful effort to absorb strength and grace from an accessible and inexhaustible source.

CHAPTER IV

SLEEP

400. In the two preceding chapters I have reviewed the main disturbances and alternations of man's personality, and have then considered the {i-xxxii} norm of the waking phase of that personality. The sleeping phase must now be discussed;—what its characteristics are, how its special faculties can be developed, and what light the study of its manifestations may throw upon the constitution of man.

401. A physiological definition of sleep has never yet been achieved, and is rendered increasingly difficult by what we now know of hypnotic sleep;—induced in apparent independence of the supposed physiological requisites of slumber.

402. On the psychological side, sleep is the suspension of waking consciousness. But this is only a negative definition. We must seek its positive characteristics, regarding it as a secondary personality. The abeyance of the supraliminal life may be the liberation of the subliminal.

403. To begin with, the mere break of waking consciousness is somehow associated with a potent physiological change—of a kind whose induction lies beyond the spectrum of our ordinary consciousness.

404. And when we pass on within the limits of powers consciously exercised in waking hours, we find that sleep, although it habitually suspends, yet does occasionally enhance those powers. Thus muscular control is enhanced in somnambulism.

405. And the power of visualisation is heightened in illusions hypnagogiques,—inward vision on the verge of sleep.

406. And also in hypnopompic pictures,—or the prolongation of dream-images into waking life.

407. Sometimes sensory imagination, inward vision, inward audition, and the like,—seem to be heightened and intensified in dream. 407 A. Case of Dr. Hodgson.

408. R. L. Stevenson utilised this sleep-faculty by self-suggestion to secure visual and dramatic interest for imagined scenes.

409. And similarly, as though by an unwilled self-suggestion, a dream may leave permanent nervous injury, or nervous benefit. 409 A. Faure's case. 409 B. Case of Dr. Holbrook.

410. Even stigmata may apparently be caused by self-suggestion in sleep: Krafft-Ebing's case.

411. Dream-memory and hypnotic memory seem to be connected;—suggesting some subliminal continuity of memory through all phases of personality.

412. And in fact we find that, where the memories of several states can be compared, it is the memory furthest from waking life whose span is generally the widest.

413. And dream-memory does at least sometimes include ecmnesic periods, as a case of Charcot's shows.

414. Dream-memory may include facts once known but now forgotten; and also facts which have indeed fallen within the sensory field, but which waking attention has never observed.

415. Example from Delbœuf of the recovery in dream of a forgotten memory. Cases of: 415 A. Mrs. Bickford-Smith. 415 B. Col. A.v.S.

416. Example of the recovery through dream of an object whose position seemed beyond the range of waking myopic vision: Case of Mr. Lewis.

417. Examples of dreams which reason as well as remember. 417 A. {i-xxxiii} Davey's case. 417 B. Case of Professor Lamberton. 417 C. Case of Professor Hilprecht.

418. Analogy between the achievements of dream and the achievements of genius. Possibility that sleep may stand in closer relation than vigilance to a spiritual environment. Ancient universality of this belief.

419. Both telæsthesia and *telepathy—terms between which we may roughly divide our first groups of supernormal faculty,—meet us indistinguishably in the phenomena of dream. Other groups, as premonitions, present further difficulties for any logical scheme of classification.

420. Nor can the distinction between excursive dreams and receptive dreams serve as a definite mark of division. A fuller scheme will be discussed in Chapter VI. For the present we shall take first those phenomena most nearly allied to our ordinary perceptions of the material world, and shall proceed to those which suggest relations to a spiritual world.

421. Visions of objects during sleep, no longer explicable as revivals of facts which had once fallen, though unnoticed, within the field of vision, but suggesting supernormal perception or excursion by the dreamer. Cases of: 421 A. Mr. Squires. 421 B. Mr. Watts. 421 C. Mrs. Wilkie. 421 D. Judge Howe. 421 E. Mr. Brighten. 421 F. Captain Scott. 421 G. Miss Luke. 421 H. Sir L. Jones. 421 J. Mr. Nascimento.

422. Cases where there is an apparently telepathic link between the dreamer and the scene discerned:—Case of Canon Warburton. Cases of: 422 A. Mrs. West. 422 B. Sir J. Drummond Hay.

423. Case of Mr. Boyle: vision of a death-scene.

424. Case of Sir E. Hamilton: dream of injury to brother's arm. Cases of: 424 A. Mr. Crewdson. 424 B. Mrs. Richardson. 424 C. Mr. William Tudor.

425. Precognitive dreams. Indeterminate whether due to the subliminal self of the dreamer or to other spirits incarnate or discarnate. Case of Duchess of Hamilton. Cases of: 425 A. Mr. Pratt. 425 B. Mr. Ivey. 425 C. Lady Z. 425 D. Mr. Haggard. 425 E. Lady Q.

426. Prolonged vision of a scene of death: 426 A. Case of Dr. Bruce.

427. Case of Mrs. Storie. Symbolical presentation of a scene of death.

428. Illustrations of the theory of “psychical invasion” by the spirits of living persons: case of Mrs. T. Cases of: 428 A. Mr. Pike. 428 B. Mrs. Manning. 428 C. Mr. Newnham. 428 D. Mr. W. 428 E. Mrs. Shagren. 428 F. Mrs. Venter.

429. Sometimes this invasion appears to come from departed spirits. Cases of: 429 A. Mrs. Menneer. 429 B. Mrs. Lightfoot. 429 C. Mr. Wingfield. 429 D. Mrs. Green. 429 E. Mr. Dignowity. 429 F. Professor Dolbear.

430. Summary of the lines of inquiry dealt with in the preceding sections, and the conclusion suggested that the self of sleep is a spirit freed from ordinary material limitations.

431. This conclusion accords with the hypothesis that we are living a life in two worlds. The waking personality is adapted to the needs of earthly life; the personality of sleep maintains the fundamental connection between the organism and the spiritual world by supplying it with spiritual energy during sleep, and itself develops by the exercise of its own spiritual faculties.

432. This conclusion will be further justified in later chapters, and especially in those dealing with states analogous to sleep; somnambulistic and hypnotic trance—possession and ecstasy.

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CHAPTER V

HYPNOTISM

500. Preliminary survey of the chapter. I first show that hypnotism is an experimental development of the sleeping phase of personality. Then, reviewing the various accredited modes of inducing hypnotic effects, I show that these resolve themselves into suggestion and self-suggestion; and, further, that suggestion from hypnotisers resolves itself, in its turn, into self-suggestion; and I define suggestion as a successful appeal to the subliminal self.

Analysing, in the next place, the main achievements of hypnotism, I find that these seem all of them to imply an increased subliminal vitalisation of the organism; and, again, that self-suggestion is exercised most effectively when it is supported by strong faith in some external vitalising or succouring power. I conclude that man's spirit does actually draw in energy from some spiritual environment; and that “by Grace we are saved through Faith.”

501. Our study of sleep in the last chapter, even more than our study of genius in the chapter preceding, has suggested the desirability of reproducing and consolidating by experiment some part of that sporadic and spontaneous faculty which has come to the surface especially in vision and sleep-waking states.

502. Yet at the same time, if it were not for the knowledge which hypnotism has almost accidentally brought to us, we should find it hard to devise any appropriate scheme of experiment. Important lesson conveyed by the fact that a phenomenon so easily produced and so impressive as the hypnotic trance should have remained virtually unknown until so recent a period.

503. Hypnotism has now, in fact, been discovered, and has opened an easy road of exploration. Yet we should realise beforehand that we are only likely to reach experimentally such portions of our subliminal being as hysteria and somnambulism have affected in their spontaneous and sporadic way. We shall probably reach, so to say, only “middle-level centres” of the subliminal self.

504. These reflections, at any rate, show that hypnotism is no disconnected or extraneous insertion into experimental psychology, but rather a summary name for a group of necessary, although empirical and isolated, attempts to bring under control that range of submerged faculty which has already from time to time risen into our observation.

505. Mesmer showed broadly that a profound nervous change, often therapeutic, would often follow upon an obscure stimulus which he regarded as a specific effluence passing from hypnotiser to subject.

506. De Puységur developed this nervous change into its most important phase, namely, induced somnambulism, and in this phase obtained indications of supernormal faculty.

507. Elliotson and Esdaile, using mesmeric passes, effected remarkable cures, with deep anæsthesia under surgical operations.

508. Braid and Fahnestock showed that hypnotic results could be produced without passes by suggestion and self-suggestion.

509. Charcot, by strongly defending a definite, but mistaken, conception of {i-xxxv} hypnotism, gave a fresh impulse to its study. 509 A. Bramwell's criticism of Charcot.

510. Liébeault, Bernheim, and other hypnotists representing what was at first identified with “the Nancy School,” but is now the generally accepted view, insisted that hypnotic phenomena are wholly due to suggestion and self-suggestion, but left these terms unexplained.

511. On a closer analysis it is seen that “suggestibility” means nothing more than increased internal responsiveness of the organism, which is the result which we wish to effect, not the means by which we effect it.

512. This plasticity, or readier response of the organism to our desire for its modification, is, in fact, aimed at by the use of various nervous stimuli, massive or specialised. Drugs afford a form of massive stimulus which is sometimes effective. 512 A. Chloroform may sometimes act simply as a suggestion (Herrero's cases). 512 B. Voisin's view of chloroform as facilitating attention. 512 C. Influence of opium in adding force to self-suggestion: Case of Dr. Parsons.

513. Sudden shock has also been tried, but the resultant “cataplexy” is not identical with hypnotic trance. 513 A. Bramwell on hypnosis in animals. 513 B. Mesmerisation of animals regarded as a test of existence of mesmeric effluence. 513 C. Liébeault on hypnotisation of infants.

514. Hypnotic trance is induced in some hysterical persons by pressure on certain patches of skin called hypnogenous zones. This method, however, seems to be merely a form of hysterical self-suggestion.

515. Monotonous stimulation (as used by Voisin, Braid, &c.), has some predisposing effect, but its apparent effect may often be more truly referred to suggestion.

516. And mesmeric passes involve too little monotonous stimulation to be thus explicable. Their effect must be due either to suggestion or to some influence or effluence akin to telepathy.

517. All forms of nervous stimulation, resulting in increased plasticity, tend thus to resolve themselves into the unexplained efficacy of “suggestion,” while, on the other hand, unless there exist some influence or effluence of unknown type, suggestion by hypnotisers can mean little more than self-suggestion.

518. Self-suggestion is itself capricious and unintelligible; although it is in practice observed to work more readily along certain main lines. 518 A. Fahnestock and Delbœuf on self-suggestion. 518 B. Bramwell and the elder Despine on the same. 518 C. Forel's experience. 518 D. Wingfield's experiments in self-suggestion.

519. I define suggestion as “successful appeal to the subliminal self”; and thus, in the first place, I present the puzzle of the capriciousness of successful suggestion as part and parcel of the larger problem of the relationships of the supraliminal and the subliminal self.

520. This conception should throw light on the phenomena of hypnotism. In the first place, since the subliminal self is specially concerned with the sleeping phase of personality, we may expect that hypnotism will involve some developed form of sleep.

521. The hypnotic trance is not identical with ordinary sleep. The subliminal self comes to the front in reply to our appeal, and displaces just so much of the supraliminal self as may be needful for its purposes.

522. The stages of hypnotism do not follow any fixed physiological law,—as {i-xxxvi} Charcot, for instance, supposed. 522 A. Jules Janet's case. 522 B. Gurney on hypnotic stages.

523. Rather, as Gurney has shown, they resemble alternating personalities, of shallow type. 523 A. Gurney on stages of memory in hypnosis. 523 B. Mrs. Sidgwick on the same.

524. Beneath and between the alert states lies the profound hypnotic trance, which resembles a scientific rearrangement of sleep;—at once more stable and more responsive than ordinary sleep.

525. This generalised conception of hypnotism needs a survey, wider than has been usually attempted, of hypnotic results. The impracticability of framing a physiological scheme of these results teaches us to fall back on psychological considerations. Inhibition and dynamogeny form a convenient contrast of conceptions; both factors entering into all processes of education.

526. It is possible that the influence of suggestion begins before birth. At any rate, we may regard hypnotic suggestion as a summarised education, and may discuss the rôle of inhibition and dynamogeny from the nursery onwards. 526 A. Liébeault's case of suggested birth-mark. 526 B. Galton's case of suggested connate idiosyncrasy. 526 C. Maston's case.

527. Inhibition of childish tricks (acquired morbid synergies) by hypnotic suggestion. 527 A. Bérillon's cases of cures of childish tricks, &c. 527 B. Vlavianos' cure of similar tricks in an adult.

528. Inhibition of kleptomania and of violence. 528 A. Cases and references re kleptomania. 528 B. Janet's cases.

529. Inhibition of organic proclivities—dipsomania, nicotinism. 529 A. Cases and references re dipsomania. 529 B. Bramwell on dipsomania. 529 C. Cure of nicotinism.

530. Inhibition of morphinomania. 530 A. Marot's cure of a case.

531. Inhibition of aberrant sexual impulse and imagination.

532. Inhibition of morbid memory and attention,—of idées fixes.obsessions 532 A. References to cures of phobies professionnelles.occupational phobias 532 B. Vlavianos' cure of agoraphobia. 532 C. Mavroukakis' cure of the same. 532 D. Bramwell's cures of obsessions.

533. Inhibition of inconvenient elements of normal memory:—cure of shyness, &c. Hypnosis not a state of mono-ideism. 533 A. Bramwell shows it to be rather one of poly-ideism.

534. Inhibition of pain;—the most forcible control of attention. 534 A. Delbœuf's experiment of the two burns. 534 B. References to some cases of hypnotic analgesia. 534 C. Delbœuf's cure of neuralgia. 534 D. A cure of sycosis menti. 534 E. Hypnotic analgesia in accouchements.childbirth

535. Is this inhibited pain altogether abrogated, or translated to some other plane of consciousness? 535 A. Green's cases. 535 B. Bramwell's cases.

536. In any case suggestion has the power of dissociating vital phenomena hitherto conjoined, and thus allowing a man to retain in consciousness only such selection of faculties as may suit his immediate purpose.

537. Turning now to the dynamogenic results of suggestion, we find that even the results already classed as inhibitive are in the last resort dynamogenic; since although external acts may be inhibited, there must be a dynamogenic reinforcement of the ideas which check the acts. The more obviously dynamogenic results may now be arranged in an order resembling that which {i-xxxvii} we try to follow in education;—proceeding from external senses to internal sensory and other central operation; and thence again to attention and will, and so to character, which is a kind of resultant of all these.

538. Sensory dynamogeny; correction and reinforcement of defective end-organs by suggestion. 538 A. Liébeault on cases of Aubry and Loué. 538 B. Bramwell's subject, as examined by Hewetson. 538 C. Cullerre's case of suggestion by motor images. 538 D. Connection of hypnotic suggestion with Restitution of Function.

539. Hyperæsthesiæ of sight and hearing produced by suggestion. 539 A. Bergson's case of cornea-reading.

540. Hyperæsthesiæ of the less defined sense-organs merge into what we may term heteræsthesiæ, or new varieties of sensibility. 540 A. Kropotkin on primitive sense-organs.

541. Difficulties in the investigation of these; different types of heteræsthesiæ. 541 A. Sensibility to inorganic objects; e.g. running water. 541 B. Barren on “dowsing.” 541 C. Metallæsthesia. 541 D. Sensibility to magnets. 541 E. Sensibility to dead or living organisms; or to mesmerised objects. 541 F. Medical Clairvoyance. 541 G. Richet's experiments. 541 H. Richet's case of clairvoyant diagnosis accompanied by some prevision. 541 J. Suggestive dynamogeny thus leads up to supernormal faculty. 541 K. Braid on medicamentous substances, &c.

542. Dynamogenic effects of suggestion continued. Effects of suggestion on the vaso-motor system. 542 A. De Jong's cure of hæmorrhage. 542 B. Various cases of vaso-motor effects. 542 C. Bramwell's cure of hyperhydrosis.

543. Stigmatisation. 543 A. Case of Louise Lateau. 543 B. Biggs' cases. 543 C. Coomes' case. 543 D. Krafft-Ebing's case. 543 E. Cases by Janet, Backman, &c. 543 F. Charcot's production of œdema by suggestion. 543 G. Artigalas' cure of hæmorrhage. 543 H. Schrenck-Notzing's experiments.

544. Dynamogeny of the central sensorium; visual and auditory hallucinations.

545. Certain points peculiar to hypnotic hallucinations. Their capability of deferment.

546. So-called “negative hallucinations,” or “systematised anæsthesiæ,” imply a watchful adaptation of the hallucination to circumstances unpredictable when the suggestion was first given. 546 A. Mrs. Sidgwick's experiments.

547. Organic effects of hypnotic hallucinations may be profounder than in spontaneous cases.

548. Possibility of utilising this vividness and durability of hallucinatory sensation in such a manner as to extend human faculty.

549. The so-called “transposition of senses” is perhaps a hallucinatory self-suggestion in explanation of a real emergence of telæsthetic capacity. 549 A. Experiments of Pététin, Fahnestock, &c. 549 B. Fontan's experiments.

550. Dynamogenic efficacy of suggestion on attention, will, and character.

551. Suggestions à échéance,delayed-action and post-hypnotic calculation of time-intervals, &c. Experiments of: 551 A. Gurney; 551 B. Delbœuf; 551 C. Bramwell.

552. Vivification of memory, reinforcement of histrionic capacity, &c. 552 A. Dufay's case. 552 B. Bramwell on memory in hypnosis. 552 C. Memory of secondary states recovered by hypnosis.

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553. Capacity for attention strengthened and waste of intelligence checked by suggestion. 553 A. Forel's warders. 553 B. Bramwell's subject, &c.

554. Reinforcement of will-power. Backman's experiment. Control over involuntary muscles.

555. Supposed danger of loss of independence; how avoidable. 555 A. Liégeois, Liébeault, &c., on subject's will-power and “suggested crimes.” 555 B. Bramwell on the same.

556. Influence of suggestion on character. 556 B. Voisin and Dufour on moral reforms.

557. Types of faults and relative probability of hypnotic amelioration. 557 A. Bourdon's cure of morbid jealousy.

558. Faults from which the erring person does not desire to be free.

559. Merging of hypnotic suggestibility into susceptibility to religious influences.

560. We have thus reviewed that branch of hypnotic results which develop the capacity of the subliminal self for organic recuperation in the sleeping phase of personality. We must turn to the results which develop its capacity for self-liberation in the same phase:—as shown by the emergence of supernormal powers.

561. Before expanding this theme I must introduce another subject whose consideration has thus far been postponed, namely, spontaneous somnambulisms.

562. These sleep-waking states form a development of dream, and show the middle-level elements of the subliminal self operating unchecked, with supernormal faculties, for the most part aimlessly and incoherently employed.

563. Sleep-waking parallels to genius. 563 A. Case of Rachel Baker.

564. Sleep-waking sagacity and organic prevision. 564 A. Teste's case and references to others.

565. Telæsthesia and telepathy in spontaneous sleep-waking. 565 A. Dufay's case. References to cases of Elizabeth Squirrell, Jane Rider, &c.

566. Transition from spontaneous sleep-waking to the trance of “possession.”

567. This evidence shows us that the supernormal powers which we have traced in each of the preceding chapters in turn present themselves in much the same fashion in spontaneous sleep-waking states also. We must now return to hypnotism, and ask whether these powers are also manifest in sleep-waking states experimentally induced.

568. And first, as to the supernormal induction of hypnotic states. Can hypnosis be telepathically produced from a distance? Experiments of: 568 A. Janet and Gibert. 568 B. Héricourt. 568 C. Dusart. 568 D. Dufay. 568 E. Other cases.

569. If, then, a supernormal influence is exercised from a distance, it may presumably be exercised from close at hand, and we may thus be better able to analyse its true nature. Experiments in the telepathic production of local organic effects and in silent willing in proximity. 569 A. Experiments in the production of local anæsthesia by Gurney. 569 B. The same, by Mrs. Sidgwick. 569 C. Experiments in silent willing by Barrett, H. S. Thompson, &c.

570. Possible physical effluence as a hypnotic agent in proximity, perhaps indicated by the occasional sensations accompanying mesmeric passes.

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571. Supernormal response of the hypnotised subject. Rapport, and community of sensation with hypnotiser. 571 A. Bramwell on rapport. 571 B. Experiments in community of sensation by Gurney. 571 C. The same, by Guthrie.

572. Perception of past sensation or action; retrocognitive telæsthesia. 572 A. Dobbie's cases. 572 B. Case of Ellen Dawson.

573. Perception of existing facts out of sensory range; telepathy and travelling clairvoyance, &c., with occasional elements of precognition. 573 A. Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick's experiments. 573 B. Case of “Jane.” 573 C. Backman's experiments. 573 D. Fahnestock's experiments. 573 E. Major Buckley's experiments. 573 F. Case of prediction of result of operation.

574. We have now traced out the second line in which hypnotism is a development of the sleeping phase of personality;—the supernormal phenomena, as contrasted with the therapeutic. The chapter might here conclude; save that it is felt that, if hypnotism be thus generalised as an appeal to the subliminal self, that appeal should not be the mere appanage of medical practice, but should be based for mankind at large upon some deep-seated instinct or faith.

575. Such faiths or instincts form what I have called “schemes of self-suggestion”;—which do, in fact, shape themselves for man at each stage in turn of human progress. 575 A. Cases of efficacy of charms.

576. Transition from fetichistic to polytheistic conceptions of cure, and from polytheism to monotheism; the so-called “miracles of Lourdes.”

577. Transition from monotheism to metaphysical abstraction; faith-healing; Christian science; mind-healing. Reasons for not here treating these faiths in detail. They are crude attempts at a practical realisation of the profound conception of the superior reality of mind over matter.

578. The “miracles of Lourdes,” on the other hand, depend on a complex resuscitation of antique methods of self-suggestion. No evidence for the agency of the Virgin Mary, or that the cures belong to a different category from hypnotic cures. 578 A. The Lourdes legend.

579. The Lourdes legend must needs be fully discussed, since it is important to clear away all that we can of superstition and delusion from the essential truth that it is possible by a right disposition of our own minds to draw energy from an environing world of spiritual life. The practical result of hypnotic artifice has been to strengthen in us that intelligent central force which guides organic metabolism to useful ends.

580. I can conceive that force in no other way than by saying that man is a spirit, controlling an organism irregularly and variably, and controlling more intimately those deeper strata which hypnotic suggestion reaches.

581. Thus in hypnotic or trance states the spirit can more easily either modify the organism, with self-sanative results, or partially quit the organism, with telæsthetic results.

582. The life of the organism depends on a perpetual and varying indraft from the cosmic energy, and there will be effective therapeutical or ethical self-suggestion whenever by any artifice subliminal attention to a bodily function or to a moral purpose is carried to some unknown pitch of intensity which draws fresh energy from the metetherial world.

583. We cannot at present define the form of faith which may be most effective in this illation of spiritual strength and grace. Yet we may at once {i-xl} realise that our most comprehensive duty, in this or other worlds, is intensity of spiritual life;—nay, that our own spirits are part and parcel of the ultimate vitalising Power.

CHAPTER VI

SENSORY AUTOMATISM

600. Summary of preceding chapters. While various kinds of manifestations of the Subliminal Self are disintegrative or morbid in character, we find in each class indications of higher faculties and of an evolutive potency. The converging lines of evidence lead to the conception of the subliminal Self as the principal, deepest, and most permanent element of the Self; although much that is incoherent or outworn is also subliminal

601. The distinctive subliminal faculty of Telepathy or Telæsthesia is emancipated from the ordinary limitations of organic life, and also persists after organic death; thus showing a relation between the subliminal and the surviving self. All subliminal action may be called Automatism and regarded under the form of messages conveying information from the subliminal to the supraliminal self, in either a sensory or a motor form.

602. Supraliminal life is here regarded as a special or privileged case of the whole personality, and consequently each ordinary faculty or sense will appear as a special case of some more general power, towards which its evolution may be tending. Each sense is generally supposed to obtain fresh information only through its own end-organ, but it will appear that new and true perceptions are also generated in the brain.

603. Vestiges of the primitive undifferentiated sensitivity persist in the form of synæsthesiæ, e.g. when the hearing of an external sound carries with it, by some arbitrary association of ideas, the seeing of some form or colour. These phenomena are apparently entencephalic. 603 A. Flournoy's case. 603 B. Gruber's case.

604. The successive stages leading from these entencephalic percepts towards ordinary vision are: Entoptic impressions due to mechanical stimuli of the optic nerve or eye.

605. After-images: the retinal sequelæ of ordinary vision.

606. Ordinary external vision.

607. The further stages from entencephalic vision towards the more internal forms are: Memory-images; either cerebral sequelæ of external vision, or a psychical rearrangement of these. 607 A. Flourney on memory-images.

608. Dreams, mostly consisting of confused memory-images.

609. Imagination-images, psychical rearrangements of visual imagery.

610. All these forms of internal vision lead up to the most completely developed form, viz., hallucinations. 610 A. Mrs. Verrall on visualisation.

611. A hallucination is an intensified internal vision, a case of central hyperæsthesia. The faculty of internal vision varies in different persons, and only rarely attains to hallucination. Hallucinations sometimes arise from well-known morbid causes, but those which occur in normal conditions are more instructive, being apparently spontaneous modifications of central percepts.

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612. The popular assumption that a hallucination was proof of some morbid condition was shown to be without foundation by Gurney's statistics of hallucinations occurring to persons “in good health, free from anxiety, and completely awake.” Through the investigation initiated by Gurney and resumed later by a Committee of the S.P.R., a far larger collection, and one more completely representative of all classes of hallucinations than had ever existed before, was formed. It showed that for the majority of hallucinations, as for the great majority of dreams, no special explanation (either physiological or supernormal) can be offered. In most of the coincident cases, the events coinciding with the hallucinations were unknown to the percipients at the time. 612 A. Summary of the Report on the “Census of Hallucinations.”

613. These veridical hallucinations afford evidence of a development of fresh faculty. The usual conformity of visual hallucinations to optical laws is the result of self-suggestion; this is true of veridical as of falsidical hallucinations.

614. But in that case, is the apparent spatial relation between percipient and percept due only to self-suggestion? Or is it not possible that real spatial relations may still exist in percepts—whether of embodied or of disembodied percipients—which have nothing to do with the sense-organs?

615. If so, veridical mental visions may symbolically represent material objects from a point of view outside the bodily organism of the percipient, and in the place to which he imagines himself to have travelled. This excursive theory may be applied to many telepathic and to all telæsthetic cases. A corollary to it would be the possible perception of the percipient, in the place where he imagines himself to be, by other persons actually present there.

616. Mental visions can be controlled; e.g. the most effective means of checking morbid and harmful hallucinations is the influence of hypnotic suggestion on the submerged mental strata.

617. Another instance of control is the production of harmless hallucinations by hypnotic suggestion. This differs from ordinary suggestion, in which only the ordinary powers of the subject are brought into play, since it involves at least a great increase in his ordinary visualising power, and forms another example of hypnotic evocations of fresh faculty, such as were given in Chapter V. The present cases are stimulations of central sensory tracts. The subliminal formation of these complex centrally initiated images is fostered by the suggestion which also projects them into the ordinary consciousness.

618. Hallucinations, then, have no necessary connection with disease, though they may often accompany it, since the central sensory tracts are of course capable of morbid as well as of healthful stimulus. The therapeutic study of hallucinations naturally preceded their psychological study; but in the newer practical study of eugenics—the study which aims at improving the human organism, instead of merely conserving it—experimental psychology is indispensable, and one branch of this is the experimental study of mental visions.

619. For this purpose it would be convenient to dispense with external suggestion, and confine our attention to the mind of the percipient. There are already in ordinary life indications of some faculty of projecting supraliminally visual images apparently matured elsewhere; e.g. in dreams, memory-images, illusions hypnagogiques.

620. Crystal-vision affords a simple empirical method of finding the correlation {i-xlii} between all these types of internal vision, by facilitating in the seers the externalisation of subliminal concepts or ideas. 620 A. Résumé of history of crystal-gazing.

621. Hypnotisation, which is sometimes induced by prolonged gazing, may occur in crystal-gazing and facilitate hallucination. And the visions are sometimes determined by points de repère.

622. But crystal-visions generally occur without hypnotisation, and develop in a way independent of points de repère.

623. Crystal-gazing is a harmless empirical method of developing internal vision. Experiments have been tried to test if the visions follow optical laws, independently of suggestion;—and should be tried again. 623 A. Discussion of optical effects in hallucinations.

624. A hypnotised person may be made to see visions on waking from the trance, and, as in the cases quoted in the Appendix, the seer, having forgotten the suggestion, may be unaware of the origin of the pictures and unable to explain what their subject or meaning is. 624 A. Post-hypnotic crystal visions recorded by the present writer.

625. These experiments illustrate the transition between post-hypnotic hallucinations and crystal-visions, and afford further evidence of the genuine occurrence of the latter. Crystal-visions of: 625 A. Mrs. Verrall; 625 B. Miss Goodrich-Freer; 625 C.“Miss A.”; 625 D. “Miss Angus.”

626. These are really instances of the control of inward vision; although at first sight appearing lawless and arbitrary,—a random mixture of normal and supernormal knowledge with mere imagination.

627. Induced crystal-visions illustrate the various types of spontaneous sensory automatism; and these—to have any objective validity—must represent knowledge supernormally acquired, or direct communication between the subliminal strata of two minds,—that is, telepathy.

628. Telepathy must exist if any disembodied intelligences exist. On the principle of continuity, evolution from the lower carries with it a presumption of development into the higher. Conversely, the ancient belief in the possibility of telepathic communication with higher minds, as in prayer, might well have suggested that such communication was possible between minds on the same level. This notion has occurred from time to time to philosophic thinkers, but has only recently been systematised by actual experiment.

629. The operation of telepathy is probably constant and far-reaching, and intermingled with ordinary modes of acquiring knowledge. But since we know nothing of its method of action, we can only specifically postulate it when all other known causes are excluded. The best experimental evidence is where the ideas to be transferred are trivial, and devoid of all association or emotion.

630. An account of the history and development of this form of experimentation, and the varied yet concordant results obtained, was given by Gurney in 1886 in Phantasms of the Living, and some part of this history is reproduced in our Appendices, with examples of the additional evidence received since as to experimental thought-transference in the normal state. 630 A. Note on “Number-habits.” Experiments with agent and percipient in the same room by: 630 B. Mr. Guthrie; 630 C. Mr. Rawson. Experiments with agent and percipient at a distance from one another by: 630 D. Mr. Kirk; 630 E. Mr. Glardon; 630 F. Dr. and Mrs. S.; 630 G. Miss Despard.

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631. Thus telepathy may produce definitely sensory, or vague, or ideational impressions; it may sometimes be assisted by hypnotisation; and we find a continuous transition from experimental to spontaneous telepathy. The apparently favourable effect of proximity may be due to self-suggestion alone.

632. We cannot as yet command success in the experiments;—(a) the idea to be transferred may not reach the percipient's mind; or (b) if it does, it may be prevented from emerging into his ordinary consciousness. It has been suggested that telepathy is propagated by “brain-waves,” that is, by ether waves passing from brain to brain.

633. But this suggestion rests on very superficial analogies, since the mental images of agent and percipient are generally dissimilar, the percipient greatly modifying the impression before externalising it.

634. Nor does it meet cases of collective percipience, or of varying time-relation, or of telepathy from discarnate spirits. We can at present say little more in the way of explanation than that Life has the power of manifesting itself to Life. Such manifestation may involve the lower animals also. 634 A. Case of animal apparition: Mrs. Bagot.

635. Hypothesis of a possible mode of psychical interaction: a “psychical invasion” by the agent, creating a “phantasmogenetic centre” in the place invaded; the spirit of the agent being actually transferred to the distant scene, which it perceives, but may or may not remember; while its presence may or may not be perceived by the persons materially present in the scene.

636. Mere telepathy may explain an apparition coinciding with the death of the person seen; but the hypothesis of “psychical invasion” seems to apply better to (1) collective cases; (2) telepathic clairvoyance; (3) reciprocal cases.

637. The increased evidence for communications from the dead must affect our view of telepathy; as may also the increasing evidence for precognition; and theorising must simply follow the evidence.

638. The present theory starts from the conception that different segments of the personality can operate independently of and unknown to each other, and sometimes apart from the organism; (this latter is implied in the assumption of telepathy,—still more in that of survival). Through hypnotism the first important step has been proved possible, namely, the independent operation of different segments, with separate streams of memory and consciousness, all working through the same organism.

639. Between these minor dissociations expressing themselves through the brain and the complete dissociation from the brain itself occurring at death come the apparently intermediate cases of spiritual activity at a distance during the comatose condition sometimes preceding death.

640. The cases now to be considered are regarded as coming within the formula “Dissociation of personality, combined with activity in the metetherial environment”; and the word “spirit” is here used to mean that element of the personality which operates, before or after death, in this environment.

641. Hallucinations, however, were shown by Gurney's Census to be too frequent to have any evidential force apart from some correspondence with external events. They can easily be produced by hypnotic suggestion, and the percipient's subjective impression as to their validity is at best a very doubtful criterion.

642. The only valid evidence, then, for veridicality depends on a coincidence with some external event. Thus apparitions of the dying show primâ {i-xliv} facieat first sight a causal connection between apparition and death unless the coincidence can be attributed to chance. The questions of evidence and chance coincidence were dealt with fully both by Gurney and in the Report of the later Census, with the conclusion that these coincidences could not be due to chance alone. 642 A. Gurney's general criticism of the evidence for telepathy. 642 B. Contemporary documentary evidence, with references to some cases supported by such evidence. 642 C. Hallucinations and illusions of memory: Royce and Parish on “pseudo-presentiments”; replies by Gurney and Hodgson.

643. Coincidental hallucinations have been classified from different points of view according to (a) the external event to which they correspond; (b) the condition, waking or sleeping, of the percipient; (c) the sense affected; (d) the collectivity, or otherwise, of the perception. We take here as the basis of our scheme of classification the conception of psychical invasion by the agent.

644. We begin with cases where the action of the invader is of the weakest kind, so as to be hardly, if at all, evidential; e.g., case of Col. Bigge seeing phantasm of Col. Reed shortly before his actual arrival. In “arrival cases” the agent is probably imagining himself in the place where he is seen.

645. In other cases there is no obvious link with the place; but the phantasm is probably veridical if seen either repeatedly by different persons, or collectively; e.g. repeated apparitions of Mrs. Hawkins; and the evidence is still stronger when the apparitions are both repeated and collective. Cases of: 645 A. Mr. Williams. 645 B. Mrs. Stone. 645 C. Mrs. Beaumont. 645 D. Canon Bourne. 645 E. Miss Maughan.

646. In some cases, the percipience is merely collective, not repeated, and coincides with no crisis; e.g. apparition of Miss E. seen by her two sisters.

647. Apparition of Mrs. Hall seen by herself and three other persons.

648. Collective percipience has sometimes been explained by telepathy, but is here attributed to psychical invasion by the agent; since in some cases there is no link between him and any of the percipients. Further, the frequent absence of any crisis on his part suggests a special facility of psychical dissociations of a kind to make his phantom visible. The supposed idiosyncrasy is here called the “psychorrhagic diathesis.”

649. Canon Bourne's case may be regarded as an instance. The same idiosyncrasy may exist in discarnate spirits, thus causing “haunts.”

650. This hypothesis of a non-material effect produced on space is supported by cases in which the phantasm is perceived—not by the person apparently most appropriate as percipient, but by some comparatively uninterested person present with him, who happens to possess greater sensitivity; e.g. case of Mrs. Reddell.

651. Two other cases of the same kind are those of Mrs. Clerke, and 651 A. Mr. Brown.

652. The next stage of psychical invasion consists of cases where the agent is seen in a place where he is probably imagining himself to be at the time. A few cases of precognitions of intended suicide are especially strong evidence of this; e.g. case of Mrs. McAlpine.

653. As already mentioned, phantasms seen just before arrival are of the same type; e.g. case of Mr. Carroll.

654. Any accessories to the picture (carriages, horses, &c.) are merely parts of the subliminal dream or scene imagined and projected by the agent. Cases of: 654 A. Mr. Mountford. 654 B. Major W.

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655. The supposed space-modification may take the form of a phantasmal voice (not heard acoustically), instead of a figure; e.g. case of Mr. Stevenson. 655 A. Case of Mr. Fryer.

656. Other “arrival cases” and cases where contents of letters just arrived are discerned, as if mere vicinity aided clairvoyant perception, point to some spatial relation. Cases of: 656 A. Miss R. 656 B. Dr. Holmes.

657. We come next to cases where the supposed psychical invader or agent himself supernormally acquires information. This may be done through (a) hyperæsthesia, (b) crystal-gazing or shell-hearing, (c) telepathy, leading to telæsthesia, (d) telæsthetic dreams or visions; in all of which the percipient often has the impression of travelling to the distant scene.

658. The constitutional habits of the brain would dispose the perception to take a sensory form, but it is often symbolic, showing psychical shaping of the percept.

659. Such symbolism is no proof of any mental agency beyond our own, since all our percepts are ultimately symbolic, or indirectly representative of external realities. To incarnate spirits the material world seems the easiest to perceive, and consequently immaterial percepts are apt to assume a material symbolism. For discarnate spirits this position may be reversed.

660. There may be a continuous transition between supernormal perceptions of ideas and of matter. In travelling clairvoyance there seem to be all forms of supernormal faculty, and a power of perceiving objects or events distant either in space or time, and sometimes with no assignable link with any living person.

661. Cases of this kind occur more often in dreams than in waking hallucinations; e.g. case of Dr. ——. In many of these cases there is no clear indication of an agent; they suggest rather an active impulse on the part of the percipient. The scene perceived may or may not be of special interest to him.

662. Sometimes a scene may be discerned as in crystal vision; e.g., in cases of: 662 A. Mr. Keulemans. 662 B. Mr. Gottschalk. 662 C. Mr. Searle. 662 D. Mrs. Taunton.

663. Clairvoyant visions representing a past scene (e.g. case of Mrs. Paquet) suggest either latency of the impression, or—more strongly—a sense of time-relations different from the ordinary. The latter conception is suggested also by cases of premonition. 663 A. Case of Dr. Wiltse. References to Hulin's cases and to Ermacora's theory of premonition.

664. The next case (that of Mr. Dyne) suggests yet another explanation—a picture of its last scenes on earth impressed by a spirit on a surviving friend.

665. Next come cases where there was probably some real projection of will or desire by the agent-invader, who (himself retaining no memory of his excursion) is seen by the percipient in his own vicinity; e.g. the case of Mrs. Elgee and Mrs. Ramsay, which, being collective, specially suggests invasion by the agent. Cases of: 665 A. Mr. Kearne. 665 B. Mr. Lodge. 665 C. Mr. Dickinson.

666. A still further stage is reached when the agent perceives and remembers the scene which he has been perceived to invade; i.e. in “reciprocal” cases. Cases of: 666 A. Mrs. Parker. 666 B. Mrs. S. 666 C. Mr. Wilmot.

667. Premature fulfilments of “death-compacts,” when the agent is seen at the time of some dangerous but not fatal accident. Cases of: 667 A. Miss R. 667 B. Commander Aylesbury.

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668. Apparitions produced experimentally; that is, when the agent is perceived at a time when he is strongly willing to appear, though he may not himself know of his success; e.g. case of Mr. S. H. B. Cases of: 668 A. Mr. Godfrey. 668 B. Mr. Kirk. 668 C. Dr. G. 668 D. Miss Maughan. 668 E. “Miss Danvers.” 668 F. Mr. Sinclair. 668 G. Councillor Wesermann.

669. Experiments should be tried as to whether self-projection could not be facilitated by hypnotic suggestion. Also the agent might be made to recall his visit by hypnotic suggestion.

670. These self-projections represent the most extraordinary achievements of the human will, and are perhaps acts which a man might perform equally well before and after death.

{i-1}

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Maior agit deus, atque opera in maiora remittit.

—VIRGIL.

The greater god acts, and sends [you] back into greater deeds. [Aen. 12.429]

100. In the long story of man's endeavours to understand his own environment and to govern his own fates, there is one gap or omission so singular that, however we may afterwards contrive to explain the fact, its simple statement has the air of a paradox. Yet it is strictly true to say that man has never yet applied to the problems which most profoundly concern him those methods of inquiry which in attacking all other problems he has found the most efficacious.

The question for man most momentous of all is whether or no he has an immortal soul; or—to avoid the word immortal, which belongs to the realm of infinities—whether or no his personality involves any element which can survive bodily death. In this direction have always lain the gravest fears, the farthest-reaching hopes, which could either oppress or stimulate mortal minds.

On the other hand, the method which our race has found most effective in acquiring knowledge is by this time familiar to all men. It is the method of modern Science—that process which consists in an interrogation of Nature entirely dispassionate, patient, systematic; such careful experiment and cumulative record as can often elicit from her slightest indications her deepest truths. That method is now dominant throughout the civilised world; and although in many directions experiments may be difficult and dubious, facts rare and elusive, Science works slowly on and bides her time,—refusing to fall back upon tradition or to launch into speculation, merely because strait is the gate which leads to valid discovery, indisputable truth.

I say, then, that this method has never yet been applied to the all-important problem of the existence, the powers, the destiny of the human soul.

101. Nor is this strange omission due to any general belief that the problem is in its nature incapable of solution by any observation whatever which mankind could make. That resolutely agnostic view—I may almost say that scientific superstition—“ignoramus et ignorabimus”We do not and shall not know—is no doubt held at the present date by many learned minds. But it has never been {i-2} the creed, nor is it now the creed, of the human race generally. In most civilised countries there has been for nearly two thousand years a distinct belief that survival has actually been proved by certain phenomena observed at a given date in Palestine. And beyond the Christian pale—whether through reason, instinct, or superstition—it has ever been commonly held that ghostly phenomena of one kind or another exist to testify to a life beyond the life we know.

But, nevertheless, neither those who believe on vague grounds nor those who believe on definite grounds that the question might possibly be solved, or has actually been solved, by human observation of objective facts, have hitherto made any serious attempt to connect and correlate that belief with the general scheme of belief for which Science already vouches. They have not sought for fresh corroborative instances, for analogies, for explanations; rather they have kept their convictions on these fundamental matters in a separate and sealed compartment of their minds, a compartment consecrated to religion or to superstition, but not to observation or to experiment.

It is my object in the present work—as it has from the first been the object of the Society for Psychical Research, on whose behalf most of the evidence here set forth has been collected,—to do what can be done to break down that artificial wall of demarcation which has thus far excluded from scientific treatment precisely the problems which stand in most need of all the aids to discovery which such treatment can afford.

Yet let me first explain that by the word “scientific” I signify an authority to which I submit myself—not a standard which I claim to attain. Any science of which I can here speak as possible must be a nascent science—not such as one of those vast systems of connected knowledge which thousands of experts now steadily push forward in laboratories in every land—but such as each one of those great sciences was in its dim and poor beginning, when a few monks groped among the properties of “the noble metals,” or a few Chaldean shepherds outwatched the setting stars.

What I am able to insist upon is the mere Socratic rudiment of these organisms of exact thought—the first axiomatic pre-requisite of any valid progress. My one contention is that in the discussion of the deeper problems of man's nature and destiny there ought to be exactly the same openness of mind, exactly the same diligence in the search for objective evidence of any kind, exactly the same critical analysis of results, as is habitually shown, for instance, in the discussion of the nature and destiny of the planet upon which man now moves.

Obvious truism although this statement may at first seem, it will presently be found, I think, that those who subscribe to it are in fact committing themselves to inquiries of a wider and stranger type than any to which they are accustomed;—are stepping outside certain narrow limits {i-3} within which, by ancient convention, disputants on either side of these questions are commonly confined.

102. A brief recall to memory of certain familiar historical facts will serve to make my meaning clearer. Let us consider how it has come about that, whereas the problem of man's survival of death is by most persons regarded as a problem in its nature soluble by sufficient evidence, and whereas to many persons the traditional evidence commonly adduced appears insufficient,—nevertheless no serious effort has been made on either side to discover whether other and more recent evidence can or cannot be brought forward.

A certain broad answer to this inquiry, although it cannot be said to be at all points familiar, is not in reality far to seek. It is an answer which would seem strange indeed to some visitant from a planet peopled wholly by scientific minds. Yet among a race like our own, concerned first and primarily to live and work with thoughts undistracted from immediate needs, the answer is natural enough. For the fact simply is that the intimate importance of this central problem has barred the way to its methodical, its scientific solution.

There are some beliefs for which mankind cannot afford to wait. “What must I do to be saved?” is a question quite otherwise urgent than the cause of the tides or the meaning of the marks on the moon. Men must settle roughly somehow what it is that from the Unseen World they have reason to fear or to hope. Beliefs grow up in direct response to this need of belief; in order to support themselves they claim unique sanction; and thus along with these specific beliefs grows also the general habit of regarding matters that concern that Unseen World as somehow tabooed or segregated from ordinary observation or inquiry.

Let us pass from generalities to the actual history of Western civilisation. In an age when scattered ritual, local faiths—tribal solutions of cosmic problems—were destroying each other by mere contact and fusion, an event occurred which in the brief record of man's still incipient civilisation may be regarded as unique. A life was lived in which the loftiest response which man's need of moral guidance had ever received was corroborated by phenomena which have been widely regarded as convincingly miraculous, and which are said to have culminated in a Resurrection from the dead. To those phenomena or to that Resurrection it would at this point be illegitimate for me to refer in defence of my argument. I have appealed to Science, and to Science I must go;—in the sense that it would be unfair for me to claim support from that which Science in her strictness can set aside as the tradition of a pre-scientific age. Yet this one great tradition, as we know, has, as a fact, won the adhesion and reverence of the great majority of European minds. The complex results which followed from this triumph of Christianity have been discussed by many historians. But one result which here appears to us in a new light was this—that the Christian religion, the Christian Church, became for Europe the accredited representative {i-4} and guardian of all phenomena bearing upon the World Unseen. So long as Christianity stood dominant, all phenomena which seemed to transcend experience were absorbed in her realm—were accounted as minor indications of the activity of her angels or of her fiends. And when Christianity was seriously attacked, these minor manifestations passed unconsidered. The priests thought it safest to defend their own traditions, their own intuitions, without going afield in search of independent evidence of a spiritual world. Their assailants kept their powder and shot for the orthodox ramparts, ignoring any isolated strongholds which formed no part of the main line of defence.

103. Meantime, indeed, the laws of Nature held their wonted way. As ever, that which the years had once brought they brought again; and every here and there some marvel, liker to the old stories than any one cared to assert, cropped up between superstition on the one hand and contemptuous indifference on the other. Witchcraft, Mesmerism, Swedenborgianism, Spiritism—these especially, amid many minor phenomena, stood out in turn as precursory of the inevitable wider inquiry. A very few words on each of these four movements may suffice here to show their connection with my present theme.

Witchcraft.—The lesson which witchcraft teaches with regard to the validity of human testimony is the more remarkable because it was so long and so completely misunderstood. The belief in witches long passed—as well it might—as the culminant example of human ignorance and folly; and in so comparatively recent a book as Mr. Lecky's “History of Rationalism,” the sudden decline of this popular conviction, without argument or disapproval, is used to illustrate the irresistible melting away of error and falsity in the “intellectual climate” of a wiser age. Since about 1880, however, when French experiments especially had afforded conspicuous examples of what a hysterical woman could come to believe under suggestion from others or from herself, it has begun to be felt that the phenomena of witchcraft were very much what the phenomena of the Salpêtrière would seem to be to the patients themselves, if left alone in the hospital without a medical staff. And in Phantasms of the Living, Edmund Gurney, after subjecting the literature of witchcraft to a more careful analysis than any one till then had thought it worth while to apply, was able to show that practically all recorded first-hand depositions (made apart from torture) in the long story of witchcraft may quite possibly have been true, to the best belief of the deponents; true, that is to say, as representing the conviction of sane (though often hysterical) persons, who merely made the almost inevitable mistake of confusing self-suggested hallucinations with waking fact. Nay, even the insensible spots on the witches were no doubt really anæsthetic—involved a first discovery of a now familiar clinical symptom—the zones analgésiques of the patients of Pitres or Charcot. Witchcraft, in fact, was a gigantic, a cruel psychological and pathological experiment conducted by inquisitors upon hysteria; {i-5} but it was conducted in the dark, and when the barbarous explanation dropped out of credence much of possible discovery was submerged as well.

104. Mesmer.—Again, the latent possibilities of “suggestion,”—though not yet under that name, and mingled with who knows what else?—broke forth into a blaze in the movement headed by Mesmer;—at once discoverer and charlatan. Again the age was unripe, and scientific opposition, although not so formidable as the religious opposition which had sent witches to the stake, was yet strong enough to check for the second time the struggling science. Hardly till our own generation—hardly even now—has a third effort found better acceptance, and hypnotism and psychotherapeutics, in which every well-attested fact of witchcraft or of mesmerism finds, if not its explanation, at least its parallel, are establishing themselves as a recognised and advancing method of relieving human ills.

105. This brief sketch of the development as it were by successive impulses, under strong disbelief and discouragement, of a group of mental tendencies, faculties, or sensibilities now recognised as truly existing and as often salutary, is closely paralleled by the development, under similar difficulties, of another group of faculties or sensibilities, whose existence is still disputed, but which if firmly established may prove to be of even greater moment for mankind.

At no time known to us, whether before or since the Christian era, has the series of trance-manifestations,—of supposed communications with a supernal world,—entirely ceased. Sometimes, as in the days of St. Theresa, such trance or ecstasy has been, one may say, the central or culminant fact in the Christian world. Of these experiences I must not here treat. The evidence for them is largely of a subjective type, and they may belong more fitly to some future discussion as to the amount of confidence due to the interpretation given by entranced persons to their own phenomena.

But in the midst of this long series, and in full analogy to many minor cases, occurs the exceptional trance-history of Emmanuel Swedenborg. In this case, as is well known, there appears to have been excellent objective evidence both of clairvoyance or telæsthesia and of communication with departed persons;—and we can only regret that the philosopher Kant, who satisfied himself of some part of Swedenborg's supernormal^{1 1} I have ventured to coin the word “supernormal” to be applied to phenomena which are beyond what usually happens—beyond, that is, in the sense of suggesting unknown psychical laws. It is thus formed on the analogy of abnormal. When we speak of an abnormal phenomenon we do not mean one which contravenes natural laws, but one which exhibits them in an unusual or inexplicable form. Similarly by a supernormal phenomenon I mean, not one which overrides natural laws, for I believe no such phenomenon to exist, but one which exhibits the action of laws higher, in a psychical aspect, than are discerned in action in everyday life. By higher (either in a psychical or physiological sense) I mean, apparently belonging to a more advanced stage of evolution. gift, did {i-6} not press further an inquiry surpassed in importance by none of those upon which his mastermind was engaged. Apart, however, from these objective evidences, the mere subject-matter of Swedenborg's trance-revelations was enough to claim respectful attention. I cannot here discuss the strange mixture which they present of slavish literalism with exalted speculation, of pedantic orthodoxy with physical and moral insight far beyond the level of that age. It is enough to say here that even as Socrates called down philosophy from heaven to earth, so in a somewhat different sense it was Swedenborg who called up philosophy again from earth to heaven;—who originated the notion of science in the spiritual world, as earnestly, though not so persuasively, as Socrates originated the idea of science in this world which we seem to know. It was to Swedenborg first that that unseen world appeared before all things as a realm of law; a region not of mere emotional vagueness or stagnancy of adoration, but of definite progress according to definite relations of cause and effect, resulting from structural laws of spiritual existence and intercourse which we may in time learn partially to apprehend. For my own part I regard Swedenborg,—not, assuredly, as an inspired teacher, nor even as a trustworthy interpreter of his own experiences,—but yet as a true and early precursor of that great inquiry which it is our present object to advance.

106. The next pioneer—fortunately still amongst us—whom I must mention even in this summary notice, is the celebrated physicist and chemist, Sir W. Crookes. Just as Swedenborg was the first leading man of science who distinctly conceived of the spiritual world as a world of law, so was Sir W. Crookes the first leading man of science who seriously endeavoured to test the alleged mutual influence and interpenetration of the spiritual world and our own by experiments of scientific precision.¹¹ Other savants of eminence—the great name of Alfred Russel Wallace will occur to all—had also satisfied themselves of the reality of these strange phenomena; but they had not tested or demonstrated that reality with equal care. I am not able in this brief sketch to allude to distinguished men of earlier date—Richard Glanvil, John Wesley, Samuel Johnson, &c., who discerned the importance of phenomena which they had no adequate means of investigating. Beyond the establishment of certain supernormal facts Crookes declined to go. But a large group of persons have founded upon these and similar facts a scheme of belief known as Modern Spiritualism, or Spiritism. Later chapters in this book will show how much I owe to certain observations made by members of this group—how often my own conclusions concur with conclusions at which they have previously arrived. And yet this work of mine is in large measure a critical attack upon the main Spiritist position, as held, say, by Mr. A. R. Wallace, its most eminent living supporter,—the belief, namely, that all or almost all supernormal phenomena are due to the action of spirits of the dead. By far the larger proportion, as I hold, are due to the action of the still embodied spirit of the agent or percipient himself. Apart from speculative differences, {i-7} moreover, I altogether dissent from the conversion into a sectarian creed of what I hold should be a branch of scientific inquiry, growing naturally out of our existing knowledge. It is, I believe, largely to this temper of uncritical acceptance, degenerating often into blind credulity, that we must refer the lack of progress in Spiritualistic literature, and the encouragement which has often been bestowed upon manifest fraud,—so often, indeed, as to create among scientific men a strong indisposition to the study of phenomena recorded or advocated in a tone so alien from Science.

107. I know not how much of originality or importance may be attributed by subsequent students of the subject to the step next in order in this series of approximations. To those immediately concerned, the feeling of a new departure was inevitably given by the very smallness of the support which they for a long time received, and by the difficulty which they found in making their point of view intelligible to the scientific, to the religious, or even to the spiritualistic world. In about 1873—at the crest, as one may say, of perhaps the highest wave of materialism which has ever swept over these shores—it became the conviction of a small group of Cambridge friends that the deep questions thus at issue must be fought out in a way more thorough than the champions either of religion or of materialism had yet suggested. Our attitudes of mind were in some ways different; but to myself, at least, it seemed that no adequate attempt had yet been made even to determine whether anything could be learnt as to an unseen world or no; for that if anything were knowable about such a world in such fashion that Science could adopt and maintain that knowledge, it must be discovered by no analysis of tradition, and by no manipulation of metaphysics, but simply by experiment and observation;— simply by the application to phenomena within us and around us of precisely the same methods of deliberate, dispassionate, exact inquiry which have built up our actual knowledge of the world which we can touch and see. I can hardly even now guess to how many of my readers this will seem a truism, and to how many a paradox. Truism or paradox, such a thought suggested a kind of effort, which, so far as we could discover, had never yet been made. For what seemed needful was an inquiry of quite other scope than the mere analysis of historical documents, or of the origines originsof any alleged revelation in the past. It must be an inquiry resting primarily, as all scientific inquiries in the stricter sense now must rest, upon objective facts actually observable, upon experiments which we can repeat today, and which we may hope to carry further tomorrow. It must be an inquiry based, to use an old term, on the uniformitarian hypothesis; on the presumption, that is to say, that if a spiritual world exists, and if that world has at any epoch been manifest or even discoverable, then it ought to be manifest or discoverable now.

It was from this side, and from these general considerations, that the group with which I have worked approached the subject. Our methods, {i-8} our canons, were all to make. In those early days we were more devoid of precedents, of guidance, even of criticism that went beyond mere expressions of contempt, than is now readily conceived. Seeking evidence as best we could—collecting round us a small group of persons willing to help in that quest for residual phenomena in the nature and experience of man—we were at last fortunate enough to discover a convergence of experimental and of spontaneous evidence upon one definite and important point. We were led to believe that there was truth in a thesis which at least since Swedenborg and the early mesmerists had been repeatedly, but cursorily and ineffectually, presented to mankind—the thesis that a communication can take place from mind to mind by some agency not that of the recognised organs of sense. We found that this agency, discernible even on trivial occasions by suitable experiment, seemed to connect itself with an agency more intense, or at any rate more recognisable, which operated at moments of crisis or at the hour of death. Edmund Gurney—the invaluable collaborator and friend whose loss in 1888 was our heaviest discouragement—set forth this evidence in a large work, Phantasms of the Living, in whose preparation Mr. Podmore and I took a minor part. The fifteen years which have elapsed since the publication of this book in 1886 have added to the evidence on which Gurney relied, and have shown (I venture to say) the general soundness of the canons of evidence and the lines of argument which it was his task to shape and to employ.¹¹ The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882, Professor W. F. Barrett taking a leading part in its promotion. Henry Sidgwick was its first President, and Edmund Gurney was its first Honorary Secretary—he and I being joint Honorary Secretaries of its Literary Committee, whose business was the collection of evidence.

108. Of fundamental importance, indeed, is this doctrine of telepathy—the first law, may one not say?—laid open to man's discovery, which, in my view at least, while operating in the material, is itself a law of the spiritual or metetherial²² For this term see Glossary. world. In the course of this work it will be my task to show in many connections how far-reaching are the implications of this direct and supersensory communion of mind with mind. Among those implications none can be more momentous than the light thrown by this discovery upon man's intimate nature and possible survival of death.

We gradually discovered that the accounts of apparitions at the moment of death—testifying to a supersensory communication between the dying man and the friend who sees him—led on without perceptible break to apparitions occurring after the death of the person seen, but while that death was yet unknown to the percipient, and thus apparently due, not to mere brooding memory, but to a continued action of that departed spirit. The task next incumbent on us therefore seemed plainly to be the collection and analysis of evidence of this and other types, pointing directly to the survival of man's spirit. But after pursuing this task for some years I felt that in reality the step from the action of embodied to the action of {i-9} disembodied spirits would still seem too sudden if taken in this direct way. So far, indeed, as the evidence from apparitions went, the series seemed continuous from phantasms of the living to phantasms of the dead. But the whole mass of evidence primâ facie pointing to man's survival, was of a much more complex kind. It consisted largely, for example, in written or spoken utterances, coming through the hand or voice of living men, but claiming to proceed from a disembodied source. To these utterances, as a whole, no satisfactory criterion had ever been applied.

In considering cases of this kind, then, it became gradually plain to me that before we could safely mark off any group of manifestations as definitely implying an influence from beyond the grave, there was need of a more searching review of the capacities of man's incarnate personality than psychologists unfamiliar with this new evidence had thought it worth their while to undertake.

It was only slowly, and as it were of necessity, that I embarked on a task which needed for its proper accomplishment a knowledge and training far beyond what I could claim. The very inadequate sketch which has resulted from my efforts is even in its author's view no more than preparatory and precursive to the fuller and sounder treatment of the same subject which I doubt not that the new century will receive from more competent hands. The truest success of this book will lie in its rapid supersession by a better. For this will show that at least I have not erred in supposing that a serious treatise on these topics is nothing else than the inevitable complement and conclusion of the slow process by which man has brought under the domain of science every group of attainable phenomena in turn—every group save this.

109. Let me then without further preamble embark upon that somewhat detailed survey of human faculty, as manifested during various phases of human personality, which is needful in order to throw fresh light on these unfamiliar themes. My discussion, I may say at once, will avoid metaphysics as carefully as it will avoid theology. I avoid theology, as already explained, because I consider that in arguments founded upon experiment and observation I have no right to appeal for support to traditional or subjective considerations, however important. For somewhat similar reasons I do not desire to introduce the idea of personality with any historical résumé of the philosophical opinions which have been held by various thinkers in the past, nor myself to speculate on matters lying beyond the possible field of objective proof. I shall merely for the sake of clearness begin by the briefest possible statement of two views of human personality which cannot be ignored, namely, the old-fashioned or commonsense view thereof, which is still held by the mass of mankind, and the newer view of experimental psychology, bringing out that composite or “colonial” character which on a close examination every personality of men or animals is seen to wear.

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The following passage, taken from a work once of much note, Reid's “Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man,” expresses the simple primâ facie view with care and precision, yet with no marked impress of any one philosophical school:—

The conviction which every man has of his identity, as far back as his memory reaches, needs no aid of philosophy to strengthen it; and no philosophy can weaken it without first producing some degree of insanity.… My personal identity, therefore, implies the continued existence of that indivisible thing which I call myself. Whatever this self may be, it is something which thinks, and deliberates, and resolves, and acts, and suffers. I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers. My thoughts and actions and feelings change every moment: they have no continued, but a successive existence; but that self or I, to which they belong, is permanent, and has the same relation to all succeeding thoughts, actions, and feelings which I call mine.… The identity of a person is a perfect identity; wherever it is real it admits of no degrees; and it is impossible that a person should be in part the same and in part different, because a person is a monad, and is not divisible into parts. Identity, when applied to persons, has no ambiguity, and admits not of degrees, or of more and less. It is the foundation of all rights and obligations, and of all accountableness; and the notion of it is fixed and precise.

110. Contrast with this the passage with which M. Ribot concludes his essay on “Les Maladies de la Personnalité.”

It is the organism, with the brain, its supreme representative, which constitutes the real personality; comprising in itself the remains of all that we have been and the possibilities of all that we shall be. The whole individual character is there inscribed, with its active and passive aptitudes, its sympathies and antipathies, its genius, its talent or its stupidity, its virtues and its vices, its torpor or its activity. The part thereof which emerges into consciousness is little compared with what remains buried, but operative nevertheless. The conscious personality is never more than a small fraction of the psychical personality. The unity of the Ego {i-11} is not therefore the unity of a single entity diffusing itself among multiple phenomena; it is the co-ordination of a certain number of states perpetually renascent, and having for their sole common basis the vague feeling of our body. This unity does not diffuse itself downwards, but is aggregated by ascent from below; it is not an initial but a terminal point.

Does then this perfect unity really exist? In the rigorous, the mathematical sense, assuredly it does not. In a relative sense it is met with,—rarely and for a moment. When a good marksman takes aim, or a skilful surgeon operates, his whole body and mind converge towards a single act. But note the result; under those conditions the sentiment of real personality disappears, for the conscious individual is simplified into a single idea, and the personal sentiment is excluded by the complete unification of consciousness. We thus return by another route to the same conclusion; the Self is a co-ordination. It oscillates between two extremes at each of which it ceases to exist;—absolute unity and absolute incoherence.

The last word of all this is that since the consensus of consciousness is subordinated to the consensus of the organism, the problem of the unity of the Ego is in its ultimate form a problem of Biology. Let Biology explain, if it can, the genesis of organisms and the solidarity of their constituent parts. The psychological explanation must needs follow on the same track.

111. Here, then, we have two clear and definite views,—supported, the one by our inmost consciousness, the other by unanswerable observation and inference,—yet apparently incompatible the one with the other. And in fact by most writers they have been felt and acknowledged to be even hopelessly incompatible. The supporters of the view that “The Self is a co-ordination,”—and this, I need hardly say, is now the view prevalent among experimental psychologists,—have frankly given up any notion of an underlying unity,—of a life independent of the organism,—in a word, of a human soul. The supporters of the unity of the Ego, on the other hand, if they have not been able to be equally explicit in denying the opposite view, have made up for this by the thorough-going way in which they have ignored it. I know of no source from which valid help has been offered towards the reconcilement of the two opposing systems in a profounder synthesis. If I believe—as I do believe—that in the present work some help in this direction is actually given, this certainly does not mean that I suppose myself capable of stitching the threadbare metaphysical arguments into a more stable fabric. It simply means that certain fresh evidence can now be adduced, which has the effect of showing the case on each side in a novel light;—nay, even of closing the immediate controversy by a judgment more decisively in favour of both parties than either could have expected. On the one side, and in favour of the co-ordinators,—all their analysis of the Self into its constituent elements, all that they urge of positive observation, of objective experiment, must—as I shall maintain on the strength of the new facts which I shall adduce—be unreservedly conceded. Let them push their analysis as far as they like,—let them get down, if they can, to those ultimate infinitesimal psychical elements from which is upbuilt the complex, the composite, the “colonial” structure and constitution of man. All this may well be valid and important work. It is only on their negative side that the conclusions of this school need a complete overhauling. Deeper, bolder inquiry along their own line shows that they have erred when they asserted that analysis showed no trace of faculty beyond such as the life of earth—as they conceive it—could foster, or the environment of earth employ. For in reality analysis shows traces of faculty which this material or planetary life could not have called into being, and whose exercise even here and now involves and necessitates the existence of a spiritual world.

On the other side, and in favour of the partisans of the unity of the Ego, the effect of the new evidence is to raise their claim to a far higher ground, and to substantiate it for the first time with the strongest presumptive proof which can be imagined for it;—a proof, namely, that the Ego can and does survive—not only the minor disintegrations which affect it during earth-life—but the crowning disintegration of bodily death. {i-12} In view of this unhoped-for ratification of their highest dream, they may be more than content to surrender as untenable the far narrower conception of the unitary Self which was all that “commonsense philosophies” had ventured to claim. The “conscious Self” of each of us, as we call it,—the empirical, the supraliminal Self, as I should prefer to say,—does not comprise the whole of the consciousness or of the faculty within us. There exists a more comprehensive consciousness, a profounder faculty, which for the most part remains potential only so far as regards the life of earth, but from which the consciousness and the faculty of earth-life are mere selections, and which reasserts itself in its plenitude after the liberating change of death.

Towards this conclusion, which assumed for me something like its present shape some fourteen years since,¹¹ See, for instance, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (henceforth in this book referred to as the Proceedings S.P.R.), vol. iv. p. 256, Jan. 1887. a long series of tentative speculations, based on gradually accruing evidence, has slowly conducted me. The conception is one which has hitherto been regarded as purely mystical; and if I endeavour to plant if upon a scientific basis I certainly shall not succeed in stating it in its final terms or in supporting it with the best arguments which longer experience will suggest. Its validity, indeed, will be impressed—if at all—upon the reader only by the successive study of the various kinds of evidence which this book will set forth.

112. Yet so far as the initial possibility or plausibility of such a widened conception of human consciousness is concerned;—and this is all which can be dealt with at this moment of its first introduction;—I have not seen in such criticism as has hitherto been bestowed upon my theory any very weighty demurrer. I summarise in a note an attack of this kind, with what seems to me an adequate reply from a colleague's pen.²² See an article in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 317 to 325, entitled “Subliminal Self or Unconscious Cerebration,” by Mr. A. H. Pierce, of Harvard University. Mr. Pierce maintains (1) that the hypothesis of a subliminal self or secondary consciousness is chiefly based on a study of hysteria, in which sensations and movements are not governed by the primary consciousness. But these hysterical phenomena are, he argues, simply analogous to the actions of animals deprived of their cerebral hemispheres, and it is unnecessary to suppose that they are accompanied by any consciousness at all. (2) The ordinary automatic actions of normal persons are ascribed by some to a secondary consciousness. But “if this theory be made to do its full duty, the doctrine that habits are due to well-worn nervous paths must be abandoned, and all the phenomena now ascribed to habit must be classed under the head of relegations to a secondary consciousness.” Further, the secondary consciousness is, ex hypothesi, divided into two parts,—one associated with physiological functions and the other with the highest mental processes, such as the “inspirations of genius”; and if we once admit the possibility of such subdivision, consistency demands that we should posit a separate consciousness for each physical process. (3) We have no direct testimony for the existence of a split-off consciousness. The dream-consciousness is said to be thus split off because dream-images—forgotten on waking—are sometimes observed to recur in another dream. But this in itself proves that the fact of recurrence and knowledge of the recurring events were present in the primary consciousness, which is thereby shown not to be separate from the dream-consciousness. If the primary consciousness attempts to bear witness to the existence of a secondary dissociated fragment, “it thereby proves that the fragment is a portion of itself and therefore no fragment at all.” “All the facts usually taken in support of a double-consciousness theory appear explicable in terms of brain alone.” In reply to this, Mr. Podmore (op. cit. pp. 325 to 332) has well pointed out that the criticism rests almost wholly on an attempt to explain mental phenomena on a physical basis. The fact is that, accompanying the mental phenomena—states of consciousness, there are physical phenomena—brain-changes; but no knowledge of the one throws any light on the other. The physical explanation cannot be substituted for the mental one, because it applies to a different category of facts. The two sets may indeed be diverse aspects of the same essential fact, but for practical purposes we have to regard them as distinct and treat them separately. From the actions of brainless animals we cannot therefore argue to the consciousness of hysterics. Again, to ascribe mental habits to well-worn brain-paths has no bearing on the question whether they are accompanied by consciousness or not. With regard to direct testimony to the existence of a secondary consciousness, perhaps the strongest is to be found in the hypnotic condition. “The hypnotised subject presents, or may present, all the phenomena which we associate with consciousness, not merely in our own case, but in the case of the same person when in his normal state. He talks, acts, reasons; exhibits emotion, judgment, volition.” His actions “are frequently so difficult and complicated as necessarily to imply the exercise of the fullest intelligence of which [he] is capable. Moreover, the re-hypnotised subject remembers the performance of the enjoined act, and can explain any peculiarities in its performance, and correct mistakes made. It would surely be extravagant to refuse to admit that such acts are deliberately and consciously performed.” “And the consciousness of the hypnotic is certainly not identical with the consciousness of the waking state. With rare exceptions it is more extensive; it includes the waking consciousness as a larger includes a smaller concentric circle, itself not included by it”

{i-13}

“Normally at least,” says another critic, summarising in a few words the ordinary view, “all the consciousness we have at any moment corresponds to all the activity which is going on at that moment in the brain. There is one unitary conscious state accompanying all the simultaneous brain excitations together, and each single part of the brain-process contributes something to its nature. None of the brain-processes split themselves off from the rest and have a separate consciousness of their own.” This is, no doubt, the apparent dictum of consciousness, but it is nothing more. And the dicta of consciousness have already been shown to need correction in so many ways which the ordinary observer could never have anticipated that we have surely no right to trust consciousness, so to say, a step further than we can feel it,—to hold that anything whatever—even a separate consciousness in our own organisms—can be proved not to exist by the mere fact that we—as we know ourselves—are not aware of it.

But indeed this claim to a unitary consciousness tends to become less forcible as it is more scientifically expressed. It rests on the plain man's conviction that there is only one of him; and this conviction the experimental psychologist is always tending to weaken or narrow by the admission of coexistent localised degrees of consciousness in the brain, which are at any rate not obviously reducible to a single state. Even those who would stop {i-14} far short of my own position find it needful to resort to metaphors of their own to express the different streams of “awareness” which we all feel to be habitually coexistent within us. They speak of “fringes” of ordinary consciousness; of “marginal” associations; of the occasional perception of “currents of low intensity.” These metaphors may all of them be of use, in a region where metaphor is our only mode of expression; but none of them covers all the facts now collected. And on the other side, I need not say, are plenty of phrases which beg the question of soul and body, or of the man's own spirit and external spirits, in no scientific fashion. There seems to be need of a term of wider application, which shall make as few assumptions as possible. Nor is such a term difficult to find.

The idea of a threshold (limen, Schwelle,) of consciousness;—of a level above which sensation or thought must rise before it can enter into our conscious life;—is a simple and familiar one. The word subliminal,—meaning “beneath that threshold,”—has already been used to define those sensations which are too feeble to be individually recognised. I propose to extend the meaning of the term, so as to make it cover all that takes place beneath the ordinary threshold, or say, if preferred, outside the ordinary margin of consciousness;—not only those faint stimulations whose very faintness keeps them submerged, but much else which psychology as yet scarcely recognises; sensations, thoughts, emotions, which may be strong, definite, and independent, but which, by the original constitution of our being, seldom emerge into that supraliminal current of consciousness which we habitually identify with ourselves. Perceiving (as this book will try to show) that these submerged thoughts and emotions possess the characteristics which we associate with conscious life, I feel bound to speak of a subliminal or ultramarginal consciousness,¹¹ It is naturally impossible to express by the help of any single metaphor the complex and changing relation between that part of our personality with which in waking life we consciously identify ourselves, and that part which is not habitually represented in our consciousness. A field of view is quite as natural a metaphor as a threshold, and we may naturally speak of intra-marginal and extra-marginal. These terms, of course, are merely superficial,—denoting a relationship to consciousness which is capable of frequent change, and is not in itself fundamental. We may attempt, indeed, deeper distinctions, and speak of the empirical self on the one hand, and the surviving or the transcendental self on the other hand. But my object at present is to use whatever title makes the least assumption; and to leave it to our evidence gradually to give definite meaning to a distinction at first apprehended in a vague superficial way.—a consciousness which we shall see, for instance, uttering or writing sentences quite as complex and coherent as the supraliminal consciousness could make them. Perceiving further that this conscious life beneath the threshold or beyond the margin seems to be no discontinuous or intermittent thing; that not only are these isolated subliminal processes comparable with isolated supraliminal processes (as when a problem is solved by some unknown procedure in a dream), but that there also is a {i-15} continuous subliminal chain of memory (or more chains than one) involving just that kind of individual and persistent revival of old impressions, and response to new ones, which we commonly call a Self,—I find it permissible and convenient to speak of subliminal Selves, or more briefly of a subliminal Self. I do not indeed by using this term assume that there are two correlative and parallel selves existing always within each of us. Rather I mean by the subliminal Self that part of the Self which is commonly subliminal; and I conceive that there may be,—not only cooperations between these quasi-independent trains of thought,—but also upheavals and alternations of personality of many kinds, so that what was once below the surface may for a time, or permanently, rise above it. And I conceive also that no Self of which we can here have cognisance is in reality more than a fragment of a larger Self,—revealed in a fashion at once shifting and limited through an organism not so framed as to afford it full manifestation.

113. Now this hypothesis is exposed manifestly to two main forms of attack, which to a certain extent neutralise each other. On the one hand it has been attacked, as has already been indicated, as being too elaborate for the facts,—as endowing transitory moments of subconscious intelligence with more continuity and independence than they really possess. These ripples over the threshold, it may be said, can be explained by the wind of circumstance, without assuming springs or currents in the personality deep below.

But soon we shall come upon a group of phenomena which this view will by no means meet. For we shall find that the subliminal uprushes,—the impulses or communications which reach our emergent from our submerged selves,—are (in spite of their miscellaneousness) often characteristically different in quality from any element known to our ordinary supraliminal life. They are different in a way which implies faculty of which we have had no previous knowledge, operating in an environment of which hitherto we have been wholly unaware. This broad statement it is of course the purpose of my whole work to justify. Assuming its truth here for argument's sake, we see at once that the problem of the hidden self entirely changes its aspect. Telepathy and telæsthesia—the perception of distant thoughts and of distant scenes without the agency of the recognised organs of sense;—those faculties suggest either incalculable extension of our own mental powers, or else the influence upon us of minds freer and less trammelled than our own. And this second hypothesis,—which would explain by the agency of discarnate minds, or spirits, all these supernormal phenomena,—does at first sight simplify the problem, and has by Mr. A. R. Wallace and others been pushed so far as to remove all need of what he deems the gratuitous and cumbrous hypothesis of a subliminal self.

114. I believe, indeed, that it will become plain as we proceed that some such hypothesis as this,—of almost continuous spirit-intervention and {i-16} spirit-guidance,—is at once rendered necessary if the subliminal faculties for which I argue are denied to man. And my conception of a subliminal self will thus appear, not as an extravagant and needless, but as a limiting and rationalising hypothesis, when it is applied to phenomena which at first sight suggest Mr. Wallace's extremer view, but which I explain by the action of man's own spirit, without invoking spirits external to himself. I do not indeed say that the explanation here suggested is applicable in all cases, or to the complete exclusion of the spirit-hypothesis. On the contrary, the one view gives support to the other. For these faculties of distant communication exist none the less, even though we should refer them to our own subliminal selves. We can, in that case, affect each other at a distance, telepathically;—and if our incarnate spirits can act thus in at least apparent independence of the fleshly body, the presumption is strong that other spirits may exist independently of the body, and may affect us in similar manner.

The much-debated hypothesis of spirit-intervention, in short, still looms behind the hypothesis of the subliminal Self; but that intermediate hypothesis should, I think, in this early stage of what must be a long inquiry, prove useful to the partisans of either side. For those who are altogether unwilling to admit the action of agencies other than the spirits of living men, it will be needful to form as high an estimate as possible of the faculties held in reserve by these spirits while still in the flesh. For those, on the other hand, who believe in the influence of discarnate spirits, this scheme affords a path of transition, and as it were a provisional intelligibility.

115. These far-reaching speculations make the element of keenest interest in the inquiry which follows. But even apart from its possible bearing on a future life, the further study of our submerged mentation,—of the processes within us of which we catch only indirect, and as it were, refracted glimpses,—seems at this time especially called for by the trend of modern research. For of late years we have realised more and more fully upon how shifting and complex a foundation of ancestral experience each individual life is based. In recapitulation, in summary, in symbol, we retraverse, from the embryo to the corpse, the history of life on earth for millions of years. During our self-adaptation to continually wider environments, there may probably have been a continual displacement of the threshold of consciousness;—involving the lapse and submergence of much that once floated in the main stream of our being. Our consciousness at any given stage of our evolution is but the phosphorescent ripple on an unsounded sea. And, like the ripple, it is not only superficial but manifold. Our psychical unity is federative and unstable; it has arisen from irregular accretions in the remote past; it consists even now only in the limited collaboration of multiple groups. These discontinuities and incoherences in the Ego the elder psychologists managed to ignore. Yet infancy, idiocy, sleep, insanity, decay;—these breaks and stagnancies in {i-17} the conscious stream were always present to show us, even more forcibly than more delicate analyses show us now, that the first obvious conception of man's continuous and unitary personality was wholly insecure; and that if indeed a soul inspired the body, that soul must be sought for far beneath these bodily conditions by which its self-manifestation was clouded and obscured.

116. The difference between older and newer conceptions of the unifying principle or soul (if soul there be) in man, considered as manifesting through corporeal limitations, will thus resemble the difference between the older and newer conceptions of the way in which the sun reveals himself to our senses. Night and storm-cloud and eclipse men have known from the earliest ages; but now they know that even at noonday the sunbeam which reaches them, when fanned out into a spectrum, is barred with belts and lines of varying darkness;—while they have learnt also that where at either end the spectrum fades out into what for us is blackness, there stretches onwards in reality an undiscovered illimitable ray.

It will be convenient for future reference if I draw out this parallel somewhat more fully. I compare, then, man's gradual progress in self-knowledge to his gradual decipherment of the nature and meaning of the sunshine which reaches him as light and heat indiscernibly intermingled. So also Life and Consciousness,—the sense of a world within him and a world without—come to the child indiscernibly intermingled in a pervading glow. Optical analysis splits up the white ray into the various coloured rays which compose it. Philosophical analysis in like manner splits up the vague consciousness of the child into many faculties;—into the various external senses, the various modes of thought within. This has been the task of descriptive and introspective psychology. Experimental psychology is adding a further refinement. In the sun's spectrum, and in stellar spectra, are many dark lines or bands, due to the absorption of certain rays by certain vapours in the atmosphere of sun or stars or earth. And similarly in the range of spectrum of our own sensation and faculty there are many inequalities—permanent and temporary—of brightness and definition. Our mental atmosphere is clouded by vapours and illumined by fires, and is clouded and illumined differently at different times. The psychologist who observes, say, how his reaction-times are modified by alcohol is like the physicist who observes what lines are darkened by the interposition of a special gas. Our knowledge of our conscious spectrum is thus becoming continually more accurate and detailed.

117. But turning back once more to the physical side of our simile, we observe that our knowledge of the visible solar spectrum, however minute, is but an introduction to the knowledge which we hope ultimately to attain of the sun's rays. The limits of our spectrum do not inhere in the sun that shines, but in the eye that marks his shining. Beyond each end of that prismatic ribbon are ether-waves of which our retina takes no cognisance. {i-18} Beyond the red end come waves whose potency we still recognise, but as heat and not as light. Beyond the violet end are waves still more mysterious; whose very existence man for ages never suspected, and whose intimate potencies are still but obscurely known. Even thus, I venture to affirm, beyond each end of our conscious spectrum extends a range of faculty and perception, exceeding the known range, but as yet indistinctly guessed. The artifices of the modern physicist have extended far in each direction the visible spectrum known to Newton. It is for the modern psychologist to discover artifices which may extend in each direction the conscious spectrum as known to Plato or to Kant. The phenomena cited in this work carry us, one may say, as far onwards as fluorescence carries us beyond the violet end. The “X rays” of the psychical spectrum remain for a later age to discover.

Our simile, indeed—be it once for all noted—is a most imperfect one. The range of human faculty cannot be truly expressed in any linear form. Even a three-dimensional scheme,—a radiation of faculties from a centre of life,—would ill render its complexity. Yet something of clearness will be gained by even this rudimentary mental picture;—representing conscious human faculty as a linear spectrum whose red rays begin where voluntary muscular control and organic sensation begin, and whose violet rays fade away at the point at which man's highest strain of thought or imagination merges into reverie or ecstasy.

At both ends of this spectrum I believe that our evidence indicates a momentous prolongation. Beyond the red end, of course, we already know that vital faculty of some kind must needs extend. We know that organic processes are constantly taking place within us which are not subject to our control, but which make the very foundation of our physical being. We know that the habitual limits of our voluntary action can be far extended under the influence of strong excitement. It need not surprise us to find that appropriate artifices—hypnotism or self-suggestion—can carry the power of our will over our organism to a yet further point.

The faculties that lie beyond the violet end of our psychological spectrum will need more delicate exhibition and will command a less ready belief. The actinic energy which lies beyond the violet end of the solar spectrum is less obviously influential in our material world than is the dark heat which lies beyond the red end. Even so, one may say, the influence of the ultra-intellectual or supernormal faculties upon our welfare as terrene organisms is less marked in common life than the influence of the organic or subnormal faculties. Yet it is that prolongation of our spectrum upon which our gaze will need to be most strenuously fixed. It is there that we shall find our inquiry opening upon a cosmic prospect, and inciting us upon an endless way.

118. Even the first stages of this progress are long and labyrinthine; and it may be useful to conclude this introductory chapter by a brief sketch of the main tracts across which our winding road must lie. It will {i-19} be my object to lead by transitions as varied and as gradual as possible from phenomena held as normal to phenomena held as supernormal, but which like the rest are simply and solely the inevitable results and manifestations of universal Law.

Our inquiry will naturally begin by discussing the subliminal structure, in disease or health, of those two familiar phases of human personality, ordinary waking and ordinary sleep. I shall go on to consider in what way the disintegration of personality by disease is met by its reintegration and purposive modification by hypnotism and self-suggestion. By that time enough will have been said of subliminal phenomena in general to make it possible to deal with their various groups in separate fashion. I shall go on, then, to their mode of automatic manifestation, and first (Chapter VI.) to the sensory automatism which is the basis of hallucination. This includes phenomena claiming an origin outside the automatist's own mind. It will be found that that origin is often to be sought in the minds of other living men; and various forms of telepathy will be brought under review. The conception of telepathy is not one that in its nature need be confined to spirits still incarnate; and we shall find evidence (Chapter VII.) that intercourse of similarly direct type can take place between discarnate and incarnate spirits. The remainder of the book will discuss the methods and results of this supernormal intercourse.

This scheme will be developed in a series of chapters whose general drift and connection I am anxious that the reader should clearly grasp before he studies them in detail.

119. My second chapter may at first sight appear to stray somewhat far from my main purport. It is of the evolution of human personality that this work proposes to treat;—of faculties newly dawning, and of a destiny greater than we know. Yet I must begin with a detailed discussion of certain modes of that personality's disintegration and decay. The extreme instances of such decay—actual imbecility or insanity—do indeed lie outside my province. But there are many cases where there is no actual insanity,—probably no organic disease of the brain,—but in which nevertheless there are disturbances of personality which teach us more than any theoretical treatise can do as to that complex structure or synergy which it is our object to upbuild or to develop. Alternations of personality and hysterical phenomena generally are in fact spontaneous experiments of precisely the type most instructive to us. For my own argument, indeed, I urgently need some true conception of the psychological meaning of hysteria,—a vague range of phenomena called by a meaningless name;—and when that conception has been reached, the support which it gives by analogy to my own principal thesis will be found to be of the most striking kind. For in hysteria (as my second chapter will show) we have before us a contraction, an effacement of the spectrum of consciousness, which leaves the hysteric occupying much the same position relatively to ourselves as our own supraliminal consciousness occupies (in my view) relatively to our whole self. Or, to return to our {i-20} other metaphor:—the essence of hysteria is an instability of the thresholds of consciousness and of voluntary movement,—insomuch that many perceptions which should be fully conscious are for the time submerged, and many actions or motor syntheses which should be subject to waking will have sunk out of that will's control. Occasionally, indeed, and as a sort of incident of the general disturbance, some faculties habitually submerged may rise into apprehension, and there may thus be at some points an analogy between hysteria and genius. But on the whole these two conditions are fundamentally opposed; genius consisting (as we shall presently see) in an intensification of the conscious spectrum,—hysteria in its dimming and interruption by dark belts of anæsthesia and aboulia,—defect of perception and of will;—genius consisting in the uprush of subliminal faculty,—hysteria in the descent and disappearance of faculty which should be supraliminal into depths from which it cannot voluntarily be recalled.

120. Continuing this inquiry in my third chapter, I shall consider what kind of man he is to whom the epithet of normal,—an epithet often obscure and misleading,—may be most fitly applied. I shall urge that in a rapidly altering genus—and such the genus homo undoubtedly is—the word normal may be best used to signify such a combination of new with old powers as can at the present stage be effected without dangerous instability. If, however, it be held that man's development is not in any given direction sufficiently definite to admit of this mode of measurement, then I shall at least claim that that man shall be regarded as normal who has the fullest grasp of faculties which inhere in the whole race. Among these faculties I shall venture to count subliminal as well as supraliminal powers;—the mental processes which take place below the conscious threshold as well as those which take place above it. What class of men, then, can we regard as reaping most advantage from this submerged mentation? Men of genius, I shall reply;—if to the vague word genius we may give a definite or psychological meaning, which, while adhering pretty closely to general usage, shall distinguish it in some real manner from other forms of capacity. Such a definition, I think, we shall attain if we describe an “inspiration of genius” as a subliminal uprush;—an emergence into ordinary consciousness of ideas matured below the threshold. Falling back upon our simile of the spectrum, this process would be represented by the brightening of lines previously dimmed by interposing vapours;—such a brightening as seems often due to an intensification of the central incandescence. The man who thus receives the upward message of his submerged self may or may not find in it something of value to the world. But at any rate he tends towards the employment of the whole range of his faculty, and thus also (as will be seen later on) towards a profounder realisation of his environment than is as yet possible for the mass of men.

This view differs widely from the estimate of genius now in fashion with a certain school of anthropologists, who regard the man of genius as in some sense an aberrant or even degenerate type,—and class him with {i-21} the criminal and the lunatic. The alleged nervous disorder of men of genius, on which this apparent paradox is based, is largely, I think, the creation of mere gossip and anecdote. So far as it really exists, I regard it as illustrating the instability which in a rapidly changing species is apt to characterise those very organs which on the whole are moving most decisively along the path of progress. There is a perturbation which masks evolution; and just as at the child's birth into the world, or at his entrance into the wider emotions of adolescence, there may be much that is disturbing and strange, so too in that new birth, that entry into the emotions of a vaster world, for which Earth-life at its best is one great opportunity, there is likely to be some straining and disruption of the spiritual organism adapted to the earlier phase. The true analogue of the genius is not the criminal nor the lunatic, but the child.

121. In the fourth chapter I shall deal with the alternating phase through which man's personality is constructed habitually to pass. I speak of sleep; which I regard as a phase of personality, adapted to maintain our existence in the spiritual environment, and to draw from thence the vitality of our physical organisms. Both sleep and waking will thus be developed phases of an earlier and less differentiated condition, from which waking life has been developed by practical needs, while sleep, less changed externally from the primitive state, may nevertheless have undergone some parallel evolution in its relations to that metetherial world. And thus I regard the passage back from waking into sleep as including elements both of reversion and of what I may term preversion. There is firstly a relapse or reversion to an earlier animal condition;—a condition where the conscious part of the spectrum lay nearer to the red end; consisting mainly of organic faculties and sensations many of which are no longer present to waking consciousness. But sleep also represents a stage of wider potentiality; a stage where a longer spectrum is more faintly seen; whereas the waking state represents a stage in which natural selection on this planet has operated both to intensify the range of faculty, and also to confine it within the limits serviceable for earthly life. When waking faculty, thus confined and thus intensified, is dimmed by sleep, we are able to catch some scattered lines of feeble radiance beyond each end of our ordinary spectrum. Of the ultra-red activities I have spoken just above. But there are traces of ultra-violet luminosity also. Those faculties which form man's link with the spiritual world,—telepathy and telæsthesia—are apt (as dreams obscurely show us) to make in sleep their first rudimentary appearance; or to use another metaphor, sleep-waking states teach us to think of sleep as a kind of “primitive magma” or “mother-solution” from which various phases of personality have a tendency to crystallise out. Somnambulism, trance, ecstasy, are such crystallisations; representing co-ordinations of faculty unfitted indeed for man's self-preservation upon this planet, but which it may be worth his while to develop experimentally, when once that preservation has been secured.

{i-22}

Or I may put the matter in yet another way, so as to bring out a certain parallel between the forms of dissolution and of evolution to which each phase of our personality—the waking phase and the sleeping—has shown itself liable.

What hysteria is to ordinary waking life, that is morbid somnambulism to sleep; what genius is to ordinary waking life, that is hypnotic trance to sleep.

In somnambulism, as in waking hysteria, there is a narrowing of the field of attention, accompanied by an arbitrary unsettlement of the threshold of consciousness. Some of the normal faculties of sleep,—as its organic recuperative power,—may in somnambulism be concealed or arrested; and on the other hand some faculties not normal for sleep,—as acute sensory perception, delicate muscular co-ordination, may rise into prominence. This exactly resembles the hysteric instability; and we need not wonder that in some hysterical conditions there is a mere confusion and jumble of states of imperfect sleep and of imperfect waking.

On the other hand,—as we are now about to see,—the sleeping phase of personality may be greatly improved, its beneficent effects greatly extended, by certain artifices which evoke in the sleeper a power of self-suggestion which corresponds to what in the waking phase we call an inspiration of genius.

122. Thus far I shall have been dealing with conditions or phases of personality which, whether for good or evil, appear spontaneously and without artificial induction. Were we limited to such a review alone, I should still trust that the importance and in a certain sense the independence of the subliminal portion of our consciousness might be brought out by careful inference. But we are not in fact thus restricted. We are not confined to observation only. We are able to mix therewith an element of experiment which, although yet in its infancy, has already, in my view, given us an insight into much of man's nature which no mere speculation or introspection could ever have reached. First among our experimental methods I must speak of hypnotism. That word indeed, as now used, is a vague one. It includes all the methods—and they are all of them frankly empirical—which have been found successful in inducing in man,—whether apparently waking or sleeping,—what is in fact a development and concentration of his sleeping phase;—and in thus reaching organic processes over which his supraliminal will has no control. The chief—some say the only—method which has been found thus effective is called “suggestion”;—a mere name for an appeal to subliminal faculty which sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails, without our being able either to predict or to explain its success or its failure. Long opposed or ignored by orthodox Science, this mode of acting on man's hidden being is now in most countries established in medical practice, and is increasingly successful in the direction especially of relieving pain. At the same time the psychophysiological problems at the root {i-23} of its success are quite unsolved; and its profounder influences on personality have hardly yet been approached.

The discussion in my fifth chapter—that on Hypnotism—will naturally fall under three main heads. I shall first briefly discuss the psychology of hypnotism. I shall consider what actually are the methods which succeed in hypnotism,—whether this be called mesmerism on the one hand or suggestion on the other;—different aspects of an influence which no name fully expresses and which no theory fully explains. In the next place I shall describe some of the triumphs of psychotherapeutics. These cures effected by suggestion belong to the very core of my subject. They are, so to say, the public advertisement or commercial application of just those hidden and subliminal faculties which for the most part show themselves in less easily apprehended fashion. Like the application of the “X rays” to the discovery and extraction of bullets or needles, these cures must at least bring home to the most conservative reader the fact that there is some unexplained agency operating upon human nature,—something of extraordinary potency which orthodox science has thus far completely failed to grasp. So surprising, indeed, are some of these cures,—they reproduce so startlingly certain cures held of old as miraculous,—that many men have been led to ask whether it be not in some way or other religion rather than science which is answerable for the marvels. A question, this, of deeper import than the literature either of the Lourdes miracles or of American “mental science” might lead the sceptical reader to suppose! On this point I shall dwell at some length; nor is there, I think, any line of inquiry more essential to the physical well-being of mankind.

Less conspicuously important, but of equal significance for my argument, is that group of hypnotic results which I shall in the third place briefly discuss. These phenomena I shall consider first as they occur in spontaneous sleep-waking states or somnambulisms, and then as they appear in cases experimentally induced, where they are manifested in a more marked degree. We see here the influence exercised by suggestion and self-suggestion on higher types of faculty, supernormal as well as normal, on character, on personality. It is on this side, indeed, that the outlook is the most deeply interesting. Man is in course of evolution; and the most pregnant hint which these nascent experiments have yet given him is that it may be in his power to hasten his own evolution in ways previously unknown.

123. In the following chapter on Sensory Automatism (Chapter VI.) I shall proceed to describe certain other experiments, less familiar to the public than those classed as hypnotic, but which give a still further insight into our subliminal faculty. With those experiments will be intermingled many spontaneous phenomena; and the chapter will take up and continue the spontaneous phenomena of Chapters III. and IV. as well as the experiments of Chapter V. Its theme will be the messages which the subliminal self sends up to the supraliminal in sensory form;—the visions {i-24} fashioned internally, but manifested not to the inward eye alone; the voices which repeat as though in audible tones the utterance of the self within. In this way we shall be in continued connection with the phenomena of Chapter II. also; but, instead of the morbid hallucinations which were there described, we shall be dealing with hallucinations which not only are consistent with health and sanity, but also resemble and in a sense surpass the inspirations of genius in their manifestation of important faculty, habitually screened from our view.

Even so long as these subliminal messages convey to us knowledge of no new kind,—even while they are still occupied with the known spectrum,—they are nevertheless full of instruction as regards the extent of subliminal faculty. They are the products of internal vision ejected into apparent externality; and the sights projected outwards from within us are to the psychologist even more interesting than the sights projected inwards from without.

But at this point, and amid these subjective hallucinations which, although they extend, do not fundamentally modify previous conceptions, we come face to face with a class of perceptions which, although in one sense hallucinatory, are in another sense the messengers of a truth deeper and more direct from the source than any which our ordinary senses convey to us. We come upon experiments which prove telepathy;—the transference of ideas and sensations from one mind to another without the agency of the recognised organs of sense. We shall already have encountered some telepathic and telæsthetic incidents among the phenomena of dreams and of hypnosis. But we shall now find that telepathy and telæsthesia occur in waking moments also; occur sometimes as the result of direct experiment; oftener as the spontaneous and apparently casual convergence of forces which we may be led to suppose to be normally operative between all of us. This is the central theme of Edmund Gurney's Phantasms of the Living; and subsequent experiment and observation, while they have strengthened the evidence for the conclusions of that book, have in no way diminished their startling importance. Believe though we may in the ultimate continuity of all existence and operation, there is still a vast and sudden separation—unbridgeable at present by any hypothesis of etherial vibrations or the like—between the smallest act of telepathic transmission and all that we have previously known concerning matter and motion. Even if there be no true Rubicon disparting the ocean of things, we have here for mortal minds the Rubicon between the mechanical and the spiritual conceptions of the Universe. I at least can see no logical halting-place between the first admission of supersensory faculty and the conclusion that such faculty is exercised by somewhat within us which is not generated from material elements, nor confined by mechanical limitations, but which may survive and operate uninjured in a spiritual world.

There is one particular line of telepathic experiment and observation {i-25} which seems to lead us by an almost continuous pathway across that hitherto impassable gulf. Among telepathic experiments, to begin with, none is more remarkable than the occasional power of some agent to project himself phantasmally; to make himself manifest, as though in actual presence, to some percipient at a distance. The mechanism of such projection is entirely unknown to the agent himself; nor is the act always preceded by any effort of the supraliminal will. But our records of such cases do assuredly suggest a quite novel disengagement of some informing spirit from the restraint of the organism;—a form of distant operation in which we cannot say whether the body in its apparent passivity co-operates or no.

With these experiments in mind, let us turn to the main groups of spontaneous telepathic phenomena which fill the work on Phantasms of the Living above alluded to. These are apparitions of a distant person mainly at moments of crisis, and at the moment of death. Now these spontaneous apparitions at moments when the agent whose phantasm appears is actually passing through some external or internal crisis, are separated by no clear line from the experimentally induced projection of a man's phantasmal figure of which I have spoken above. Sometimes, as I have already implied, we hardly know whether to call such a self-projection experimental or not, since the agent does not know how to accomplish it, and may not even have been conscious of desiring it at the precise moment when it occurred. Thus far the series of phenomena is plainly continuous. And it remains continuous as we gradually pass on from apparitions coincident with crises—crises often involving great danger or even apparent death—to apparitions coincident with the coma which frequently precedes death, or with the moment of death itself.

124. And thus (Chapter VII.) we come face to face with the supreme problem;—if not of all theoretical knowledge, at least of all knowledge as bearing upon the fate and the duty of man. The theoretical question of primary importance may be simply that of the existence or nonexistence of a spiritual world. The human or practical question of supreme importance is that of man's presence or portion in that world, if it does exist. To prove that telepathy implies a spiritual environment would be at once to lift our knowledge of the Cosmos to a higher level. To prove that man survives death would also be to transform and transfigure his whole life here and now. Before us, as of old, is that all-embracing problem; but before us also, for the first time, is some hint and indication as to the track which may be pursued towards its solution.

The old conception of the ghost—a conception which seemed to belong only to primitive animism and to modern folk-lore—has received a new meaning from observations of phenomena occurring between living men. We realise that a phantasmal figure may bear a true relation to some distant person whose semblance is thus shown; we learn by {i-26} instances of directly provable coincidence that wraiths of this kind correspond with death too often to leave the correspondence attributable to chance alone. The vague question of former times narrows down, then, to the more precise question: Are there still coincidences, is there still evidence of some such definite type as this, showing that a phantasm can appear not only at but after a man's bodily death, and can still indicate connection with a persistent and individual life?

To this distinct question there can now be given, as I believe, a distinct and affirmative answer. When evidence has been duly analysed, when alternative hypotheses have been duly weighed, it seems to me that there is no real break in the appearance of veridical phantasms, or in their causation at the moment of bodily death; but rather that (after setting aside all merely subjective post-mortem apparitions) there is evidence that the self-same living spirit is still operating, and it may be in the self-same way. And thus my general dogma will have received its specific confirmation. Telepathy, I have said, looks like a law prevailing in the spiritual as well as in the material world. And that it does so prevail, I now add, is proved by the fact that those who communicated with us telepathically in this world communicate with us telepathically from the other. Man, therefore, is not a planetary or a transitory being; he persists as very man among cosmic and eternal things.

If this bare fact be gained, we have a basis for such an edifice of knowledge as will take many generations to uprear. At first, indeed, the mere observation of these phantasms does not seem as though it could lead us far. It is like the observation of shooting stars—of meteors which appear without warning and vanish in a flash of fire. Yet systematic observation has learnt much as to these meteors; has learnt, for instance, the point in heaven from which they issue; their orbital relation to earth and sun. Somewhat similarly, continuous observation of these brief phantasmal appearances may tell us much of them at last; much, for instance, as to their relative frequency at different epochs after death; something as to their apparent knowledge of what has happened on earth since they left it. From the study of meteorites, again, a further unexpected discovery has been made. “The stone that fell down from Jupiter” is nowhere alone in its glory. The solid earth, the ocean's floor, are covered with meteoric dust;—the dust of the cosmic wayside, which we have gathered in our rush through the constellations. Even thus we come to find that there are traces over all the earth of indeterminate and unrecognised communication from a world of unembodied intelligences;—hauntings of unknown purport, and bearing no perceptible relation to the thoughts or deeds of living men.

125. Much more, indeed, than would at first seem likely can be learnt by mere prolonged observation of spontaneous phantasms of the {i-27} dead. Yet here as everywhere,—here more than anywhere,—the need of actual experiment is felt. For experiment here would mean the conversion of the scarce decipherable flash which flits before our spectroscope into a steady glow; it would mean the enlistment of the departed in conscious and willing cooperation,—the long-desired opportunity to hear and to answer;—veras audire et reddere voces.to hear true voices and to answer [Aen. 1.409] And in fact such experiment turns out to be actually feasible. It is feasible in connection with each of the four forms of communication, of verbalisation, with which human life is familiar. There is a possibility of inducing a spiritual hearing and a spiritual picture-seeing or reading; and also a spiritually-guided writing and speech. Both our sensory automatism and our motor automatism may be initiated and directed by intelligence outside our own.

In Chapter VI., on Sensory Automatism, we shall already have discussed the passive methods in which communications of this kind may be awaited. We have now (in Chapter VIII.), to consider in what ways Motor Automatism,—the unwilled activity of hand or voice,—may be used to convey messages which come to the automatist as though from without himself.

As though from without himself, I say; but of course their apparent externality does not prove that they have not originated in submerged strata of his own mind. In most cases, indeed, with motor as with sensory automatism, this is probably what really occurs. We find that a tendency to automatic writing is by no means uncommon among sane and healthy persons. But we also find that the messages thus given do not generally rise above the level of an incoherent dream. They seem to emerge from a region where scraps of thought and feeling exist confusedly, with no adequate central control. Yet sometimes the vague scrawling changes its character. It becomes veridical; it begins to convey a knowledge of actual facts of which the automatist has no previous information; it indicates some subliminal activity of his own, or some telepathic access to an external mind. Apparitions may flash their signals; the automatic script will lay the wire. For however inchoate and ill-controlled these written messages may be, if once they have been received at all we can assign no limit to their development as the expression of thought that passes incorporeally from mind to mind.

From mind to mind, as we have already seen ground to hope, independently of the question whether both minds, or one only, be still clad in flesh. There will often be great difficulty of interpretation; great perplexity as to the true relation between a message and its alleged source. But every year of late has added,—every year ought to add,—both to the mass of matter and to the feasibility of interpretation. These are not the hieroglyphs of the dead, but the hieroglyphs of the living.

126. Side by side with the automatism of arm and hand we must place the automatism of throat and tongue (Chapter IX.). Automatic utterance parallels automatic script throughout the scale of degrees by this time familiar. It begins, that is to say, with mere incoherence; but it {i-28} assumes in some cases a veridical character; with knowledge delivered from some subliminal stratum or some external mind. And in some cases the special knowledge displayed in the utterances lends probability to their claim to proceed from a departed spirit.

When this occurs, when the utterance reaches this point of veracity and intensity, it is sometimes accompanied by certain other phenomena which for those who have witnessed them carry a sense of reality which description can hardly reproduce. The ordinary consciousness of the automatist appears to be suspended; he passes into a state of trance,—which in its turn seems but the preparation for an occupation by an invading intelligence,—by the surviving spirit, let us boldly say, of some recognisable departed friend. This friend then disposes of voice and hand almost as freely as though he were their legitimate owner. Nay, more than one intelligence may thus operate simultaneously, and the organism may thus appear as indeed no more than the organ of spiritual influences which make and break connection with it at will.

And here we reach a point which has become,—without my anticipation, and—as a matter (so to say) of mere scientific policy—even against my will,—the principal nodus of the present work. This book, designed originally to carry on, as continuously and coherently as possible, the argument and exposition of facts which in Phantasms of the Living I had aided in setting before serious readers, has been forced unexpectedly forward by the sheer force of evidence, until it must now dwell largely on the extreme branch of the subject, far beyond the reserves and cautious approaches of the earlier work.

For in truth during the last ten years the centre of gravity of our evidence has shifted so profoundly that it can no longer be said that the relative masses of evidence for each class of phenomenon correspond roughly to the degree of strangeness—of apparent difficulty—which the phenomena themselves exhibit. Ten years ago there was most evidence for telepathy between the living; next most for phantasms of the dead; least, perhaps, for that actual possession and control of human organisms by departed spirits, which of all our phenomena is likely to be the hardest for the scientific mind to accept,—since it carries us back to the most outrageously savage group among the superstitions of the early world. With the recent development of trance-phenomena, however, this semblance of logical proportion has been quickly altered. We seem suddenly to have arrived, by a kind of short cut, at a direct solution of problems which we had till then been approaching by difficult inference or laborious calculation of chances. What need of computing coincidental death-wraiths,—of analysing the evidential details of post-mortem apparitions,—if here we have the departed ready to hear and answer questions, and to tell us frankly of the fate of souls? Might not these earlier lines of inquiry be now abandoned altogether?—nay, must not our former results seem useless now, in view of this overwhelming proof?

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I reply to this, that it was soon evident, in the first place, that our previous disciplined search had been by no means wasted. There was need of our canons of evidence, our analysis of the sources of subliminal messages, in order to satisfy ourselves that these trance-utterances could in part, but in part only, be explained by telæsthesia and telepathy,—operating among actual scenes and the minds of living men. Nay, further, that old evidence of ours at once explained and was explained by the new. Fresh light was thrown on many previous groups of phenomena, and they in their turn were seen to have preluded to the new phenomena in such fashion that the continuity of the whole series—albeit a series advancing by leaps and bounds—was intelligibly maintained for us.

Following on the first revelation of Mrs. Piper's trance-phenomena came the permission accorded to me by the executors of Mr. Stainton Moses to read and analyse his private records after his death. The strong impression which his phenomena had made upon me during his life was increased,—as the reader will afterwards see,—by this posthumous and intimate study; and his history was seen to be in many respects analogous to Mrs. Piper's. Further parallels have been afforded since by more than one other medium;—and it seems to me now that the evidence for communication with the spirits of identified deceased persons through the trance-utterances and writings of sensitives apparently controlled by those spirits is established beyond serious attack.

In saying this, however, I desire to explain,—in anticipation of obvious and legitimate criticism,—that throughout all this discussion of “spirit-possession” I use purposely the simplest and most popular terms, without by any means denying that terms more accurate and philosophical may be ultimately attainable. What I feel sure of is that such more accurate terms have not yet been attained;—that we are not yet justified in using any nomenclature which assumes that we possess a deeper knowledge of what is going on than the messages themselves have given us. I do not of course mean that we ought to accept the messages unquestioningly as being in all cases literally what they claim to be. We know of various veræ causæ,true causes—conscious or unconscious fraud, self-suggestion, telepathy between the living, and the like, which we are bound to regard as possibly operative, and which enable us to resolve many automatic messages into mere illustrations of agencies previously known. But I mean that where we get beyond these simpler causes,—where we are forced to accept the messages as representing in some way the continued identity of a former denizen of earth,—I do not think that either tradition or philosophy affords us any solid stand-point from which to criticise those messages;—any such knowledge of the nature or destiny of the human soul as can at present justify us in translating them, so to say, into any would-be interpretative terminology of our own. Such critical power we may perhaps achieve in the future; but we shall have to achieve it, I think, by careful collation of many more such messages than we as yet possess.

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127. The reader who may feel disposed to give his adhesion to this culminating group of the long series of evidences which have pointed with more and more clearness to the survival of human personality, and to the possibility for men on earth of actual commerce with a world beyond, may feel perhaps that the desiderium orbis catholici,desire for a universal world the intimate and universal hope of every generation of men, has never till this day approached so near to fulfilment. There has never been so fair a prospect for Life and Love. But the goal to which we tend is not an ideal of personal happiness alone. The anticipation of our own future is but one element in the prospect which opens to us now. Our inquiry has broadened into a wider scope. The point from which we started was an analysis of the latent faculties of man. The point towards which our argument has carried us is the existence of a spiritual environment in which those faculties operate, and of unseen neighbours who speak to us thence with slowly gathering power. Deep in this spiritual environment the cosmic secret lies. It is our business to collect the smallest indications; to carry out from this treasury of Rhampsinitus so much as our bare hands can steal away. We have won our scraps of spiritual experience, our messages from behind the veil; we can try them in their connection with certain enigmas which philosophy hardly hoped to be able to put to proof. Can we, for instance, learn anything,—to begin with fundamental problems,—of the relation of spiritual phenomena to Space, to Time, to the material world?

As to the idea of Space, the evidence which will have been presented will enable us to speak with perhaps more clearness than could have been hoped for in such a matter. Spiritual life, we infer, is not bound and confined by space-considerations in the same way as the life of earth. But in what way is that greater freedom attained? It appears to be attained by the mere extension of certain licenses (so to call them) permitted to ourselves. We on earth submit to two familiar laws of the physical universe. A body can only act where it is. Only one body can occupy the same part of space at the same moment. Applied to common affairs these rules are of plain construction. But once get beyond ponderable matter,—once bring life and ether into play, and definitions become difficult indeed. The orator, the poet, we say, can only act where he is;—but where is he? He has transformed the sheet of paper into a spiritual agency;—nay, the mere memory of him persists as a source of energy in other minds. Again, we may say that no other body can be in the same place as this writing-table; but what of the ether? What we have thus far learnt of spiritual operation seems merely to extend these two possibilities. Telepathy indefinitely extends the range of an unembodied spirit's potential presence. The interpenetration of the spiritual with the material environment leaves this ponderable planet unable to check or to hamper spiritual presence or operation. Strange and new though our evidence may be, it needs at present in its relation to space nothing more than an immense extension of conceptions which {i-31} the disappearance of earthly limitations was certain immensely to extend.

How, then, does the matter stand with regard to our relation to Time? Do we find that our new phenomena point to any mode of understanding, or of transcending Time fundamentally different from those modes which we have at our command?

In dealing with Time Past we have memory and written record; in dealing with Time Future we have forethought, drawing inferences from the past.

Can, then, the spiritual knowledge of Past and Future which our evidence shows be explained by assuming that these existing means of knowledge are raised to a higher power? Or are we driven to postulate something in the nature of Time which is to us inconceivable;—some coexistence of Past and Future in an eternal Now? It is plainly with Time Past that we must begin the inquiry.

The knowledge of the past which automatic communications manifest is in most cases apparently referable to the actual memory of persons still existing beyond the tomb. It reaches us telepathically, as from a mind in which remote scenes are still imprinted. But there are certain scenes which are not easily assigned to the individual memory of any given spirit. And if it be possible for us to learn of present facts by telæsthesia as well as by telepathy;—by some direct supernormal percipience without the intervention of any other mind to which the facts are already known,—may there not be also a retrocognitive telæsthesia by which we may attain a direct knowledge of facts in the past?

Some conception of this kind may possibly come nearest to the truth. It may even be that some World-Soul is perennially conscious of all its past; and that individual souls, as they enter into deeper consciousness, enter into something which is at once reminiscence and actuality. But nevertheless a narrower hypothesis will cover the actual cases with which we have to deal. Past facts are known to men on earth not from memory only, but by written record; and there may be records, of what kind we know not, which persist in the spiritual world. Our retrocognitions seem often a recovery of isolated fragments of thought and feeling, pebbles still hard and rounded amid the indecipherable sands over which the mighty waters are “rolling evermore.”

When we look from Time Past to Time Future we are confronted with essentially the same problems, though in a still more perplexing form, and with the world-old mystery of Free Will versus Necessity looming in the background. Again we find that, just as individual memory would serve to explain a large proportion of Retrocognition, so individual forethought—a subliminal forethought, based often on profound organic facts not normally known to us—will explain a large proportion of Precognition. But here again we find also precognitions which transcend what seems explicable by the foresight of any mind such as we know; {i-32} and we are tempted to dream of a World-Soul whose Future is as present to it as its Past. But in this speculation also, so vast and vague an explanation seems for the present beyond our needs; and it is safer—if aught be safe in this region which only actual evidence could have emboldened us to approach—to take refuge in the conception of intelligences not infinite, yet gifted with a foresight which strangely transcends our own.

Closely allied to speculations such as these is another speculation, more capable of being subjected to experimental test, yet which remains still inconclusively tested, and which has become for many reasons a stumbling-block rather than a corroboration in the spiritual inquiry. I refer to the question whether any influence is exercised by spirits upon the gross material world otherwise than through ordinary organic structures. We know that the spirit of a living man controls his own organism, and we shall see reason to think that discarnate spirits may also control, by some form of “possession,” the organisms of living persons,—may affect directly, that is to say, some portions of matter which we call living, namely, the brain of the entranced sensitive. There seems to me, then, no paradox in the supposition that some effect should be produced by spiritual agency—possibly through the mediation of some kind of energy derived from living human beings—upon inanimate matter as well. And I believe that as a fact such effects have been observed and recorded in a trustworthy manner by Sir W. Crookes, the late Dr. Speer, and others, in the cases especially of D. D. Home and of W. Stainton Moses. If, indeed, I call these and certain other records still inconclusive, it is mainly on account of the mass of worthless narratives with which they have been in some sense smothered; the long history of so-called investigations which have consisted merely in an interchange of credulity and fraud. For the present the evidence of this kind which has real value is better presented, I think, in separate records than collected or discussed in any generalised form. All that I purpose in this work, therefore, is briefly to indicate the relation which these “physical phenomena” hold to the psychical phenomena with which my book is concerned. Alongside of the faculty or achievement of man's ordinary or supraliminal self I shall demarcate the faculty or achievement which I ascribe to his subliminal self; and alongside of this again I shall arrange such few well-attested phenomena as seem primâ facie to demand the physical intervention of discarnate intelligences.

128. I have traced the utmost limits to which any claim to a scientific basis for these inquiries can at present be pushed. Yet the subject-matter has not yet been exhausted of half its significance. The conclusions to which our evidence points are not such as can be discussed or dismissed as a mere matter of speculative curiosity. They affect every {i-33} belief, every faculty, every hope and aim of man; and they affect him the more intimately as his interests grow more profound. Whatever meaning be applied to ethics, to philosophy, to religion, the concern of all these is here.

It would have been inconsistent with my main purpose had I interpolated considerations of this kind into the body of this work. For that purpose was above all to show that realms left thus far to philosophy or to religion,—too often to mere superstition and idle dream,—might in the end be brought under steady scientific rule. I contend that Religion and Science are no separable or independent provinces of thought or action; but rather that each name implies a different aspect of the same ideal;— that ideal being the completely normal reaction of the individual spirit to the whole of cosmic law.

Assuredly this deepening response of man's spirit to the Cosmos deepening round him must be affected by all the signals which now are glimmering out of night to tell him of his inmost nature and his endless fate. Who can think that either Science or Revelation has spoken as yet more than a first half-comprehended word? But if in truth souls departed call to us, it is to them that we shall listen most of all. We shall weigh their undesigned concordances, we shall analyse the congruity of their message with the facts which such a message should explain. To some thoughts which may thus be generated I shall try to give expression in an Epilogue to the present work.

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CHAPTER II

DISINTEGRATIONS OF PERSONALITY

θάνατός ἐστιν ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ὁρέομεν, ὁκόσα δὲ εὕδοντες, ὕπνος.
[Translation]

—HERACLITUS.

Death is as many things as we see when awake, sleep is as many things as we see when asleep.

200. Of the race of man we know for certain that it has been evolved through many ages and through countless forms of change. We know for certain that its changes continue still; nay, that more causes of change act upon us in “fifty years of Europe” than in “a cycle of Cathay.” We may reasonably conjecture that the race will continue to change with increasing rapidity, and through a period in comparison with which our range of recorded history shrinks into a moment.

The actual nature of these coming changes, indeed, lies beyond our imagination. Many of them are probably as inconceivable to us now as eyesight would have been to our eyeless ancestors. All that we can do is to note so far as possible the structural laws of our personality as deduced from its changes thus far; inferring that for some time to come, at any rate, its further changes will proceed upon similar lines.

I have already (Chapter I.) indicated the general view as to the nature of human personality which is maintained in this work. I regard each man as at once profoundly unitary and almost infinitely composite, as inheriting from earthly ancestors a multiplex and “colonial” organism—polyzoic and perhaps polypsychic in an extreme degree; but also as ruling and unifying that organism by a soul or spirit absolutely beyond our present analysis—a soul which has originated in a spiritual or metetherial environment; which even while embodied subsists in that environment; and which will still subsist therein after the body's decay.

It is, of course, impossible for us to picture to ourselves the way in which the individual life of each cell of the body is reconciled with the unity of the central life which controls the body as a whole. But this difficulty is not created or intensified by the hypothesis of a separate and persistent soul. On no hypothesis can we really understand the collaboration and the subordination of the cell-lives of any multicellular animal. It is as mysterious in the starfish as it is in Plato; and the “eight brains of Aurelia” with their individual and their common life are as inconceivable {i-35} as the life of the phagocytes in the philosopher's veins, in their relation to his central thought.¹¹ The difficulty of conceiving any cellular focus, either fixed or shifting, has actually led some psychologists to demand a unifying principle which is not cellular, and yet is not a soul.

201. I claim, in fact, that the ancient hypothesis of an indwelling soul, possessing and using the body as a whole, yet bearing a real, though obscure relation to the various more or less apparently disparate conscious groupings manifested in connection with the organism and in connection with more or less localised groups of nerve-matter, is a hypothesis not more perplexing, not more cumbrous, than any other hypothesis yet suggested. I claim also that it is conceivably provable,—I myself hold it as actually proved,—by direct observation. I hold that certain manifestations of central individualities, associated now or formerly with certain definite organisms, have been observed in operation apart from those organisms, both while the organisms were still living, and after they had decayed. Whether or no this thesis be as yet sufficiently proved, it is at least at variance with no scientific principle nor established fact whatever; and it is of a nature which continued observation may conceivably establish to the satisfaction of all. The negative thesis, on the other hand, is a thesis in unstable equilibrium. It cannot be absolutely proved by any number of negative instances; and it may be absolutely disproved by a single positive instance. It may have at present a greater scientific currency, but it can have no real scientific authority as against the view defended in these pages.

202. Leaving these questions, however, aside for the present, we may agree that in the organism as we can observe it in common life we have no complete or unchanging unity, but rather a complex hierarchy of groups of cells exercising vaguely limited functions, and working together with rough precision, tolerable harmony, fair success. That these powers ever work perfectly together we have no evidence. Our feeling of health is but a rough haphazard register of what is passing within us. Nor would it ever be possible to define a permanently ideal status in an organism in moving equilibrium,—an organism which lives by exploding unstable compounds, and which is constantly aiming at new ends at the expense of the old.

Many disturbances and disintegrations of the personality must presently fall [sic] to be described. But the reader who may follow me must remember the point of view from which I am writing. The aim of my analysis is not to destroy but to fulfil;—or say, rather, my hope is that observation of the ways in which the personality tends to disintegrate may suggest methods which may tend on the other hand to its more complete integration.

Such improvements upon the natural conditions of the organism are not unknown. Just as the study of hysteria deals mainly with instabilities in {i-36} the threshold of consciousness, so does the study of zymotic disease deal mainly with instabilities in the constitution of the blood. The ordinary object of the physician is to check these instabilities when they occur; to restore healthy blood in the place of vitiated. The experimental biologist has a further aim. He wishes to provide men with better blood than nature has bestowed; to elicit from virus and decay some element whose infusion into the veins may give immunity against microbic invasion. As the adult is safer against such attacks than the child by dint of his more advanced development, so is the immunised adult safer than the common man. The change in his blood which healthy maturity has induced has made him safe against whooping-cough. The change in his blood which we effect by injecting antitoxin makes him temporarily safe against diphtheria. We have improved upon nature;—and our artifice has been prophylactic by virtue of being in a certain sense developmental.

Even such, I trust, may be the achievement of experimental psychology in a later day. I shall be well content if in this chapter I can give hints for some future colligation of such evolutive phenomena as may lurk amid a mass of phenomena mainly dissolutive—phenomena whose records are scattered and imperfect, and have as yet only in some few directions, and by quite recent writers, been collated or systematised on any definite plan.

203. The discussion of these disintegrations of personality needs, I think, some little clearing of the ground beforehand, if it is to avoid confusion. It will be needful to speak of concurrent and alternating streams of consciousness,—of subliminal and supraliminal strata of personality and the like;—phrases which save much trouble when used with care, but which need some words of preliminary explanation. It is not easy to realise that anything which deserves the name of consciousness can be going on within us, apart from that central stream of thought and feeling with which we identify ourselves in common life. Something of definition is needed;—not indeed of any formal or dogmatic kind;—but enough to make clear the sense given to such words as consciousness, memory, personality, in the ensuing pages.

I begin, then, with the obvious remark that when we conceive any act other than our own as a conscious act, we do so either because we regard it as complex, and therefore purposive, or because we perceive that it has been remembered. Thus we call the fencer or the chess-player fully conscious; or, again, we say, “The man who seemed stunned after that blow on the head must really have been conscious all the time; for he afterwards recalled every incident.” The memorability of an act is, in fact, a better proof of consciousness than its complexity. Thus consciousness has been denied both to hypnotised subjects and to dogs; but it is easier to prove that the hypnotised subject is conscious than that the dog is conscious. For the hypnotised subject, though he may forget the incidents of the trance when he awakes, will remember them in the next trance; or he may be trained to remember them in the waking state also; while with {i-37} regard to the dog we cannot decide from the mere complexity of his actions how far he is conscious of their performance. With him, too, the best line of proof lies in his obvious memory of past acts. And yet, although all agree that our own memory, broadly speaking, proves our past consciousness, some persons would not admit that a dog's memory does so too. The dog's organism, they would say, responds, no doubt, in a new manner to a second repetition of a previous stimulus; but this is more or less true of all living organisms, or parts of organisms, even far below what we generally regard as a conscious level.

Reflections of this kind naturally lead to a wider conception of consciousness. It is gradually seen that the earlier inquiries which men have made about consciousness have been of a merely ethical or legal character;—have simply aimed at deciding whether at a given moment a man was responsible for his acts, either to a human or to a divine tribunal. Common sense has seemed to encourage this method of definite demarcation; we judge practically either that a man is conscious or that he is not; in the experience of life intermediate states are of little importance.

As soon, however, as the problem is regarded as a psychological one, to be decided by observation and experiment, these hard and fast lines grow fainter and fainter. We come to regard consciousness as an attribute which may possibly be present in all kinds of varying degrees in connection with the animal and vegetable worlds; as the psychical counterpart of life; as conceivably the psychical counterpart of all phenomenal existence. Or, rather, we may say this of mind, to which, in its more elementary forms, consciousness bears somewhat the same relation as self-consciousness bears to consciousness, or some higher evolution may bear to self-consciousness.

This being so, I cannot see how we can phrase our definition more simply than by saying that any act or condition must be regarded as conscious if it is potentially memorable;—if it can be recollected, under any circumstances, by the subject concerned. It does not seem needful that the circumstances under which such recollection may occur should arise while the subject is still incarnated on this planet. We shall never on this planet remember the great majority of our dreams; but those dreams were presumably no less conscious than the dreams which a sudden awakening allowed us to keep in memory. Certain hypnotic subjects, indeed, who can be made to remember their dreams by suggestion, apparently remember dreams previously latent just as easily as dreams previously remembered. And we shall have various other examples of the unexpected recollection of experiences supposed to have been entirely devoid of consciousness.

We are bound, I think, to draw at least this negative conclusion: that we must not take for granted that our apparently central consciousness is something wholly different in kind from the minor consciousnesses out of which it is in some sense elaborated. I do indeed believe it to be in an {i-38} important sense different; but this difference must not be assumed on the basis of our subjective sensations alone. We must approach the whole subject of split or duplicated personalities with no prepossession against the possibility of any given arrangement or division of the total mass of consciousness which exists within us.

204. Before we can picture to ourselves how that mass of consciousness may disintegrate, we ought, were it possible, to picture to ourselves how it is in the first instance integrated. That, however, is a difficulty which does not begin with the constitution of man. It begins when unicellular develop into multicellular organisms. It is, of course, a mystery how a single cell can hold together, and what kind of unity it can possess. But it is a fresh mystery when several cells cohere in a conjoint and independent life. In the collective unity of certain “colonial animals” we have a kind of sketch or parody of our own complex being. Higher intelligences may possibly see us as we see the hydrozoon—a creature split up into different “persons,” a “hydriform person” who feeds, a “medusiform person” who propagates, and so on—elements of the animal differentiated for different ends—interconnected from one point of view as closely as our stomach and brain, yet from another point of view separable existences, capable of detachment and of independent regeneration in all kinds of different ways. Still more composite, though less conspicuously composite, is every animal that we meet as we rise through the scale; and in man we reach the summit both of colonial complexity and of centralised control.

I need hardly say that as regards the inner nature of this close coordination, this central government, science can at present tell us little or nothing. The growth of the nervous mechanism may be to some extent deciphered; but how this mechanism is centrally governed; what is the tendency which makes for unity; where precisely this unity resides, and what is its exact relation to the various parts of the multicellular organism—all these are problems in the nature of life, to which as yet no solution is known.

The needed clue, as I believe, can be afforded only by the discovery of laws affecting primarily that unseen or spiritual plane of being where I imagine the origin of life to lie. If we can suppose telepathy to be a first indication of a law of this type, and to occupy in the spiritual world some such place as gravitation occupies in the material world, we might imagine something analogous to the force of cohesion as operating in the psychical contexture of a human personality. Such a personality, at any rate, as the development of higher from lower organisms shows, involves the aggregation of countless minor psychical entities, whose characteristics still persist, although in a manner consistent with the possibility that one larger psychical entity, whether pre-existent or otherwise, is the unifying continuum of which those smaller entities are fragments, and exercises over them a pervading, though an incomplete, control.

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205. It is plainly impossible to say beforehand what will be the relation to the ordinary stream of consciousness of a personality thus composed. We have no right to assume that all our psychical operations will fall at the same time, or at any time, into the same central current of perception, or rise above what we have called the ordinary conscious threshold. We can be sure, in fact, that there will be much which will not so rise; can we predict what will rise?

We can only reply that the perception of stimuli by the supraliminal consciousness is a kind of exercise of function; and that here, as in other cases where a function is exercised, part of its range will consist of such operation as the primary structure of the organism obliges it to perform, and part will consist of such operation as natural selection (after the structure has come into being) has trained it to perform. There will be something which is structurally inevitable, and something which was not structurally inevitable, but which has proved itself practically advantageous.

Thus it may be inevitable—a necessary result of nervous structure—that consciousness should accompany unfamiliar cerebral combinations;—that the “fraying of fresh channels” should carry with it a perceptible tingle of novelty. Or it is possible, again, that this vivid consciousness of new cerebral combinations may be a later acquisition, and merely due to the obvious advantage of preventing new achievements from stereotyping themselves before they have been thoroughly practised;—as a musician will keep his attention fixed on a difficult novelty, lest his execution should become automatic before he has learnt to render the piece as he desires. It seems likely, at any rate, that the greater part of the contents of our supraliminal consciousness may be determined in some such fashion as this, by natural selection so operating as to keep ready at hand those perceptions which are most needed for the conduct of life.

The notion of the upbuilding of the personality here briefly given is of use, I think, in suggesting its practical tendencies to dissolution. Subjected continually to both internal and external stress and strain, its ways of yielding indicate the grain of its texture.

206. It is possible that if we could discern the minute psychology of this long series of changes, ranging from modifications too minute to be noted as abnormal to absolute revolutions of the whole character and intelligence, we might find no definite break in all the series; but rather a slow, continuous detachment of one psychical unit or element of consciousness after another from the primary synthesis. It is possible, on the other hand, that there may be a real break at a point where there appears to our external observation to be a break, namely, where the personality passes into its new phase through an interval of sleep or trance. And I believe that there is another break, at a point much further advanced, and not to be reached in this chapter, where some external intelligence begins in some way to possess the organism and to replace for a time the ordinary {i-40} intellectual activity by an activity of its own. Setting, however, this last possibility for the present aside, we must adopt some arrangement on which to hang our cases. For this purpose the appearance of sleep or trance will make a useful, although not a definite line of demarcation.

We may begin with localised psychical hypertrophies and isolations,—terms which I shall explain as we proceed; and then pass on through hysterical instabilities (where intermediate periods of trance may or may not be present) to those more advanced sleep-wakings and dimorphisms which a barrier of trance seems always to separate from the primary stream of conscious life. All such changes, of course, are generally noxious to the psychical organism; and it will be simpler to begin by dwelling on their noxious aspect, and regarding them as steps on the road—on one of the many roads—to mental overthrow.

The process begins, then, with something which is to the psychical organism no more than a boil or a corn is to the physical. In consequence of some suggestion from without, or of some inherited tendency, a small group of psychical units set up a process of exaggerated growth which shuts them off from free and healthy interchange with the rest of the personality.

The first symptom of disaggregation is thus the idée fixe, that is to say, the persistence of an uncontrolled and unmodifiable group of thoughts or emotions, which from their brooding isolation,—from the very fact of deficient interchange with the general current of thought,—become alien and intrusive, so that some special idea or image presses into consciousness with undue and painful frequency. We may perhaps suppose that the fixed idea here represents the psychological aspect of some definite, although ultra-microscopic, cerebral lesion. One may look for analogy sometimes, as I have said, to a corn, sometimes to a boil, sometimes to an encysted tumour, sometimes to a cancer. The idée fixe may be little more than an indurated prejudice, which hurts when pressed upon. Or, again, it may be like a hypertrophied centre of inflammation, which sends its smart and ache abroad through the organism. Or for certain hysterical fixed ideas we shall find our best parallel if, accepting a well-known hypothesis, we suppose that a tumour may originate in the isolated and extravagant growth of some fragment of embryonic matter, accidentally nipped off or extruded from the embryo's concordant development. Such tumours may be encysted or encapsuled, so that they injure surrounding tissues by pressure, while yet their own contents can only be discovered by incision. Just such, one may say, are the forgotten and irrecoverable terrors which Dr. Janet has shown us as giving rise to hysterical attacks. (See 207 A, in Appendices at end of volume.) Such tumours of the mind may sometimes be psychologically cut down upon and removed by free discussion; “talked out,” as Dr. Breuer has it.¹¹ For a series of independent, but fully concordant observations, see “The Use of Hypnotism in the First Degree,” by Dr. Russell Sturgis (Boston, 1894). Worst of all, of course, are {i-41} the cancer-like cases, where the degeneration, beginning it hardly matters where, invades with rapid incoherence the whole compass of the mind.

The fixed idea, thus originating probably from various causes, may develop in different ways. It may become a centre of explosion, or a nucleus of separation, or a beginning of death. It may induce an access of hysterical convulsions, thus acting like a material foreign body which presses on a sensitive part of the organism. Or it may draw to its new parasitic centre so many psychical elements that it forms a kind of secondary personality, coexisting secretly with the primary one, or even able at times (as in some well-known cases) to carry the whole organism by a coup-de-mainraid, surprise attack. (Such changes, it may be noted in passing, are not always for the worse.) Or, again, the new quasi-independent centres may be merely anarchical; the revolt may spread to every cell; and the forces of the environment, ever making war upon the organism, may thus effect its total decay.

207. Let us dwell for a few moments on the nature of these fixed or insistent ideas. They are not generally or at the first outset extravagant fancies,—as that one is made of glass, or the like. Rather will “fixed ideas” come to seem a mere expression for something in a minor degree common to most of us. Hardly any mind, I suppose, is wholly free from tendencies to certain types of thought or emotion for which we cannot summon any adequate check—useless recurrent broodings over the past or anxieties for the future, perhaps traces of old childish experience which have become too firmly fixed ever wholly to disappear. Nay, it may well be that we must look even further back than our own childhood for the origin of many haunting troubles. Inherited tendencies to terror, especially, seem to reach back far into a prehistoric past. In a recent “Study of Fears,” which Professor Stanley Hall has based on a wide statistical collection,¹¹ Stanley Hall's “Study of Fears,” American Journal of Psychology, vol. viii., No. 2, January 1897. it would seem that the fears of childhood,—indications of the nervous instability of the yet immature system,—often correspond to no existing cause for uneasiness, but rather to the vanished perils of primitive man. The fear of darkness, for instance, the fear of solitude, the fear of thunderstorms, the fear of the loss of orientation, speak of primitive helplessness,—just as the fear of animals, the fear of strangers, suggest the fierce and hazardous life of early man. To all such instinctive feelings as these a morbid development is easily given.

Of what nature must we suppose this morbid development to be? Does it fall properly within our present discussion? or is it not simply a beginning of brain-disease, which concerns the physician rather than the psychologist? The psychologist's best answer to this question will be to show cases of fixed ideas cured by psychological means. (For instances of such cures, see 207 A, in Appendices at end of volume.) And indeed there are few cases to show which have been cured by any methods except the {i-42} psychological; if hypnotic suggestion does not succeed with an idée fixe, it is seldom that any other treatment will cure it. We may, of course, say that the brain troubles thus cured were functional, and that those which went on inevitably into insanity were organic, although the distinction between functional and organic is not easily demonstrable in this ultra-microscopic realm.

At any rate, we have actually on record,—and that is what our argument needs,—a great series of idées fixes, of various degrees of intensity, cured by suggestion;—cured, that is to say, by a subliminal setting in action of minute nervous movements which our supraliminal consciousness cannot in even the blindest manner manage to set to work. Some such difference as exists on a gross scale between striped and unstriped muscle seems to exist on a minute scale among these smallest involved cells and fibres, or whatever they be. Some of them obey our conscious will, but most of them are capable of being governed only by subliminal strata of the self.

If, however, it be the subliminal self which can reduce these elements to order, it is often probably the subliminal self to which their disorder is originally due. If a fixed idea, say agoraphobia, grows up in me, this may probably be because the proper controlling co-ordinations of thought, which I ought to be able to summon up at will, have sunk below the level at which will can reach them. I am no longer able, that is to say, to convince myself by reasoning that there is no danger in crossing the open square. And this may be the fault of my subliminal self, whose business it is to keep the ideas which I need for common life easily within my reach, and which has failed to do this, owing to some enfeeblement of its grasp of my organism.

208. If we imagine these obscure operations under some such form as this, we get the advantage of being able to connect these insistent ideas in a coherent sequence with the more advanced phenomena of hysteria. We have seen that the insistent ideas are essentially a kind of small displacements of the habitual level of consciousness. They imply that some small but necessary scraps of supraliminal equipment have dropped, so to say, through chinks in the floor of the waking mind (as where the visual field has been narrowed hysterically), and have sunk to a point whence only hypnotic suggestion is likely to be able to call them back to use. Or in some cases we may go a step further, and say that these fixed ideas show us, not merely an ordinary supraliminal instinct functioning without due check, but rather a submerged and primitive instinct rising with a subliminal uprush into undesired prominence, and functioning wildly instead of remaining hidden and quiescent. That is to say, we have to do with an instability of the conscious threshold which often implies or manifests a disorderly or diseased condition of the hypnotic stratum,—of that region of the personality which, as we shall see, is best known to us through the fact that it is reached by hypnotic suggestion.

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Now we shall find, I think, that all the phenomena of hysteria are reducible to the same general conception. To understand their many puzzles we have to keep our eyes fixed upon just these psychological notions—upon a threshold of ordinary consciousness above which certain perceptions and faculties ought to be, but are not always, maintained, and upon a “hypnotic stratum” or region of the personality to which hypnotic suggestion appeals; and which includes faculty and perception which surpass the supraliminal, but whose operation is capricious and dreamlike, inasmuch as they lie, so to say, in a debateable region between two rules—the known rule of the supraliminal self, adapted to this life's experience and uses, and the conjectured rule of a fuller and profounder self, rarely reached by any artifice which our present skill suggests. Some of these conscious groupings have got separated from the ordinary stream of consciousness. These may still be unified in the subliminal, but they need to be unified in the supraliminal also. The normal relation between the supraliminal and the subliminal may be disturbed by the action of either.

Let us now see how far this view, which I suggested in the S.P.R. Proceedings as far back as 1892,¹¹ See vol. vii. p. 309. fits in with those modern observations of hysteria, in Paris and Vienna especially, which are transforming all that group of troubles from the mere opprobrium of medicine into one of the most fertile sources of new knowledge of body and mind.

209. First, then, let us briefly consider what is the general type of hysterical troubles. Speaking broadly, we may say that the symptoms of hysteria form, in the first place, a series of phantom copies of real maladies of the nervous system; and, in the second place, a series of fantasies played upon that system—of unreal, dreamlike ailments, often such as no physiological mechanism can be shown to have determined. These latter cases are often due, as we shall see, not to purely physiological, but rather to intellectual causes; they represent, not a particular pattern in which the nervous system tends of itself to disintegrate, but a particular pattern which has been imposed upon it by some intellectual process;—in short, by some form of self-suggestion.

Let us briefly review some common types of hysterical disability,—taking as our first guide Dr. Pierre Janet's admirable work, L'Etat Mental des Hystériques (Paris, 1893).

What, then, to begin with, is Dr. Janet's general conception of the psychological states of the advanced hysteric? “In the expression I feel,” he says (L'Etat Mental, p. 39), “we have two elements: a small new psychological fact, ‘feel,’ and an enormous mass of thoughts already formed into a system ‘I.’ These two things mix and combine, and to say I feel is to say that the personality, already enormous, has seized and absorbed this small new sensation;…as though the I were an amœba {i-44} which sent out a prolongation to suck in this little sensation which has come into existence beside it.” Now it is in the assimilation of these elementary sensations or affective states with the perception personnelle, as Janet terms it, that the advanced hysteric fails. His field of consciousness is so far narrowed that it can only take in the minimum of sensations necessary for the support of life. “One must needs have consciousness of what one sees and hears, and so the patient neglects to perceive the tactile and muscular sensations with which he thinks that he can manage to dispense. At first he could perhaps turn his attention to them, and recover them at least momentarily within the field of personal perception. But the occasion does not present itself, and the psychological bad habit is formed.… One day the patient—for he is now veritably a patient—is examined by the doctor. His left arm is pinched, and he is asked whether he feels the pinch. To his surprise the patient realises that he can no longer feel consciously, can no longer bring back into his personal perception sensations which he has neglected too long—he has become anæsthetic.… Hysterical anæsthesia is thus a fixed and perpetual distraction, which renders its subjects incapable of attaching certain sensations to their personality; it is a restriction of the conscious field.”

The proof of these assertions depends on a number of observations, all of which point in the same direction, and show that hysterical anæsthesia does not descend so deep into the personality, so to say, as true anæsthesia caused by nervous decay, or by the section of a nerve.

Thus the hysteric is often unconscious of the anæsthesia, which is only discovered by the physician. There is none of the distress caused by true anæsthesia, as, for instance, by the “tabetic mask,” or insensibility of part of the face, which sometimes occurs in tabes dorsalislocomotor ataxia; a slow degeneration of the nerve cells and nerve fibers that carry sensory information to the brain. An incident reported by Dr. Jules Janet illustrates this peculiarity. A young woman cut her right hand severely with broken glass, and complained of insensibility in the palm. The physician who examined her found that the sensibility of the right palm was, in fact, diminished by the section of certain nerves. But he discovered at the same time that the girl was hysterically anæsthetic over the whole left side of her body. She had never even found out this disability, and the doctor twitted her with complaining of the small patch of anæsthesia, while she said nothing of that which covered half her body. But, as Dr. Pierre Janet remarks, she might well have retorted that these were the facts, and that it was for the man of science to say why the small patch annoyed her while the large one gave her no trouble at all.

Of similar import is the ingenious observation that hysterical anæsthesia rarely leads to any accident to the limb;—differing in this respect, for instance, from the true and profound anæsthesia of syringomyelitis, in which burns and bruises frequently result from the patient's forgetfulness of the part affected. There is usually, in fact, a supervision—a subliminal supervision—exercised over the hysteric's limbs. Part of her personality {i-45} is still alive to the danger, and modifies her movements, unknown to her supraliminal self.

This curious point, I may remark in passing, well illustrates the kind of action which I attribute to the subliminal self in many phases of life. Thus it is that the hypnotised subject is prevented (as I hold) from committing a real as opposed to a fictitious crime; thus it is that fresh ideas are suggested to the man of genius; thus it is—I will even say—that in some cases monitory hallucinations are generated, which save the supraliminal self from some sudden danger.

210. I pass on to another peculiarity of hysterical anæsthesiæ;—also in my eyes of deep significance. The anæsthetic belts or patches do not always, or even generally, correspond with true anatomical areas, such as would be affected by the actual lesion of any given nerve. They follow what may be called fancy arrangements;—sometimes corresponding to rough popular notions of divisions of the body,—sometimes seeming to reflect a merely childish caprice. “It is not,” says Dr. Janet, “the region innervated by the cubital or the median nerve which is anæsthetic; it is the hand or the wrist. The whole arm, shoulder included, is insensible, not the region innervated by the brachial plexus.… In hysterical blindness the anæsthesia is not confined to the retina, but extends to the conjunctiva and even to the eyelids; the amaurotic hysterical patient has a pair of anæsthetic spectacles across her face. That is to say, she has lost the use of the eye, taking the eye not in the physiological but in the popular sense, as including all that is contained in the orbit.”

Now to ordinary notions it will seem very strange that a crude, vulgar conception of this kind—a conception, moreover, upon which the patient may never have consciously dwelt—should be able to modify the state of the nervous system in so marked a way. A mere silly fancy seems to have produced an effect which is not merely fanciful;—which is objective, measurable, and capable of causing long and serious disablement. This result, however, is quite accordant with my view of what I have termed the hypnotic stratum of the personality. I hold, as our coming discussion of hypnotism will more fully explain, that the region into which the hypnotic suggestion gives us access is one of strangely mingled strength and weakness;—of a faculty at once more potent and less coherent than that of waking hours. I think that in these cases we get at the subliminal self only somewhat in the same sense as we get at the supraliminal self when the “highest-level centres” are for the time inoperative (as in a dream) and only “middle-level centres” are left to follow their own devices without inhibition or co-ordination. I hold that this is the explanation of the strange contrasts which hypnosis makes familiar to us—the combination of profound power over the organism with childish readiness to obey the merest whims of the hypnotiser. The intelligence which thus responds is in my view only a fragmentary intelligence; it is a dreamlike scrap of the {i-46} subliminal self, functioning apart from that self's central and profounder control.

What happens in hypnotism in obedience to the hypnotiser's caprice happens in hysteria in obedience to the caprice of the hypnotic stratum itself. Some middle-level centre of the subliminal self (to express a difficult idea by the nearest phrase I can find) gets the notion that there is an “anæsthetic bracelet,” say, round the left wrist;—and lo, this straightway is so; and the hysteric loses supraliminal sensation in this fantastic belt. The fact, indeed, is most instructive; for it begins to show us divisions of the human body based not upon local innervation but upon ideation (however incoherent);—upon intellectual conceptions like “a bracelet,” “a cross,”—applied though these conceptions may be with dreamlike futility.

211. This mode of description,—it may be convenient to point out,—is thoroughly concordant with Professor Janet's phrase of rétrécissement de la personnaliténarrowing of personality [Richet's term]. As he justly insists, the hysterical loss of sensibility is due to a state of misère psychologiquepsychological or psychic misery,—to a “psychical poverty,” a slackness of the grip with which the known or apparent personality holds and controls the organism's capacity of sensation. Over a certain part of the mechanism of sensation this grasp gives way; there is a deep and prolonged distraction of attention, which ends in the permanent loss of the power to recognise the sensations of the special part affected. With all this I agree; these words describe the phenomena from the supraliminal point of view. From the point of view of the first subliminal region—of the hypnotic stratum—matters look slightly different. There we see certain dreamlike incoherent faculties functioning with undue freedom, for the same reason which affected the supraliminal attention, namely, the enfeebled hold which the personality now has upon the organism. Acting in dreamlike fashion these fragments of subliminal faculty disturb and confuse the weakened threshold,—the psychical diaphragm, now grown too permeable,—above which should lie all the faculty needed for the conduct of life by the supraliminal self. The morbid subliminal activity attracts or sucks down scraps of supraliminal activity,—scraps often quite fantastic in their delimitation,—and deprives the supraliminal self of thus much of its due scope of control. And observe that even at this early stage the conception here given of subliminal operation is needed to fill gaps which remain in the explanation which is given from above the threshold alone. Whence comes, for instance, the notion of the “anæsthetic bracelet”? Not from the hysteric's supraliminal self; for she is generally unaware of its existence until the physician discovers it. Nor is it a chance combination;—even were there such a thing as chance. It is a dream of the hypnotic stratum;—an incoherent self-suggestion starting from and affecting a region below the reach of conscious will.

In this view, then, we regard the fragments of perceptive power over which the hysteric has lost control as being by no means really extinguished, {i-47} but rather as existing immediately beneath the threshold, in the custody, so to say, of a dreamlike or hypnotic stratum of the subliminal self, which has selected them for reasons sometimes explicable as the result of past suggestions, sometimes to us inexplicable. If this be so, we may expect that the same kind of suggestions which originally cut off these perceptions from the main body of perception may stimulate them again to action either below or above the conscious threshold.

212. We have already, indeed, seen reason to suppose that the submerged perceptions are still at work, when Dr. Janet pointed out how rare a thing it was that any accident or injury followed upon hysterical loss of feeling in the limbs. A still more curious illustration is afforded by the condition of the field of vision in a hysteric. It often happens that the field of vision is much reduced, so that the hysteric, when tested with the perimeter, can discern only objects almost directly in front of the eye. But if an object which happens to be particularly exciting to the hypnotic stratum—for instance, the hypnotiser's finger, used often as a signal for trance—is advanced into that part of the hysteric's normal visual field of which she has apparently lost all consciousness, there will often be an instant subliminal perception,—shown by the fact that the subject promptly falls into trance. A hysterical boy, a patient of Professor Janet's, with great retrenchment of the visual field, had been frightened into his first attack by a conflagration, and the sight of a flame near him was enough to bring on an attack again. Professor Janet, with due precautions, moved a lighted match into the normal visual field, far beyond his hysterically narrowed range of conscious sight. Almost at once the boy cried, “Fire! fire!” and fell into hysterical convulsions. The same experiment was tried by M. Laurent with a girl who had first been frightened into hysteria by the sight of a mouse. A stuffed mouse—held quite outside her narrowed field of conscious vision—had the same effect upon this girl as the lighted match upon the boy.

In these cases the action of the submerged perceptions, while provoked by very shallow artifices, continued definitely subliminal. The patient herself, as we say, does not know why she does not burn her anæsthetic limbs, or why she suddenly falls into a trance while being subjected to optical tests.

But it is equally easy to devise experiments which shall call these submerged sensations up again into supraliminal consciousness. A hysteric has lost sensation in one arm; Dr. Janet tells her that there is a caterpillar on that arm; and the reinforcement of attention thus generated brings back the sensibility. A patient of Professor Pitres is hysterically unable to see with the left eye. On a screen before her he places a word or sentence so arranged that her right eye can only see half the print. The attention thus generated enables the left eye to aid her in reading the whole inscription.

213. These hysterical anæsthesiæ, it may be added here, may be not {i-48} only very definite but very profound. Just as the reality,—though also the impermanence,—of the hysterical retrenchment of field of vision of which I have been speaking can be shown by optical experiments beyond the patient's comprehension, so the reality of some profound organic hysterical insensibilities is sometimes shown by the progress of independent disease. A certain patient feels no hunger or thirst; this indifference might be simulated for a time; but her ignorance of severe inflammation of the bladder is easily recognisable as real. Throw her into hypnosis and her sensibilities return. The disease is for the first time felt, and the patient screams with the pain. This result well illustrates one main effect of hypnosis, viz., to bring the organism into a more normal state. The deep organic anæsthesia of this patient was dangerously abnormal; the missing sensibility had first to be restored, although it might be desirable afterwards to remove the painful elements in that sensibility again, under, so to say, a wiser and deeper control.

Another peculiarity of interest for us in these anæsthesiæ lies in what I may term a partial regression to the vagueness of primitive irritability. The patient M., Dr. Janet tells us, has been for years totally anæsthetic.

“Under certain circumstances, and particularly after she has long been kept in the somnambulic state, she recovers for a time, but incompletely, tactile sensations. Sometimes sensibility seems to return in the vague form of pain or distress, with no distinctive sign. Her sensations are indefinite; heat, cold, a pinch, an object placed in her hands,—each of these stimuli produces only a vague sense of something disagreeable.” And even when the sense of touch becomes more definite, confusion and error of localisation still persist. Thus may hysteria present to us in a few minutes a series of stages through which our early ancestors have slowly travelled;—stages to which we may fall back in dementia, but through which only in this quasi-experiment which nature offers us can we see the spirit pass and repass unmoved.

214. What has been said of hysterical defects of sensation might be repeated for motor defects. There, too, the powers of which the supraliminal self has lost control continue to act in obedience to subliminal promptings.

“I cannot in the least understand what is going on,” said Maria, when she entered the hospital [I quote Dr. Janet again]; “for some time past I have been working in am odd way; it is no longer I who am working, but only my hands. They get on pretty well, but I have no part in what they do. When it is over I do not recognise my work at all. I see that it is all right; but I feel that I am quite incapable of having accomplished it. If any one said, ‘It is not you who did that!’ I would answer, ‘True enough, it is not I.’ When I want to sing it is impossible to me; yet at other times I hear my voice singing the song very well. It is certainly not I who walk; I feel like a balloon which jumps up and down of itself. When I want to write I find nothing to say, my head is empty, and I must let my hand write what it chooses, and it fills four pages, and if the stuff is silly I cannot help it.”

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“The curious point is,” continues M. Janet, “that in this fashion she produces some really good things. If she makes up a dress or writes a letter she sometimes shows real talent, but it is all done in a bizarre way. She looks absorbed in her work, but yet unconscious of it; when she lifts her head she seems dazed as if she was coming out of a dream, and does not recollect what she has been doing. Her way of acting recalls what is said of men of genius who obey their inspiration without being themselves aware of accomplishing their masterpieces.… To take a humbler comparison, she acts as we occasionally do when we let our hand write of itself a word which we have forgotten how to spell. But what with us is accidental is with her perpetual; although she has still activity she has no longer the personal consciousness of this activity, and her acts therefore can no longer be called voluntary.… Some patients, on the other hand, will not or cannot abandon themselves to this automatic activity. They try to perform the actions consciously and voluntarily, and then they fail altogether.”

215. I pass on to one of M. Janet's most acute observations¹¹ Etat Mental des Hystériques, p. 171.The Mental State of Hysterics—a case where the difference between the faculty still at the command of the supraliminal personality and the faculty transmissible only by automatic impulse from the subliminal self reaches its maximum point, and suggests some reflections of novel import.

“If we tell hemiplegics or amyotrophics to squeeze the dynamometer, we get such figures as 5 and 10,—very much what these hysterics manage to reach. But with the truly paralysed such figures do not surprise us. We know that we are dealing with impotent persons whose every action shows their weakness. But our hysterics who mark 5 and 10 are by no means impotent; they sew, they work, they carry burdens without any apparent trouble. Célestine, for instance, is a robust country girl, accustomed to hard work, and still asking as a favour to be allowed to sweep and rub the floors. She is quick-tempered, and when things do not go just as she likes she shakes the beds, changes their places, and lifts with one arm the wooden armchairs. She has terrible fits of passion; and in some asylums where she has been she has soundly thrashed strong men. Well, I stop this young woman in the middle of her work, and give her the dynamometer to squeeze. To begin with, she is absolutely anæsthetic on both sides of her body, and must needs look at the instrument in order to be able to squeeze it at all. I have tried this experiment often; and the dynamometer generally marks 9 with the squeeze of her right hand, 5 with that of her left. Now I repeat that such indications of feeble muscular power are in complete contradiction with what I see her doing every minute. I have made the trial myself, and although I can squeeze the same dynamometer up to 50, I cannot lift and move the chairs and beds as Célestine does.… It is clear that in the hysteric there is a special modification of muscular power when she is made the subject of an experiment, when she is told to pay attention, and to squeeze an instrument with personal will in order to show her personal strength. She can {i-50} then no longer get at her strength; she cannot use it in this fashion; albeit the strength is really there, and is lavishly expended in all the acts of common life when the patient is not thinking of it. What we have here is a defect not of muscle but of will.”

216. The above examples, which might be greatly multiplied, especially from French sources, will suffice to give a notion of dissolutive hysterical processes, as now observed with closer insight than formerly, in certain great hospitals. But, nevertheless, these hospital observations do not exhaust what has recently been learnt of hysteria. Dealing almost exclusively with a certain class of patients, they leave almost untouched another group, smaller, indeed, but equally instructive for our study.

Hysteria is no doubt a disease, but it is by no means on that account an indication of initial weakness of mind, any more than an Arctic explorer's frost-bite is an indication of bad circulation. Disease is a function of two variables: power of resistance and strength of injurious stimulus. In the case of hysteria, as in the case of frost-bite, the inborn power of resistance may be unusually great, and yet the stimulus may be so excessive that that power may be overcome. Arctic explorers have generally, of course, been among the most robust of men. And with some hysterics there is an even closer connection between initial strength and destructive malady. For it has often happened that the very feelings which we regard as characteristically civilised, characteristically honourable, have reached a pitch of vividness and delicacy which exposes their owners to shocks such as the selfish clown can never know. It would be a great mistake to suppose that all psychical upsets are due to vanity, to anger, to terror, to sexual passion. The instincts of personal cleanliness and of feminine modesty are responsible for many a breakdown of a sensitive, but not a relatively feeble organisation. The love of one's fellow-creatures and the love of God are responsible for many more. And why should it not be so? There exist for many men and women stimuli far stronger than self-esteem or bodily desires. Human life rests more and more upon ideas and emotions whose relation to the conservation of the race or of the individual is indirect and obscure. Feelings which may once have been utilitarian have developed wholly out of proportion to any advantage which they can gain for their possessor in the struggle for life. The dangers which are now most shudderingly felt are often no real risks to life or fortune. The aims most ardently pursued are often worse than useless for man regarded as a mere over-runner of the earth.

There is thus real psychological danger in fixing our conception of human character too low. Some essential lessons of a complex perturbation of personality are apt to be missed if we begin with the conviction that there is nothing before us but a study of decay. As I have more than once found need to maintain, it is his steady advance, and not his occasional regression, which makes the chief concern of man.

To this side of the study of hysteria Drs. Breuer and Freud (in, e.g., their {i-51} Studien über Hysterie, Leipzig, 1895) have made valuable contribution Drawing their patients not from hospital wards, but from private practice, they have had the good fortune to encounter, and the penetration to understand, some remarkable cases where unselfish but powerful passions have proved too much for the equilibrium of minds previously well-fortified both by principle and by education. A somewhat detailed account of two of these cases may serve my purpose in this chapter in more ways than one. In the first case we shall see the insistent idea in its most interesting form, midway between the unreachable subliminal reminiscences, which give the signal (as in Janet's cases) for hysterical attacks, and the supraliminal and recognised idée fixe, which is the torment of many waking existences. Nowhere have we a better example of the mutual convertibility of moral and physical sensations—the way in which an emotional idea may be symbolised for the sufferer by the affection of an external sense. Here is the converse process to psychotherapeutics, a kind of psychical self-infection—self-suggestion in a powerful and a noxious form.

In the second case to be here analysed we see a still stranger process of disintegration at work. Here also the first symptoms are subliminal idées fixes, translating themselves into somatic symptoms, whose origin is only recovered by help of the profounder memory of hypnotic trance. But with Fräulein Anna these submerged ideas, these hidden ulcers of the mind, become, so to say, confluent. We have a transition from idées fixes to a secondary personality, dominated by those ideas, and sinking into incoherent insanity. Yet even from that depth a certain resolute firmness of the patient's temper, aided by Dr. Breuer's skill in suggestion, raises her once more, and replaces her uninjured among sane and vigorous women.

217. Miss Lucy R., the heroine of the first case, was an English governess in the family of a German manufacturer. She was thirty years of age, in perfect health, except for a local inflammation of the nose. It is interesting to note that this local trouble probably suggested the special sense on which a hallucination could most readily fix itself.

The symptom for which Miss R. consulted Dr. Freud was, in fact, a persistent hallucinatory smell of burnt pudding. Careful inquiry traced the origin of this smell to a scene when the children under her charge, affectionately sporting with her, had allowed some pudding which was on the schoolroom fire to burn. It was not obvious why this incident should have carried so much emotional import. Gradually the truth came out, a truth which Miss R.—and this is an essential point—had concealed from herself with all the resolution of which she was capable. She had unconsciously fallen in love with her employer, a widower, whose children she had promised their dying mother to care for always. The scene of the burnt pudding represented a moment at which an obscure scruple of conscience urged her to quit her trust, to leave these children, who were now devoted to her, on account of something dimly felt to be unsuitable {i-52} in her own attitude of mind towards their father. When once this confession had been made—a confession new to herself as well as to the physician—the hallucinatory smell of burnt pudding disappeared. Its persistence had indicated that the emotional memory on which it was based had not, so to say, been absorbed into the general psychical circulation, but had remained encysted in the personality, a cause of pressure and distress.

But now occurred a symptom which to a less skilful or patient observer would have seemed merely baffling and capricious, but from which Dr. Freud drew a psychological lesson which illustrates with curious delicacy the superposition of strata more and more segregated from waking consciousness.

As the scent of burnt pudding went off it became clear that another scent had underlain it, which still persisted—a scent of tobacco-smoke. It seemed impossible to trace the moment of origin of so everyday an odour. But by strong suggestions in a waking or lightly hypnotised state,—placing his hand on the patient's forehead,—Dr. Freud was able to evoke a stream of pictorial memory, closely analogous to crystal-vision. He called upon her to picture thus the scene required. Then slowly and fragmentarily “a picture rises to the surface” (auftauchtappears [precise translation given in text]). But it represents only the dining-room of her employer's house, where she is waiting with the children for his return to early dinner from the manufactory. “And now,” she says, “we are all sitting down at table—the gentlemen, the French governess, the housekeeper, the children, and I. But this is just an everyday scene!” “Go on looking at the picture,” replies Dr. Freud, “it will develop and specialise itself.” “I see that there is a guest, the head cashier, an old gentleman who loves the children like an uncle; but he comes so often to dinner that there is nothing unusual in his presence.” “Patience! go on looking at the picture; I am sure that something will happen.” “Nothing particular happens. Now we are rising from table; the children are leaving the room, and are going into the next room with the French governess and myself as they always do.” “Well, what next?” “Ah! here is an unusual circumstance, and now I recognise the scene completely! As the children leave the room the cashier makes as though to kiss them. The father jumps up and calls out roughly, ‘Don't kiss the children!’ I feel a kind of stab in my heart. The gentlemen are smoking; hence it is that the smell of cigars remains fixed in my memory.”

The point is easy to understand. It was this harshness, pride, aloofness in the nature of the manufacturer, who treated thus roughly a subordinate who was also an old friend, which burnt itself upon the brain, as we say, of this other subordinate who had obscurely hoped that her employer had a gentler and more accessible heart. She put aside the painful impression; but the thought which was kept out of the supraliminal lodged in the hypnotic stratum.

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The way to minister to a mind thus diseased was not hard to discover. There was nothing in this deep-hidden affection which was unworthy of a pure heart. There was only the maidenly shame at having, however secretly, entertained it for one who was above her in worldly fortune, and who was not prepared to respond. By sympathy, by suggestion, the tone of the affection was changed. “Gewiss, ich liebe ihn, aber das macht mir weiter nichts. Man kann ja bei sich denken und empfinden was man will.” With the disappearance of all personal claim or hope the love ceased to perturb, and the patient recovered health and spirits.

218. Still more remarkable was the case of Fräulein Anna O., of which a brief record must now be given. Dr. Breuer asserts, and the details of the story support his view, that Fräulein O. was greatly above the average standard in character, education, and physical vigour. There was here no misère psychologiquepsychological or psychic misery, no thinness or feebleness in the original structure of the personality. Fräulein O. led an active and happy life: her strongest attachment was to her father. Her thoughts did not dwell on love or marriage (in the whole range of her hallucinations and delirium there was no trace of this), but she had great imaginative activity in day-dreams, the invention of stories, and the like.

The cause of her breakdown lay in a long, distressing, and ultimately fatal illness of her father's (1880–81) when she was twenty-one years old. She nursed him with a passionate self-devotion, which was, no doubt, unwise, but which can hardly be called morbid. Her nervous system gave way, and a quantity of hysterical affections set in. There were headaches, strabismus, disturbances of sight and of speech, positive and negative hallucinations, the influence of idées fixes, contractions, anæsthesiæ, &c. The condition of extreme instability thus induced, varying from hour to hour, gave rise at times to a secondary personality which lay outside the primary memory. We thus have a very direct transition from isolated disturbances to a cleavage of the whole personality.

Disturbances of speech may give very delicate indications of internal turmoil of the personality; and Fräulein O.'s great linguistic gift made her perhaps the most interesting example on record of hysterical aphasia and paraphasia. Sometimes she was altogether speechless. Sometimes she talked German in the ungrammatical, negro-like fashion which so often accompanies trance or secondary states;—well indicating, in my view, the incoherent character of the then operative control. Sometimes she spoke English, apparently believing it to be German, but understood German; sometimes she spoke English and could not understand German. (The English phrases of hers which Dr. Breuer quotes are, be it noted, remarkably neat and well chosen.) Sometimes she spoke French or Italian; and in French or Italian states she had no memory of English states, and vice versâ. Sometimes, however, in an English state she could understand French or Italian books; but if she read them aloud she read them in English, apparently unaware that they were not in that language.

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The origin of this tendency to English was afterwards explained in the hypnotic state. Each of the specific hysterical symptoms took its rise from some incident which had happened in hours of anxious anguish by her father's bedside. In an hour of bewildered exhaustion she had suffered from a kind of half-waking nightmare, had striven to pray, could find no words, and had at last remembered only a line from an English child's hymn. This effort, with this casual result, seemed to have given a persistent suggestion of English speech, in a manner somewhat reminding us of the phrase which has been last uttered before aphasia sets in, and which often persists for the aphasic as his single utterance. Throughout the year 1881 these symptoms continued, and as the time of year came round when she was first taken ill, a singular time-hallucination sprang up. This was, in fact, a duplex existence at two dates, reminding us of Louis Vivé (see Section 233) and some other hysterics who can be set back by artifice to a former period of their lives. Healthy hypnotic subjects, as I have seen, can sometimes be thus transported backwards, although in a less profound manner.

219. “The two conditions,” says Dr. Breuer, “no longer differed, as formerly, only in the fact that in the first condition she was normal and in the second practically insane. For now in her first condition she lived, like the rest of us, in the winter of 1881–82, while in her second condition she lived in the winter of 1880–81, and in that state all that had happened subsequently was clean forgotten. Only the consciousness that her father was dead seemed to persist throughout. The set-back into the past year was so definite and strong that in her new house she was subject to the hallucination of her former bedroom; and when she wished to go to the door she ran to the stove, which in her new room stood in the same place relatively to the window as the door had stood in the old room. The transition from one state to another came on spontaneously, and could also be easily summoned up by means of any sense-impression which vividly reminded her of the previous year. It was enough to hold before her an orange (oranges had been her main food in her illness), to put her back from 1882 to 1881. And this return to the past year took place in no vague or general fashion, but she lived each day through each corresponding day of the past winter. I discovered this in two ways: in the evening's hypnosis she confessed day by day the troubles or illusions which had disturbed her on the corresponding day of 1881, and also a private diary of her mother's showed me the absolute accuracy of the external facts of the previous winter as revived in the hysterical illusion.

“It was curious to see how these revived psychical stimuli exercised an effect from the second condition upon the first or normal condition. It happened, for instance, that the patient said to me laughingly in the morning that she did not know why, but she was angry with me. Thanks to the mother's diary I found out what was the matter, and removed it by ‘talking it out’ in the evening's hypnosis. I had in point of fact greatly {i-55} angered the patient on that evening in the previous year. Or she said another day that there was something wrong with her eyes; she saw colours untruly; she knew that her dress was brown, but she saw it blue. Experiment showed that she could perfectly well distinguish tints on test-papers, and that the disturbance affected only her vision of the stuff of her dress. The reason was that on that day in the previous year she had been very busy with a dressing-gown for her father, made of the same stuff as this dress, but blue instead of brown.”

A most distressing inability to drink came on in the summer of 1882, and lasted for six weeks, obliging the patient to live mainly on melons,—until it was discovered that this shuddering incapacity to swallow liquids was the result of a disgust experienced at a like period in 1881, at the sight of a dog allowed to drink from an acquaintance's glass. Fräulein O. had concealed this disgust at the time, out of politeness, but the unexpressed loathing had so worked itself out in her organism, as to produce a kind of hydrophobic spasm when the subliminally remembered time of year came round.

During the nights the “second condition,” which still reproduced the previous year, was dominant. Consequently, since the family had changed houses since that date, the patient, if she awoke in the night, was liable to greater alarm than in the day, thinking, in the loss of correction from recent memories, that she had been carried away from home. This awkwardness was averted by a suggestion from Dr. Breuer that she could not open her eyes at night; although once when she wept in her sleep her eyelids were, so to say, forced open by the tears, and she was seized with the same terror at her surroundings.

Here, as in so many cases, hypnotism showed itself the exact correlative, the specific antidote, of hysteria. Exactly the symptoms which hysteria had caused hypnotic suggestion could remedy. Exactly the puzzles which hysteria had woven hypnotic suggestion could unlock.

“The talking cure” or “chimney-sweeping,” as Fräulein O. called it, was practically equivalent to confession under hypnosis. Every evening Dr. Breuer hypnotised her, and then inquired as to the origin of each symptom in turn. For each symptom there did exist such a moment of origin; often a trivial accident originating a long and serious trouble. For instance, the “macropsy and strabismus convergens” which had long troubled the patient were traced to a moment when her father asked her what time it was, and she, looking hastily while she wept, saw the dial of her watch magnified and distorted through her tears. So soon as the cause of each accident of this kind was traced and discussed, with special arguments to remove any self-blame thereto attaching, the perversion of sensibility or of motricity disappeared. The isolated, hypertrophied memory was brought back, as I have said, into the general current of the psychical circulation. It is as though the past passage of life was re-lived, and altered in the re-living.

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220. In certain cases of Janet's, indeed, a new and false, but helpful memory was substituted for the old distressing memory; as where a hysteric, suffering from horror at the recollection of having been made to sleep as a child along with another child suffering from skin-disease, was persuaded by hypnotic suggestion that this other child had really been perfectly sound and well. In Fräulein O.'s case no deception was needful. All that was necessary was to make her see past events in their true proportion. The confession was cathartic; it cleared away the morbid products and strengthened the coherence of the sane personality; it restored Fräulein O. to mental and bodily vigour.

“Wax to receive and marble to retain;” such, as we all have felt, is the human mind in moments of excitement which transcend its resistant powers. This may be for good or for evil, may tend to that radical change in ethical standpoint which is called conversion, or to the mere setting-up of some hysterical disability. Who shall say how far we desire to be susceptible to stimulus? Most rash would it be to assign any fixed limit, or to class as inferior those whose main difference from ourselves may be that they feel sincerely and passionately what we feel torpidly, or perhaps only affect to feel. “The term degenerate,” says Dr. Milne Bramwell, “is applied so freely and widely by some modern authors that one cannot help concluding that they rank as such all who do not conform to some primitive, savage type, possessing an imperfectly developed nervous system.” Our “degenerates” may sometimes be in truth progenerate; and their perturbation may mask an evolution which we or our children needs must traverse when they have shown the way.

Let us pause for a moment and consider what is here implied. We are getting here among the hystériques qui mènent le mondehysterics who rule the world. We have advanced, that is to say, from the region of idées fixes of a paltry or morbid type to the region of idées fixes which in themselves are reasonable and honourable, and which become morbid only on account of their relative intensity. Here is the debateable ground between hysteria and genius. The kind of genius which we approach here is not, indeed, the purely intellectual form. Rather it is the “moral genius,” the “genius of sanctity,” or that “possession” by some altruistic idea which lies at the root of so many heroic lives.

The hagiology of all religions offers endless examples of this type. That man would hardly be regarded as a great saint whose conduct seemed completely reasonable to the mass of mankind. The saint in consequence is apt to be set unduly apart, whether for veneration or for ridicule. He is regarded either as inspired or as morbid; when in reality all that his mode of life shows is that certain idées fixes, in themselves of no unworthy kind, have obtained such dominance that their impulsive action may take and retake, as accident wills, the step between the sublime and the ridiculous.

Martyrs, missionaries, crusaders, nihilists,—enthusiasts of any kind {i-57} who are swayed by impulses largely below the threshold of ordinary consciousness,—these men bring to bear on human affairs a force more concentrated and at higher tension than deliberate reason can generate. They are virtually carrying out self-suggestions which have acquired the permanence of idées fixes. Their fixed ideas, however, are not so isolated, so encysted as those of true hysterics. Although more deeply and immutably rooted than their ideas on other matters, these subliminal convictions are worked in with the products of supraliminal reason, and of course can only thus be made effective over other minds. A deep subliminal horror, generated, say, by the sight of some loathsome cruelty, must not only prompt hallucinations,—as it might do in the hysteric and has often done in the reformer as well,—it must also, if it is to work out its mission of reform, be held clearly before the supraliminal reason, and must learn to express itself in writing or speech adapted to influence ordinary minds.

221. We may now pass from the first to the second of the categories of disintegration of personality suggested at the beginning of this chapter. The cases which I have thus far described have been mainly cases of isolation of elements of personality. They have exhibited minor detachments from the main personality, assuming a quasi-independent existence either as recognisable fixed ideas, or as the physical representations or somatic equivalents of obscure fixed ideas,—as, for instance, persistent hallucinations or disturbances of smell or of sight. We have not dealt as yet with secondary personalities as such. There is, however, a close connection between these two classes. We have seen that in Fräulein O.'s case, for example, a kind of secondary state at times intervened—a sort of bewilderment arising from confluent idées fixes and overrunning her whole personality. This new state was preceded or accompanied by something of somnambulic change. It is this new feature of which we have here a first hint which seems to me of sufficient importance for the diagnosis of my second class of psychical disintegrations. This second class starts from sleep-wakings of all kinds, and includes all stages of alternation of personality, from brief somnambulisms up to those permanent and thorough changes which deserve the name of dimorphisms.

We are making here a transition somewhat resembling the transition from isolated bodily injuries to those subtler changes of diathesis which change of climate or of nutrition may induce. Something has happened which makes the organism react to all stimuli in a new way. Our best starting-point for the study of these secondary states lies among the phenomena of dream.

We shall in a later chapter discuss certain rare characteristics of dreams; occasional manifestations in sleep of waking faculty heightened, or of faculty altogether new. We have now to consider ordinary dreams in their aspect as indications of the structure of our personality, and as agencies which tend to its modification.

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In the first place, it should be borne in mind that the dreaming state, though I will not call it the normal form of mentation, is nevertheless the form which our mentation most readily and habitually assumes. Dreams of a kind are probably going on within us both by night and by day, unchecked by any degree of tension of waking thought. This view—theoretically probable—seems to me to be supported by one's own actual experience in momentary dozes or even momentary lapses of attention. The condition of which one then becomes conscious is that of swarming fragments of thought or imagery, which have apparently been going on continuously, though one may become aware of them and then unaware at momentary intervals;—while one tries, for instance, to listen to a speech or to read a book aloud between sleep and waking.

This, then, is the kind of mentation from which our clearer and more coherent states may be supposed to develop. Waking life implies a fixation of attention on one thread of thought running through a tangled skein. In hysterical patients we see some cases where no such fixation is possible, and other cases where the fixation is involuntary, or follows a thread which it is not desirable to pursue.

There is, moreover, another peculiarity of dreams which has hardly attracted sufficient notice from psychologists, but which it is essential to review when we are dealing with fractionations of personality.¹¹ On this subject see Du Prel, “Philosophy of Mysticism,” Eng. trans., vol. i., passim. I allude to their dramatic character. In dream, to begin with, we have an environment, a surrounding scene which we have not wittingly invented, but which we find, as it were, awaiting our entry. And in many cases our dream contains a conversation in which we await with eagerness and hear with surprise the remarks of our interlocutor, who must, of course, all the time represent only another segment or stratum of ourselves. This duplication may become either painful or pleasant. A feverish dream may simulate the confusions of insanity—cases where the patient believes himself to be two persons at once, and the like.²² See R. L. Stevenson's dream (221 A). Note.—The lettering of cases refers to their place in the Appendices. On the other hand, a relatively coherent dream may agreeably split off visual memories and imagination from the consciousness with which the dreamer identifies himself. One may walk in dream through a picture-gallery criticising pictures which another element of one's personality has hung on the walls. Again, one may be able to identify a division of date between two mental strata; the first stratum being puzzled by a scrap of memory which the second stratum retains. In other cases one's higher and one's lower moral impulses may be arrayed against each other in dream; the dreamer identifying himself sometimes with his worse, sometimes with his better impulse. These complications rarely cause the dreamer any surprise. One may even say that with the first touch of sleep the superficial unity of consciousness disappears, and that the dream world gives a truer representation than {i-59} the waking world of the real fractionation or multiplicity existing beneath that delusive simplicity which the glare of waking consciousness imposes upon the mental field of view.

Bearing these analogies in mind, we shall see that the development of somnambulism out of ordinary dream is no isolated oddity. It is parallel to the development of a secondary state from idées fixes when these have passed a certain pitch of intensity. The sleep-waking states which develop from sleep have the characteristics which we should expect from their largely subliminal origin. They are less coherent than waking secondary personalities, but richer in supernormal faculty. It is in connection with displays of such faculty—hyperæsthesia or telæsthesia—that they have been mainly observed, and that I shall, in a future chapter, have most need to deal with them. But there is also great interest simply in observing what fraction of the sleep-waker's personality is able to hold intercourse with other minds. A trivial instance of such intercourse reduced to its lowest point has often recurred to me. When I was a boy another boy sleeping in the same room began to talk in his sleep. To some slight extent he could answer me; and the names and other words uttered—Harry, the boat, &c.—were appropriate to the day's incidents, and would have been enough to prove to me, had I not otherwise known, who the boy was. But his few coherent remarks represented not facts but dreaming fancies—the boat is waiting, and so forth. This trivial jumble, I say, has since recurred to me as precisely parallel to many communications professing to come from disembodied spirits. There are other explanations, no doubt, but one explanation of such incoherent utterances would be that the spirit was speaking under conditions resembling those in which this sleeping boy spoke.

There are, of course, many stages above this. Spontaneous somnambulistic states become longer in duration, more coherent in content, and may gradually merge, as in the well-known case of Félida X. (see 231) into a continuous or dimorphic new personality.

222. The transition which has now to be made is a very decided one. We have been dealing with a class of secondary personalities consisting of elements emotionally selected from the total or primary personality. We have seen some special group of feelings grow to morbid intensity, until at last it dominates the sufferer's mental being, either fitfully or continuously, but to such an extent that he is “a changed person,” not precisely insane, but quite other than he was when in normal mental health. In such cases the new personality is of course dyed in the morbid emotion. It is a kind of dramatic impersonation, say, of jealousy or of fear, like the case of “demoniacal possession,” quoted from Dr. Janet in the Appendix (222 A). In other respects the severance between the new and the old self is not very profound. Dissociations of memory, for instance, are seldom beyond the reach of hypnotic suggestion. The cleavage has not gone down to the depths of the psychical being.

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223. We must now go on to cases where the origin of the cleavage seems to us quite arbitrary, but where the cleavage itself seems even for that very reason to be more profound. It is no longer a question of some one morbidly exaggerated emotion, but rather of a scrap of the personality taken at random and developing apart from the rest. To recur to our physical simile, we are dealing no longer with a corn, a boil, a cancer, but with a tumour starting apparently from some scrap of embryonic tissue which has become excluded from the general development of the organism.

The commonest mode of origin for such secondary personalities is from some access of sleep-waking, which, instead of merging into sleep again, repeats and consolidates itself, until it acquires a chain of memories of its own, alternating with the primary chain.

An old case of Dr. Dyce's forms a simple example of this type. Dr. Mesnet's case also should be referred to here (see Appendices). In these instances the secondary state is manifestly a degeneration of the primary state, even when certain traces of supernormal faculty are discernible in the narrowed psychical field.

may to all outward semblance closely resemble normality,—differing mainly by a lack of rational purpose, and perhaps by a recurrence to the habits and ideas of some earlier moment in the patient's history. Such a condition resembles some hypnotic trances, and some factitious personalities as developed by automatic writing. Or, again, the post-epileptic state may resemble a suddenly developed idée fixe triumphing over all restraint, and may prompt to serious crime, abhorrent to the normal, but premeditated in the morbid state. There could not, in fact, be a better example of the unchecked rule of middle-level centres;—no longer secretly controlled, as in hypnotic trance, by the higher-level centres;—which centres in the epileptic are in a state not merely of psychological abeyance, but of physiological exhaustion. I give in an Appendix a remarkable narrative from the Zoist, which shows the inevitable accomplishment of a post-epileptic crime in such a way as to bring out its analogy with the inevitable working out of a Post-hypnotic suggestion (224 A).

225. The case of Ansel Bourne, which I give next in an Appendix, is a very unusual one. It is perhaps safest to regard his change of personality as post-epileptic, although I know of no recorded parallel to the length of time during which the influence of the attack must have continued. The effect on mind and character would suit well enough with this hypothesis. The “Brown” personality showed the narrowness of interests and the uninquiring indifference which is common in such {i-61} states. But on this theory the case shows one striking novelty, namely, the recall by the aid of hypnotism of the memory of the post-epileptic state. It is doubtful, I think, whether any definite post-epileptic memory had ever previously been recovered. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether serious recourse had ever been had at such times to hypnotic methods, whose increasing employment certainly differentiates the later from the earlier cases of split personality in a very favourable way. And this application of hypnotism to post-epileptic states affords us possibly our best chance—I do not say of directly checking epilepsy, but of getting down to the obscure conditions which predispose to each attack.

226. The two cases reported by Dr. Proust and M. Boeteau quoted in the next Appendices belong to the same general type as Ansel Bourne's. There does not seem, however, to be any definite evidence that the secondary state was connected with epileptic attacks. It was referred rather by the physicians who witnessed it to a functional derangement analogous to hysteria, though it must be remembered that there are various forms of epilepsy, which are not completely understood, and some of which may be overlooked by persons who are not familiar with the symptoms. In both these cases, again, the memory of the secondary states was recovered through hypnotism.

227. Another remarkable case was that of the Rev. Thomas C. Hanna,¹¹ For full details of this, see Dr. Boris Sidis' work, “The Psychology of Suggestion: a Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society” (New York, 1898). in whom complete amnesia followed an accident. By means of a method which Dr. Sidis (who studied the case) calls “hypnoidisation,” he was able to prove that the patient had all his lost memories stored in his subliminal consciousness, and could temporarily recall them to the supraliminal. By degrees the two personalities which had developed since the accident were thus fused into one and the patient was completely cured.

228. The next case I give (228 A) is one reported by Dr. Drewry. This is of the “ambulatory” type, like Ansel Bourne's, but is remarkable in that it was apparently associated with a definite physical lesion—an abscess in the ear—the cure of which was followed by the rapid return of the patient to his normal condition. There was also in this case an inherited tendency to eccentricity, if not to insanity.

229. I may next cite a case in which the secondary state seems to owe its origination to a kind of tidal exhaustion of vitality, as though the repose of sleep were not enough to sustain the weakened personality, which lapsed on alternate days into exhaustion and incoherence (229 A).

230. The secondary personalities thus far dealt with have been the spontaneous results of some form of misère psychologique[explained in text in Myers's terms] literally “psychological or psychic misery”, of defective integration of the psychical being. We shall now see that when cohesion is thus relaxed a slight touch from without can effect dissociations which, {i-62} however shallow and almost playful in their first inception, may stiffen by repetition into phases as marked and definite as those secondary states which spring up of themselves, that is to say, from self-suggestions which we cannot trace. I quote in Appendices some examples of these factitious secondary personalities, drawn from Dr. Pierre Janet, the most ingenious and indefatigable of workers in this field.

231. Up to this point the secondary states which we have considered, however startling to old-fashioned ideas of personality, may, at any rate, be regarded as forms of mental derangement or decay—varieties on a theme already known. Now, however, we approach a group of cases to which it is difficult to make any such definition apply. They are cases where the secondary state is not obviously a degeneration;—where it may even appear to be in some ways an improvement on the primary; so that one is left wondering how it came about that the man either originally was what he was, or—being what he was—suddenly became something so very different. There has been a shake given to the kaleidoscope, and no one can say why either arrangement of the component pieces should have had the priority.

In the classical case of Félida X. the second state is, as regards health and happiness, markedly superior to the first (see 231 A).

232. The old case of Mary Reynolds, which I next cite (232 A), is again remarkable in respect of the change of character involved. The deliverance from gloomy preoccupations—the childish insouciance of the secondary state—again illustrates the difference between these allotropic changes or reconstructions of personality and that mere predominance of a morbid factor which marked the cases of idée fixe and hysteria. Observe, also, in Mary Reynolds's case the tendency of the two states gradually to coalesce apparently in a third phase likely to be preferable to either of the two already known.

233. The next two cases which I shall cite—Louis Vivé and “Sally Beauchamp”—while extremely different from each other, are among the most remarkable of all. In Louis Vivé we have the extreme example of dissociations dependent on time-relations, on the special epoch of life in which the subject is ordered to find himself. My readers may have witnessed the amusing hypnotic experiment which consists in putting back the adult into early childhood by suggestion—in making the grown man write round hand and play with his tin soldiers, the grown woman give a tea-party to her dolls. But Louis Vivé, as will be seen in the detailed account in the Appendix to this section, is put back into earlier stages of life in a much profounder way. Among various conditions of his organism—all but one of them implying, or at least simulating, some grave central lesion—any given condition can be revived in a moment, and the whole gamut of changes rung on his nervous system as easily as if one were setting back or forward a continuous cinematograph. It is hard to frame a theory of memory which shall admit of these sudden reversions,—of {i-63} playing fast and loose in this manner with the accumulated impressions of years.

234. Yet if Louis Vivé's case thus strangely intensifies the already puzzling notion of ecmnesia—as though the whole organism could be tricked into forgetting the events which had most deeply stamped it—what are we to say to Dr. Morton Prince's case of “Sally Beauchamp,” with its grotesque exaggeration of a subliminal self—a kind of hostile bedfellow which knows everything and remembers everything—which mocks the emotions and thwarts the projects of the ordinary reasonable self which can be seen and known? The case must be studied in full as it stands (see 234 A); its later developments may help to unravel the mysteries which its earlier stages have already woven.

235. I quote in full in the text the next case, reported by Dr. R. Osgood Mason (in a paper entitled “Duplex Personality: its Relation to Hypnotism and to Lucidity,” in the Journal of the American Medical Association, November 30th, 1895). Dr. Mason writes:—

Alma Z. was an unusually healthy and intellectual girl, a strong and attractive character, a leading spirit in whatever she undertook, whether in study, sport, or society. From overwork in school, and overtaxed strength in a case of sickness at home, her health was completely broken down, and after two years of great suffering suddenly a second personality appeared. In a peculiar child-like and Indian-like dialect she announced herself as “Twoey,” and that she had come to help “Number One” in her suffering. The condition of “Number One” was at this time most deplorable; there was great pain, extreme debility, frequent attacks of syncope, insomnia, and a mercurial stomatitis which had been kept up for months by way of medical treatment and which rendered it nearly impossible to take nourishment in any form. “Twoey” was vivacious and cheerful, full of quaint and witty talk, never lost consciousness, and could take abundant nourishment, which she declared she must do for the sake of “Number One.” Her talk was most quaint and fascinating, but without a trace of the acquired knowledge of the primary personality. She gave frequent evidence of supranormal intelligence regarding events transpiring in the neighbourhood. It was at this time that the case came under my observation, and has remained so for the past ten years. Four years later, under depressing circumstances, a third personality made its appearance and announced itself as “The Boy.” This personality was entirely distinct and different from either of the others. It remained the chief alternating personality for four years, when “Twoey” again returned.

All these personalities, though absolutely different and characteristic, were delightful each in its own way, and “Twoey” especially was, and still is, the delight of the friends who are permitted to know her, whenever she makes her appearance; and this is always at times of unusual fatigue, mental excitement, or prostration; then she comes and remains days at a time. The original self retains her superiority when she is present, and the others are always perfectly devoted to her interest and comfort. “Number One” has no personal knowledge of either of the other personalities, but she knows them well, and especially “Twoey,” from the report of others and from characteristic letters which are often received from her; and “Number One” greatly enjoys the spicy, {i-64} witty, and often useful messages which come to her through these letters and the report of friends.

Dr. Mason goes on to say:—

Here are three cases [the one just given, that of another patient of his own, and that of Félida X.] in which a second personality—perfectly sane, thoroughly practical, and perfectly in touch and harmony with its surroundings—came to the surface, so to speak, and assumed absolute control of the physical organisation for long periods of time together. During the stay of the second personality the primary or original self was entirely blotted out, and the time so occupied was a blank. In neither of the cases described had the primary self any knowledge of the second personality, except from the report of others or letters from the second self, left where they could be found on the return of the primary self to consciousness. The second personality, on the other hand, in each case, knew of the primary self, but only as another person—never as forming a part of, or in any way belonging to their own personalities. In the case of both Félida X. and Alma Z., there was always immediate and marked improvement in the physical condition when the second personality made its appearance.

236. The case of Mollie Fancher, of which I quote (in 236 A) such brief and imperfect account as is accessible, might have been one of the most instructive of all, had it been observed and recorded with scientific accuracy—nay, even with the most ordinary diligence and care. It is true that at the remote date when Miss Fancher's phenomena were at their best an observer both willing and capable would have been as hard to find among professed savants as among professed spiritualists. And there is at least this good point in the case, that the probity of the whole group has always been held above suspicion. The indications of supernormal faculty, which occur throughout the story, were not, at any rate, invented as a self-advertisement. And the sudden changes of personality, with a childish character fitted to each, seem to stand midway between the transformations of Louis Vivé,—each of them frankly himself at a different epoch of life,—and the “pseudo-possessions” of imaginary spirits with which we shall in a later chapter have to deal.

237. The case of Anna Winsor, next to be cited, goes so far further in its suggestion of interference from without, that it presents to us, at any rate, a contrast and even conflict between positive insanity on the part of the organism generally with wise and watchful sanity on the part of a single limb, with which that organism professes to have no longer any concern.

Perhaps, indeed, the conception which this case suggests is not so much that of an external spirit intervening on the sufferer's behalf, as of her own spirit, coexisting in gentleness and wisdom alongside of all that wild organic excitement and decay. Of course I do not press so strange a notion; yet to myself, I must in fairness add, it is by no means ludicrous. Indeed, I think that all these sudden changes and recuperations should teach us our inability to say how deep even the severest {i-65} psychical lesion goes—whether there may not at the worst be that within us which persists unmutilated and untarnished through all confusion of the flesh.

238. The case which I place last in this series, the “Watseka Wonder,” must plainly be presented to the reader as a duplication of personality—a pseudo-possession, if you will—determined in a hysterical child by the suggestion of friends. Thus, I repeat, the story must for the present be offered and received. At a later stage, and when some other wonders have become to us more familiar—not less wonderful—than now, we may perhaps consider once more what further lessons this singular narrative may have to teach us.

239. We have now briefly surveyed a series of disintegrations of personality ranging from the most trifling idée fixe to actual alternations or permanent changes of the whole type of character. All these form a kind of continuous series, and illustrate the structure of the personality in concordant ways. There do exist, it must be added, other forms of modified personality with which I shall not at present deal. Those are cases where some telepathic influence from outside has been at work, so that there is not merely dissociation of existing elements, but apparent introduction of a novel element. Such cases also pass through a long series, from small phenomena of motor automatism up to trance and so-called possession. But all this group I mention here merely in order to defer their discussion to later chapters.

The brief review already made will suffice to indicate the complex and separable nature of the elements of human personality. Of course a far fuller list might have been given; many phenomena of actual insanity would need to be cited in any complete conspectus. But hysteria is in some ways a better dissecting agent than any other where delicate psychical dissociations are concerned. Just as the microscopist stains a particular tissue for observation, so does hysteria stain with definiteness, as it were, particular synergies—definite complexes of thought and action—more manifestly than any grosser lesion, any more profound or persistent injury could do. Hysterical mutism, for instance (the observation is Charcot's¹¹ Revue de l'Hypnotisme, July 1889.), supplies almost the only cases where the faculty of vocal utterance is attacked in a quite isolated way. In aphasia dependent upon organic injury we generally find other word-memories attacked also,—elements of agraphy, of word-blindness, of word-deafness appear. In the hysteric the incapacity to speak may be the single symptom. So with anæsthesiæ; we find in hysteria a separation of sensibility to heat and to pain, possibly even a separate subsistence of electrical sensibility. It is worth remarking here that it was during the hypnotic trance, which in delicacy of discriminating power resembles hysteria, that (so far as I can make out) the distinctness of the temperature-sense from the pain-sense was first observed. Esdaile, {i-66} when removing tumours under mesmerism in Calcutta, noticed that patients, who were actually undergoing capital operations without a murmur, complained if a draught blew in upon them from an open window.

240. Nor is it only as a dissecting agent that hysteria can aid our research. There are in hysteria frequent acquisitions as well as losses of faculty. It is not unusual to find great hyperæsthesia in certain special directions—of touch, hearing, perception of light, &c.—combined with hysterical loss of sensation of other kinds. This subject will be more conveniently treated along with the hyperæsthesia of the hypnotic trance. But I may note here that just such occasional quickenings of faculty were, in my view, almost certain to accompany that instability of psychical threshold which is the distinguishing characteristic of hysteria, since I hold that subliminal faculty habitually overpasses supraliminal. These also are a kind of capricious idée fixes; only the caprice in such cases raises what was previously submerged instead of exaggerating what was previously emergent.

And from this point it is that our inquiries must now take their fresh departure. We in this work are concerned with changes which are the converse of hysterical changes. We are looking for integrations in lieu of disintegrations; for intensifications of control, widenings of faculty, instead of relaxation, scattering, or decay.

241. Suppose, then, that in a case of instability of the psychical threshold,—ready permeability, if you will, of the psychical diaphragm separating the supraliminal from the subliminal self,—the elements of emergence tend to increase and the elements of submergence to diminish. Suppose that the permeability depends upon the force of the uprushes from below the diaphragm rather than on the tendency to sink downwards from above it. We shall then reach the point where the vague name of hysteria must give place to the vague name of genius. The uprushes from the subliminal self will now be the important feature; the down-draught from the supraliminal, if it still exists, will be trivial in comparison. The content of the uprush will be congruous with the train of voluntary thought; and the man of genius will be a man more capable than others of utilising for his waking purposes the subliminal region of his being.

242. Next in order to the uprushes of genius will come the uprushes of dream. All men pass normally and healthily into a second phase of personality, alternating with the first. That is sleep, and sleep is characterised by those incoherent forms of subliminal uprush which we know as dreams. It is here that our evidence for telepathy and telæsthesia will first present itself for discussion. Sleep will indicate the existence of submerged faculty of a rarer type than even that to which genius has already testified.

There are, moreover, other states, both spontaneous and induced, analogous to sleep, and these will form the subject of my fifth chapter, that on Hypnotism. Hypnotism, however, does not mean trance or {i-67} somnambulism only. It is a name, if not for the whole ensemble, yet for a large group of those artifices which we have as yet discovered for the purpose of eliciting and utilising subliminal faculty. The results of hypnotic suggestion will be found to imitate sometimes the subliminal uprushes of genius and sometimes the visions of spontaneous somnambulism; while they also open to us fresh and characteristic accesses into subliminal knowledge and power.

243. Further than this point our immediate forecast need not go. But when we shall have completed the survey here indicated, we shall see, I think, how significant are the phenomena of hysteria in any psychological scheme which aims at including the hidden powers of man. For much as the hysteric stands in comparison with us ordinary men, so perhaps do we ordinary men stand in comparison with a not impossible ideal of faculty and of self-control.

For might not all the hysteric tale be told, mutato nomine,with the name changed of the whole race of mortal men? What assurance have we that from some point of higher vision we men are not as these shrunken and shadowed souls? Suppose that we had all been a community of hysterics; all of us together subject to these shifting losses of sensation, these inexplicable gaps of memory, these sudden defects and paralyses of movement and of will. Assuredly we should soon have argued that our actual powers were all with which the human organism was or could be endowed. We should have thought it natural that nervous energy should only just suffice to keep attention fixed upon the action which at the moment we needed to perform. We should have pointed out that our lack of sensation over large tracts of the body rarely led to positive injury; but by what means such injury was averted, by the action of what subjacent intelligence our skin was saved from steel or fire—of this we should have been too contentedly ignorant even to ask the question. Nor, again, should we have been astonished at our capricious lack of power over our organisms, our intermittent defect of will. We should have held, and with some reason, that the mystery as to how our will could ever move any limb of our bodies was far greater than the mystery as to why certain limbs at certain moments failed to obey it. And as for defects of recollection;—is the reader inclined to think that the hysterical memory could never have been accepted as normal? That some guess of a more continuous consciousness, of an identity unmoved and stable beneath the tossing of the psychic storm, must needs have been suggested by all those strange interruptions?—by the lapses into other phases of personality, by the competing fields of reminiscence, by the clean sweep and blank destruction of great slices and cantles of the Past? I ask in turn how much of guess at an underlying continuity has been suggested, I do not say to the popular, but even to the scientific mind, by life broken as we know it now?—by our nightly lapses into a primitive phase of personality? by the competing fields of recollection which shift around the hypnotic trance? by the irrecoverable {i-68} gaps in past existence when the sun's ray or the robber's bludgeon has struck too rudely on the skull?

244. Nay, if we had been a populace of hysterics we should have acquiesced in our hysteria. We should have pushed aside as a fantastic enthusiast the fellow-sufferer who strove to tell us that this was not all that we were meant to be. As we now stand,—each one of us totus, teres, atque rotunduscomplete, polished, and rounded off [Hor. Sat. 2.7.84] in his own esteem,—we see at least how cowardly would have been that contentment, how vast the ignored possibilities, the forgotten hope. Yet who assures us that even here and now we have developed into the full height and scope of our being? A moment comes when the most beclouded of these hysterics has a glimpse of the truth. A moment comes when, after a profound slumber, she wakes into an instant clair—a flash of full perception, which shows her as solid vivid realities all that she has in her bewilderment been apprehending phantasmally as a dream. Ἒξ ὀνείρου δ’ αὐτίκα—Ἦν ὕπαρ.And then, out of the dream, lo, a vision Is there for us also any possibility of a like resurrection into reality and day? Is there for us any sleep so deep that waking from it after the likeness of perfect man we shall be satisfied; and shall see face to face; and shall know even as also we are known?

245. But apart from these broader speculations, it will surely have become evident, as we have studied the evidence in this chapter, that human personality is, at any rate, a much more modifiable complex of forces than is commonly assumed, and is a complex, moreover, which has hitherto been dealt with only in crude, empirical fashion. Each stage, each method of disintegration, suggests a corresponding possibility of integration. Two points have been especially noticeable throughout the chapter. In the first place, we observe in many of the narratives some rudiment of supernormal perceptivity cropping up; probably something in itself useless, yet enough to indicate to us how great a reserve of untapped faculty is latent at no great depth beneath our conscious level. In the second place, we observe that in the more recent cases, where it has been possible to appeal, mainly through hypnotic suggestion, to the deeper strata of the personality, that appeal has seldom been made in vain. In almost every case something more has been thus learnt of the actual mischief which was going on, something effected towards the re-establishment of psychical stability. These disturbances of personality are no longer for us—as they were even for the last generation—mere empty marvels, which the old-fashioned sceptic would often plume himself on refusing to believe. On the contrary, they are beginning to be recognised as psycho-pathological problems of the utmost interest;—no one of them exactly like another, and no one of them without some possible aperçu into the intimate structure of man.

The purpose of this book, of course, is not primarily practical. It aims rather at the satisfaction of scientific curiosity as to man's psychical structure; esteeming that as a form of experimental research which the {i-69} more urgent needs of therapeutics have kept in the background too long. Yet it may not have been amiss to realise thus, on the threshold of our discussion, that already even the most delicate speculations in this line have found their justification in helpful act; that strange bewilderments, paralysing perturbations, which no treatment could alleviate, no drug control, have been soothed and stablished into sanity by some appropriate and sagacious mode of appeal to a natura medicatrixNature the physician deep-hidden in the labouring breast.

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CHAPTER III

GENIUS

Igneus est ollis vigor et cœlestis origo

Seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant

Terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra.

[Translation]

—VIRGIL.

First to each seed a fiery force is given; And every creature was begot in heaven; Only their flight must hateful flesh delay And gross limbs moribund and cumbering clay. [Aen. 6.730-32 (Myers trans.)]

300. In my second chapter I made no formal attempt to define that human personality which is to form the main subject of this book. I was content to take the conception roughly for granted, and to enter at once on the study of the lapses of personality into abnormal conditions,—short of the lowest depths of idiocy or madness. From that survey it appeared that these degenerations could be traced to some defect in that central control which ought to clasp and integrate into steady manhood the hierarchies of living cells which compose the human organism. This insight into the Self's decay was the needed prerequisite to our present task—that of apprehending its true normality, and thereafter of analysing certain obscurer faculties which indicate the line of its evolution during and after the life of earth.

Strength and concentration of the inward unifying control—that must be the true normality which we seek; and in seeking it we must remember how much of psychical operation goes on below the conscious threshold, imperfectly obedient to any supraliminal appeal. What advance can we make in inward mastery? how far extend our grasp over the whole range of faculty with which we are obscurely endowed?

301. “Human perfectibility” has been the theme of many enthusiasts; and many Utopian schemes of society have been and still are suggested, which postulate in the men and women of the future an increase in moral and physical health and vigour. And it is plain that in a broad and general way natural selection, sexual selection, and the advance of science are working together towards improvements of these kinds. But it is plain also that these onward tendencies, at least in comparison with our desires and ideals, are slow and uncertain; and it is possible to argue that the apparent advance in our race is due merely to the improvement which science has effected in its material environment, and not to any real development, during the historical period, in the character or faculties of man himself. Nay, since we have no means {i-71} of knowing to what extent any genus has an inward potentiality of improvement, it is possible for the pessimist to argue that the genus homo has reached its fore-ordained evolutionary limit; so that it cannot be pushed further in any direction without risk of nervous instability, sterility, and ultimate extinction. Somewhat similarly (it might be urged) you cannot domesticate some wild tribes of animals (perhaps some wild tribes of men) without checking their fertility; and even among animals most susceptible to domestication, and to the induction of varieties in the domesticated state,—as, for instance, pigeons,—you cannot at present exaggerate fantail or pouter beyond a certain limit without bringing on a fragility of constitution which would soon extinguish the overpressed variety. Some dim apprehension of this kind lends plausibility to many popular diatribes. Dr. Max Nordau's works afford a well-known example of this line of protest against the present age as an age of overwork and of nervous exhaustion. And narrowing the vague discussion to a somewhat more definite test, Professor Lombroso and other anthropologists have discussed the characteristics of the “man of genius”; with the result of showing (as they believe) that this apparently highest product of the race is in reality not a culminant but an aberrant manifestation; and that men of genius must be classed with criminals and lunatics, as persons in whom a want of balance or completeness of organisation has led on to an over-development of one side of their nature;—helpful or injurious to other men as accident may decide.

302. On this point I shall join issue; and I shall suggest, on the other hand, that Genius—if that vaguely used word is to receive anything like a psychological definition—should rather be regarded as a power of utilising a wider range than other men can utilise of faculties in some degree innate in all;—a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought;—so that an “inspiration of Genius” will be in truth a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being. I shall urge that there is here no real departure from normality; no abnormality, at least in the sense of degeneration; but rather a fulfilment of the true norm of man, with suggestions, it may be, of something supernormal;—of something which transcends existing normality as an advanced stage of evolutionary progress transcends an earlier stage.

303. But before proceeding further I wish to guard against a possible misapprehension. I shall be obliged in this chapter to dwell on valuable aid rendered by subliminal mentation; but I do not mean to imply that such mentation is ipso factoby that fact itself superior to supraliminal, or even that it covers a large proportion of practically useful human achievement. When I say “The differentia of genius lies in an increased control over subliminal mentation,” I express, I think, a well-evidenced thesis, and I suggest an {i-72} important inference, namely, that the man of genius is for us the best type of the normal man, in so far as he effects a successful cooperation of an unusually large number of elements of his personality—reaching a stage of integration slightly in advance of our own. Thus much I wish to say: but my thesis is not to be pushed further:—as though I claimed that all our best thought was subliminal, or that all that was subliminal was potentially “inspiration.”

Hidden in the deep of our being is a rubbish-heap as well as a treasure-house;—degenerations and insanities as well as beginnings of higher development; and any prospectus which insists on the amount of gold to be had for the washing should describe also the mass of detritus in which the bright grains lie concealed. The range of the subliminal is wide: nor will it be waste of time if I pause here to expound it.

The distinction, then, between supraliminal and subliminal,—between intra-marginal and extra-marginal;—in short, between the thoughts and sensations which fall within our ordinary waking consciousness and those which find place beneath or outside it,—cannot possibly be a distinction at once applicable to practical ends;—as though (for instance) one were able to say at once that the subliminal idea or impulse was always wiser than the supraliminal. On the contrary, the basis of the distinction is, as I have just said, a purely psychological one: it is founded on the attempt to analyse the relation of one chain of memory to another chain of memory, of one type to another type of human perception and faculty. Our simplest observation indeed must be that that which extends beneath the threshold, beyond the margin of a field of consciousness specialised for our ordinary needs, will probably be both more extensive and more miscellaneous than that which is contained within those limits. The range of our subliminal mentation is more extended than the range of our supraliminal. At one end of the scale we find dreams,—a normal subliminal product, but of less practical value than any form of sane supraliminal thought. At the other end of the scale we find that the rarest, most precious knowledge comes to us from outside the ordinary field,—through the eminently subliminal processes of telepathy, telæsthesia, ecstasy. And between these two extremes lie many subliminal products, varying in value according to the dignity and trustworthiness of the subliminal mentation concerned.

304. This last phrase,—inevitably obscure,—may be illustrated by reference to that hierarchical arrangement of supraliminal action and perception which Dr. Hughlings Jackson has so used as to clear up much previous confusion of thought. Following him, we now speak of highest-level nerve-centres, governing our highest, most complex thought and will; of middle-level centres, governing movements of voluntary muscles, and the like; and of lowest-level centres (which from my point of view are purely subliminal), governing those automatic processes, as respiration and circulation, which are independent of conscious rule, but necessary to the maintenance of life. We can roughly judge from the nature of any observed action {i-73} whether the highest-level centres are directing it, or whether they are for the time inhabited, so that middle-level centres operate uncontrolled.

Thus ordinary speech and writing are ruled by highest-level centres. But when an epileptic discharge of nervous energy has exhausted the highest-level centres, we see the middle-level centres operating unchecked, and producing the convulsive movements of arms and legs in the “fit.” As these centres in their turn become exhausted, the patient is left to the guidance of lowest-level centres alone;—that is to say, he becomes comatose, though he continues to breathe as regularly as usual.

Now this series of phenomena,—descending in coherence and. co-ordination from an active consensus of the whole organism to a mere automatic maintenance of its most stably organised processes,—may be pretty closely paralleled by the series of subliminal phenomena also.

Sometimes we seem to see our subliminal perceptions and faculties acting truly in unity, truly as a Self;—co-ordinated into some harmonious “inspiration of genius,” or some profound and reasonable hypnotic self-reformation, or some far-reaching supernormal achievement of clairvoyant vision or of self-projection into a spiritual world. Whatever of subliminal personality is thus acting corresponds with the highest-level centres of supraliminal life. At such moments the subliminal represents (as I believe) most nearly what will become the surviving Self.

But it seems that this degree of clarity, of integration, cannot be long preserved. Much oftener we find the subliminal perceptions and faculties acting in less co-ordinated, less coherent ways. We have products which, while containing traces of some faculty beyond our common scope, involve, nevertheless, something as random and meaningless as the discharge of the uncontrolled middle-level centres of arms and legs in the epileptic fit. We get, in short, a series of phenomena which the term dream-like seems best to describe.

In the realm of genius,—of uprushes of thought and feeling fused beneath the conscious threshold into artistic shape,—we get no longer masterpieces but half-insanities,—not the Sistine Madonna, but Wiertz's Vision of the Guillotined Head; not Kubla Khan, but the disordered opium dream. Throughout all the work of William Blake (I should say) we see the subliminal self flashing for moments into unity, then smouldering again in a lurid and scattered glow.

In the realm of hypnotism, again, we sink from the reasonable self-suggestion to the “platform experiments,” the smelling of ammonia, the eating of tallow candles;—all the tricks which show a profound control, but not a wise control, over the arcana of organic life. I speak, of course, of the subject's own control over his organism; for in the last resort it is he and not his hypnotiser who really exercises that directive power. And I compare these tricks of middle-level subliminal centres to the powerful yet irrational control which the middle-level centres ruling the epileptic's {i-74} arms and legs exercise over his muscles in the violence of the epileptic attack.

And so again with the automatisms which are, one may say, the subliminal self's peculiar province. Automatic script, for instance, may represent highest-level subliminal centres, even when no extraneous spirit, but the automatist's own mind alone, is concerned. It will then give us true telepathic messages, or perhaps messages of high moral import, surpassing the automatist's conscious powers. But much oftener the automatic script is regulated by what I have called middle-level subliminal centres only;—and then, though we may have scraps of supernormal intelligence, we have confusion and incoherence as well. We have the falsity which the disgusted automatist is sometimes fain to ascribe to a devil; though it is in reality not a devil, but a dream.

And hence again, just as the epileptic sinks lower and lower in the fit,— from the incoordinated movements of the limbs down to the mere stertorous breathing of coma,—so do these incoherent automatisms sink down at last, through the utterances and drawings of the degenerate and the paranoiac,—through mere fragmentary dreams, or vague impersonal bewilderment,—into the minimum psychical concomitant, whatever that be, which must coexist with brain-circulation.

305. Such is the apparent parallelism; but of course no knowledge of a hierarchy of the familiar forms of nervous action can really explain to us the mysterious fluctuations of subliminal power. When we speak of the highest-level and other centres which govern our supraliminal being, and which are fitted to direct this planetary life in a material world, we can to some extent point out actual brain-centres whose action enables us to meet those needs. What are the needs of our cosmic life we do not know; nor can we indicate any point in our organism (as in the “solar plexus,” or the like), which is adapted to meet them. We cannot even either affirm or deny that such spiritual life as we maintain while incarnated in this material envelope involves any physical concomitants at all.

For my part, I feel forced to fall back upon the old-world conception of a soul which exercises an imperfect and fluctuating control over the organism; and exercises that control, I would add, along two main channels, only partly coincident—that of ordinary consciousness, adapted to the maintenance and guidance of earth-life; and that of subliminal consciousness, adapted to the maintenance of our larger spiritual life during our confinement in the flesh.

We men, therefore, clausi tenebris et carcere cæco,in an enclosure of shadows and a blind prison [Democritus Jr., Anatomy of Melancholy] can sometimes widen, as we must sometimes narrow, our outlook on the reality of things. In mania or epilepsy we lose control even of those highest-level supraliminal centres on which our rational earth-life depends. But through automatism and in trance and allied states we draw into supraliminal life some rivulet from the undercurrent stream. If the subliminal centres which we thus impress into our waking service correspond to the middle-level only, they {i-75} may bring to us merely error and confusion; if they correspond to the highest-level, they may introduce us to previously unimagined truth.

It is to work done by the aid of some such subliminal uprush, I say once more, that the word “genius” may be most fitly applied. “A work of genius,” indeed, in common parlance, means a work which satisfies two quite distinct requirements. It must involve something original, spontaneous, unteachable, unexpected; and it must also in some way win for itself the admiration of mankind. Now, psychologically speaking, the first of these requirements corresponds to a real class, the second to a purely accidental one. What the poet feels while he writes his poem is the psychological fact in his history; what his friends feel while they read it may be a psychological fact in their history, but does not alter the poet's creative effort, which was what it was, whether any one but himself ever reads his poem or no.

And popular phraseology justifies our insistence upon this subjective side of genius. Thus it is common to say that “Hartley Coleridge” (for example) “was a genius, although he never produced anything worth speaking of.” Men recognise, that is to say, from descriptions of Hartley Coleridge, and from the fragments which he has left, that ideas came to him with what I have termed a sense of subliminal uprush,—with an authentic, although not to us an instructive, inspiration.

As psychologists, I maintain, we are bound to base our definition of genius upon some criterion of this strictly psychological kind, rather than on the external tests which as artists or men of letters we should employ:—and which consider mainly the degree of delight which any given achievement can bestow upon other men. The artist will speak of the pictorial genius of Raphael, but not of Haydon; of the dramatic genius of Corneille, but not of Voltaire. Yet Haydon's Autobiography—a record of tragic intensity, and closing in suicide—shows that the tame yet contorted figures of his “Raising of Lazarus” flashed upon him with an over-mastering sense of direct inspiration. Voltaire, again, writes to the president Hénault of his unreadable tragedy Catilina: “Five acts in a week! I know that this sounds ridiculous; but if men could guess what enthusiasm can do,—how a poet in spite of himself, idolising his subject, devoured by his genius, can accomplish in a few days a task for which without that genius a year would not suffice;—in a word, si scirent donum Dei,—if they knew the gift of God,—their astonishment might be less than it must be now.” I do not shrink from these extreme instances. It would be absurd, of course, to place Haydon's “Raising of Lazarus” in the same artistic class as Raphael's “Madonna di San Sisto.” But in the same psychological class I maintain that both works must be placed. For each painter, after his several kind, there was the same inward process,—the same sense of subliminal uprush;—that extension, in other words, of mental concentration which draws into immediate cognisance some workings or elements of the hidden self.

{i-76}

Let me illustrate this conception by a return to the metaphor of the “conscious spectrum” to which I introduced my reader in the first chapter. I there described our conscious spectrum as representing but a small fraction of the aurai simplicis ignis,of air and of simple fire or individual psychical ray;—just as our visible solar spectrum represents but a small fraction of the solar ray. And even as many waves of ether lie beyond the red end, and many beyond the violet end, of that visible spectrum, so have I urged that much of unrecognised or subliminal faculty lies beyond the red (or organic) end, and much beyond the violet (or intellectual) end of my imaginary spectrum. My main task in this book will be to prolong the psychical spectrum beyond either limit, by collecting traces of latent faculties, organic or transcendental:—just as by the bolometer, by fluorescence, by other artifices, physicists have prolonged the solar spectrum far beyond either limit of ordinary visibility.

306. But at present, and before entering on that task of rendering manifest supernormal faculty, I am considering what we ought to regard as the normal range of faculty from which we start;—what, in relation to man, the words norm and normal should most reasonably mean.

The word normal in common speech is used almost indifferently to imply either of two things, which may be very different from each other—conformity to a standard and position as an average between extremes. Often indeed the average constitutes the standard—as when a gas is of normal density; or is practically equivalent to the standard—as when a sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come to living organisms a new factor is introduced. Life is change; each living organism changes; each generation differs from its predecessor. To assign a fixed norm to a changing species is to shoot point-blank at a flying bird. The actual average at any given moment is no ideal standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary stage now reached is tending, given stability in the environment, to become the average of the future. Human evolution is not so simple or so conspicuous a thing as the evolution of the pouter pigeon. But it would be rash to affirm that it is not even swifter than any variation among domesticated animals. Not a hundred generations separate us from the dawn of history;—about as many generations as some microbes can traverse in a month;—about as many as separate the modern Derby-winner from the war-horse of Gustavus Adolphus. Man's change has been less than the horse's change in physical contour,—probably only because man has not been specially bred with that view;—but taking as a test the power of self-adaptation to environment, man has traversed in these thirty centuries a wider arc of evolution than separates the race-horse from the eohippus. Or if we go back further, and to the primal germ, we see that man's ancestors must have varied faster than any animal's, since they have travelled farthest in the same time. They have varied also in the greatest number of directions; they have evoked in greatest multiplicity the unnumbered faculties latent in the irritability of a speck of slime. Of {i-77} all creatures man has gone furthest both in differentiation and in integration; he has called into activity the greatest number of those faculties which lay potential in the primal germ,—and he has established over those faculties the strongest central control. The process still continues. Civilisation adds to the complexity of his faculties; education helps him to their concentration. It is in the direction of a still wider range, a still firmer hold, that his evolution now must lie. I shall maintain that this ideal is best attained by the man of genius.

Let us consider the way in which the maximum of faculty is habitually manifested; the circumstances under which a man does what he has never supposed himself able to do before. We may take an instance where the faculty drawn upon lies only a little way beneath the surface. A man, we say, outdoes himself in a great emergency. If his house is on fire, let us suppose, he carries his children out over the roof with a strength and agility which seem beyond his own. That effective impulse seems more akin to instinct than to calculation. We hardly know whether to call the act reflex or voluntary. It is performed with almost no conscious intervention of thought or judgment, but it involves a new and complex adaptation of voluntary muscles such as would need habitually the man's most careful thought to plan and execute. From the point of view here taken the action will appear to have been neither reflex nor voluntary in the ordinary sense, but subliminal;—a subliminal uprush, an emergence of hidden faculty,—of nerve co-ordinations potential in his organism, but till now unused,—which takes command of the man and guides his action at the moment when his being is deeply stirred.

This stock instance of a man's possible behaviour in moments of great physical risk does but illustrate in a gross and obvious manner, and in the motor region, a phenomenon which, as I hold, is constantly occurring on a smaller scale in the inner life of most of us. We identify ourselves for the most part with a stream of voluntary, fully conscious ideas,—cerebral movements connected and purposive as the movement of the hand which records them. Meantime we are aware also of a substratum of fragmentary, automatic, liminal ideas, of which we take small account. These are bubbles that break on the surface; but every now and then there is a stir among them. There is a rush upwards as of a subaqueous spring; an inspiration flashes into the mind for which our conscious effort has not prepared us. This so-called inspiration may in itself be trivial or worthless; but it is the initial stage of a phenomenon to which, when certain rare attributes are also present, the name of genius will be naturally given.

I am urging, then, that where life is concerned, and where, therefore, change is normality, we ought to place our norm somewhat ahead of the average man, though on the evolutionary track which our race is pursuing. I have suggested that that evolutionary track is at present leading him in the direction of greater complexity in the perceptions which he forms of things without, and of greater concentration in his own will and thought,— {i-78} in that response to perceptions which he makes from within. Lastly, I have argued that men of genius, whose perceptions are presumably more vivid and complex than those of average men, are also the men who carry the power of concentration furthest;—reaching downwards, by some self-suggestion which they no more than we can explain, to treasures of latent faculty in the hidden Self.

307. I am not indeed here assuming that the faculty which is at the service of the man of genius is of a kind different from that of common men, in such a sense that it would need to be represented by a prolongation of either end of the conscious spectrum. Rather it will be represented by such a brightening of the familiar spectrum as may follow upon an intensification of the central glow.

The solar spectrum itself, as all know, is by no means a uniform or continuous band of coloured light. It contains many dark lines, where some element held in vaporous suspension absorbs the special line of light which the still hotter vapour of that same element characteristically emits. Still more dimmed and interrupted are the spectra of some other stars. Bands and bars of comparative darkness stud their dispersed light. Even thus the spectrum of man's conscious faculty is not a continuous but a banded spectrum. There are groups of the dark lines of obstruction and incapacity, and even in the best of us a dim unequal glow.

It will, then, be the special characteristic of genius that its uprushes of subliminal faculty will make the bright parts of the habitual spectrum more brilliant, will kindle the dim absorption-bands to fuller brightness, and will even raise quite dark lines into an occasional glimmer. But if, as I believe, we can best give to the idea of genius some useful distinctness by regarding it in some such way as this, we shall find also that genius will fall into line with many other sensory and motor automatisms to which the word could not naturally be applied. Genius represents a narrow selection among a great many cognate phenomena;—among a great many uprushes or emergences of subliminal faculty both within and beyond the limits of the ordinary conscious spectrum.

It will be more convenient to study all these together, under the heading of sensory or of motor automatism. It will then be seen that there is no kind of perception which may not emerge from beneath the threshold in an indefinitely heightened form, with just that convincing suddenness of impression which is described by men of genius as characteristic of their highest flights. Even with so simple a range of sensation as that which records the lapse of time there are subliminal uprushes of this type, and we shall see that a man may have a sudden and accurate inspiration of what o'clock it is, in just the same way as Virgil might have an inspiration of the second half of a difficult hexameter.

308. For the purpose of present illustration of the workings of genius it seems well to choose a kind of ability which is quite indisputable, and which also admits of some degree of quantitative measurement. I would {i-79} choose the higher mathematical processes, were data available; and I may. say in passing how grateful I should be to receive from mathematicians any account of the mental processes of which they are conscious during the attainment of their highest results. Meantime there is a lower class of mathematical gift which by its very specialisation and isolation seems likely to throw light on our present inquiry.

During the course of the present century,—and alas! the scientific observation of unusual specimens of humanity hardly runs back further, or so far,—the public of great cities has been from time to time surprised and diverted by some so-called “calculating boy,” or “arithmetical prodigy,” generally of tender years, and capable of performing “in his head,” and almost instantaneously, problems for which ordinary workers would require pencil and paper and a much longer time. In some few cases, indeed, the ordinary student would have no means whatever of solving the problem which the calculating boy unriddled with ease and exactness.

The especial advantage of the study of arithmetical prodigies is that in their case the subjective impression coincides closely with the objective result. he subliminal computator feels that the sum is right, and it is right. Forms of real or supposed genius which are more interesting are apt to be less undeniable.

An American and a French psychologist¹¹ Professor Scripture in the American Journal of Psychology, vol. iv., No. 1, April 1891; Professor Binet in the Revue Philosophique, 1895. Professor Binet's article deals largely with Jacques Inaudi, the most recent prodigy, who appears to differ from the rest in that his gift is auditile rather than visual. His gift was first observed in childhood. His general intelligence is below the average. Another recent prodigy, Diamanti, seems, on the other hand, to be in other ways quick-witted. have collected such hints and explanations as these prodigies have given of their methods of working; methods which one might naturally hope to find useful in ordinary education. The result, however, has been very meagre, and the records left to us, imperfect as they are, are enough to show that the main and primary achievement has in fact been subliminal, while conscious or supraliminal effort has sometimes been wholly absent, sometimes has supervened only after the gift has been so long exercised that the accesses between different strata have become easy by frequent traversing. The prodigy grown to manhood, who now recognises the arithmetical artifices which he used unconsciously as a boy, resembles the hypnotic subject trained by suggestion to remember in waking hours the events of the trance.

In almost every point, indeed, where comparison is possible, we shall find this computative gift resembling other manifestations of subliminal faculty,—such as the power of seeing hallucinatory figures,—rather than the results of steady supraliminal effort, such as the power of logical analysis. In the first place, this faculty, in spite of its obvious connection with general mathematical grasp and insight, is found almost at random,—among non-mathematical and even quite stupid persons, as well as among {i-80} mathematicians of mark. In the second place, it shows itself mostly in early childhood, and tends to disappear in later life;—in this resembling visualising power in general, and the power of seeing hallucinatory figures in particular; which powers, as both Mr. Galton's inquiries and our own tend to show, are habitually stronger in childhood and youth than in later years. Again, it is noticeable that when the power disappears early in life it is apt to leave behind it no memory whatever of the processes involved. And even when, by long persistence in a reflective mind, the power has become, so to say, adopted into the supraliminal consciousness, there nevertheless may still be flashes of pure “inspiration,” when the answer “comes into the mind” with absolutely no perception of intermediate steps.

309. I subjoin a table, compiled by the help of Dr. Scripture's collection, which will broadly illustrate the main points above mentioned. Some more detailed remarks may then follow.

TABLE OF PRINCIPAL ARITHMETICAL PRODIGIES

Name (alphabetically).	Age when gift was observed.	Duration of gift.	Intelligence.
Ampère	4	?	eminent
Bidder	10	through life	good
Buxton	?	?	low
Colburn	6	few years	average
Dase [or Dahse]	boyhood	through life	very low
Fuller	boyhood	?	low
Gauss	3	?	eminent
Mangiamele	10	few years	average?
Mondeux	10	few years	low
Prolongeau	6	few years	low
Safford	6	few years	good
"Mr. Van R., of Utica"	6	few years	average?
Whately	3	few years	good

Now among these thirteen names we have two men of transcendent, and three of high ability. What accounts have they given us of their methods?

310. Of the gift of Gauss and Ampère we know nothing except a few striking anecdotes. After manifesting itself at an age when there is usually no continuous supraliminal mental effort worth speaking of, it appears to have been soon merged in the general blaze of their genius. With Bidder the gift persisted through life, but grew weaker as he grew older. His paper in Vol. XV. of the Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers, while furnishing a number of practical hints to the calculator, indicates also a singular readiness of communication between different mental strata. “Whenever,” he says (p. 255), “I feel called upon to make use of the stores of my mind, they seem to rise with the rapidity of lightning.” {i-81} And in Vol. CIII. of the same Proceedings, Mr. W. Pole, F. R. S., in describing how Mr. Bidder could determine mentally the logarithm of any number to 7 or 8 places, says (p. 252): “He had an almost miraculous power of seeing, as it were, intuitively what factors would divide any large number, not a prime. Thus, if he were given the number 17,861, he would instantly remark it was 337×53.… He could not, he said, explain how he did this; it seemed a natural instinct to him.”

Mr. Bidder's case is well known; but it may be of interest to quote here some passages from an autobiographical statement kindly furnished to me by Mr. Blyth, of Edinburgh, the well-known civil engineer, whose own gift, like that of the younger Mr. Bidder, though not such as to entitle him to rank as a “prodigy,” yet marks him out distinctly from ordinary mankind.

(From Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 352.)

12 BELGRAVE CRESCENT, EDINBURGH,      
February 28th, 1892.                   

I shall now endeavour, in response to your request, to give some account of my late brother's and my own faculty of arithmetical calculation mentally, and it may be interesting if I allude to influences even before birth which I have always felt may have had something to do with my brother's great power.

Benjamin Hall Blyth was born on July 6th, 1819. Our mother had a natural arithmetical gift—not to any very marked degree, but decidedly above the average, and especially so among females. Some months before Benjamin's birth the wonderful calculating boy, Bidder (then, I think, about 12 or 14 years of age), was exhibiting in Edinburgh, and made a private exhibition in my father's house. My mother was greatly astonished and interested, put various questions to Bidder, and some weeks later requested my father to invite him to another séance, which was done. Her interest increased on this second occasion, and the wonderful boy continued to occupy her mind frequently.

It is, I believe, admitted by physiologists, that anything greatly occupying a mother's mind certainly may, and frequently does, influence the character of her unborn child. At all events, my brother, whether from this or heredity, or both, very early manifested a marvellous power of mental calculation. When almost exactly six years of age Benjamin was walking with his father before breakfast, when he said, “Papa, at what hour was I born?” He was told four A.M.

Ben.—“What o'clock is it at present?”

Ans.—“Seven fifty A.M.” [My father always took exercise before breakfast in summer.]

The child walked on a few hundred yards, then turned to his father and stated the number of seconds he had lived. My father noted down the figures, made the calculation when he got home, and told Ben he was 172,800 seconds wrong, to which he got a ready reply: “Oh, papa, you have left out two days for the leap-years—1820 and 1824,” which was the case.

This latter fact of the extra day in leap-year is not known to many children of six, and if any one will try to teach an ordinary child of these years the multiplication table up to 12×12 he will be better able to realise how extraordinary was this calculation for such an infant.

I am conscious of an intuitive recognition of the relation of figures. For {i-82} instance, in reading statements of figures in newspapers, which are very often egregiously wrong, it seems to come to me intuitively that something is wrong, and when that occurs I am usually right.

I have always felt that there were times when my power was much weaker than others, not only when tired, but, like a musician, when not in the mood. I have not the same confidence now at 66 years of age as when younger. That is to say, I like to check a calculation before stating it, though I can do nearly as difficult ones as at any time of my life, though not so rapidly.

As to there being any degree of connection between this arithmetical power and ambidexterity, there is none, I think, in my case. I do not possess the latter gift consciously, though I may perhaps be able to use the left hand better than the average of people, but I should not for a moment claim to be ambidextrous.… Left-handedness runs in our family on both sides, and so I say I may have some little ambidexterity without knowing it.

EDWARD L. I. BLYTH.      

Mr. Blyth's interesting record contains other illustrations of several points above mentioned;—the early and instinctive appearance of the faculty; its gradual subjection to supraliminal guidance; yet the persistence of occasional “subliminal uprushes,” which give the problem's answer without its intermediate steps.

Passing on to the two other men of high ability known to have possessed this gift, Professor Safford and Archbishop Whately, we are struck with the evanescence of the power after early youth,—or even before the end of childhood. I quote from Dr. Scripture Archbishop Whately's account of his powers:—

There was certainly something peculiar in my calculating faculty. It began to show itself at between five and six, and lasted about three years.… I soon got to do the most difficult sums, always in my head, for I knew nothing of figures beyond numeration. I did these sums much quicker than any one could upon paper, and I never remember committing the smallest error. When I went to school, at which time the passion wore off, I was a perfect dunce at ciphering, and have continued so ever since.

Still more remarkable, perhaps, was Professor Safford's loss of power. Professor Safford's whole bent was mathematical; his boyish gift of calculation raised him into notice; and he is now a Professor of Astronomy. He had therefore every motive and every opportunity to retain the gift, if thought and practice could have retained it. But whereas at ten years old he worked correctly in his head, in one minute, a multiplication sum whose answer consisted of 36 figures, he is now, I believe, neither more nor less capable of such calculation than his neighbours.

Similar was the fate of a personage who never rises above initials, and of whose general capacity we know nothing.

“Mr. Van R., of Utica,” says Dr. Scripture on the authority of Gall, “at the age of six years distinguished himself by a singular faculty for calculating in his head. At eight he entirely lost this faculty, and after that time he could calculate neither better nor faster than any other person. {i-83} He did not retain the slightest idea of the manner in which he performed his calculations in childhood.”

Turning now to the stupid or uneducated prodigies, Dase alone seems to have retained his power through life. Colburn and Mondeux, and apparently Prolongeau and Mangiamele, lost their gift after childhood.

A few hints as to processes have been gleaned from this group;—the most interesting point being that Colburn was for some years unable, but afterwards to some extent able, to explain his own processes. “His friends tried to elicit a disclosure of the methods by which he performed his calculations, but for nearly three years he was unable to satisfy their inquiries. He positively declared that he did not know how the answers came into his mind.”¹¹ Scripture, op. cit., p. 50. Later on he did give an account of his artifices, which, however, showed no great ingenuity.

But on the whole the ignorant prodigies seldom appear to have been conscious of any continuous logical process, while in some cases the separation of the supraliminal and subliminal trains of thought must have been very complete. “Buxton would talk freely whilst doing his questions, that being no molestation or hindrance to him.”²² Scripture, op. cit., p. 54. Fixity and clearness of inward visualisation seems to have been the leading necessity in all these achievements; and it apparently mattered little whether the mental blackboard (so to say) on which the steps of the calculation were recorded were or were not visible to the mind's eye of the supraliminal self.

I have been speaking only of visualisation; but it would be interesting if we could discover how much actual mathematical insight or inventiveness can be subliminally exercised. Here, however, our materials are very imperfect. From Gauss and Ampère we have, so far as I know, no record. At the other end of the scale, we know that Dase (perhaps the most successful of all these prodigies) was singularly devoid of mathematical grasp. “On one occasion Petersen tried in vain for six weeks to get the first elements of mathematics into his head.” “He could not be made to have the least idea of a proposition in Euclid. Of any language but his own he could never master a word.” Yet Dase received a grant from the Academy of Sciences at Hamburg, on the recommendation of Gauss, for mathematical work; and actually in twelve years made tables of factors and prime numbers for the seventh and nearly the whole of the eighth million,—a task which probably few men could have accomplished, without mechanical aid, in an ordinary lifetime. He may thus be ranked as the only man who has ever done valuable service to Mathematics without being able to cross the Ass's Bridge.

On the other hand, in the case of Mangiamele, there may have been real ingenuity subliminally at work. Our account of this prodigy is authentic, but tantalising from its brevity.

{i-84}

In the year 1837 Vito Mangiamele, who gave his age as 10 years and 4 months, presented himself before Arago in Paris. He was the son of a shepherd of Sicily, who was not able to give his son any instruction. By chance it was discovered that by methods peculiar to himself he resolved problems that seemed at the first view to require extended mathematical knowledge. In the presence of the Academy Arago proposed the following questions: What is the cubic root of 3,796,416?” In the space of about half a minute the child responded 156, which is correct. “What satisfies the condition that its cube plus five times its square is equal to 42 times itself increased by 40?” Everybody understands that this is a demand for the root of the equation x³ + 5 x² − 42 x − 40 = 0. In less than a minute Vito responded that 5 satisfied the condition; which is correct. The third question related to the solution of the equation x⁵ − 4 x − 16779 = 0. This time the child remained four to five minutes without answering: finally he demanded with some hesitation if 3 would not be the solution desired. The secretary having informed him that he was wrong, Vito, a few moments afterwards, gave the number 7 as the true solution. Having finally been requested to extract the 10th root of 282,475,249 Vito found in a short time that the root is 7.

At a later date a committee, composed of Arago, Cauchy, and others, complains that “the masters of Mangiamele have always kept secret the methods of calculation which he made use of.”¹¹ Scripture, op. cit., p. 17.

There is another point on which something might have been learnt from the study of so marked a group of automatists—utilisers of subliminal capacity—as these “prodigies” form. Their bodily characteristics might have been examined with a view to tracing such physical concomitants as may go with this facility of communication between psychical strata. We have, however, few data available for this purpose. Colburn inherited supernumerary digits, and Mondeux is reported to have been hysterical. On the other hand the “prodigies” of whose lives after childhood anything is known seem to have been free from nervous taint. No one, for instance, could well be more remote from hysteria than the elder Bidder;—or than his son, the late Mr. Bidder, Q. C., or than Mr. Blyth of Edinburgh, perhaps the best living English representative of what we may call the calculating diathesis.

It is plain, then, that no support is given by what we know of this group to the theory which regards subliminal mentation as necessarily a sign of some morbid dissociation of psychical elements. Is there, on the other hand, anything to confirm a suggestion which will occur in some similar cases, namely, that,—inasmuch as the addition of subliminal to supralimmal mentation may often be a completion and integration rather than a fractionation or disintegration of the total individuality,—we are likely sometimes to find traces of a more than common activity of the right or less used cerebral hemisphere? Finding no mention of ambidexterity in the meagre notices which have come down to us of the greater “prodigies,” I begged Mr. Blyth and the late {i-85} Mr. Bidder, Q. C, to tell me whether their left hands possessed more than usual power. Mr. Blyth's reply has been already given above; I now quote Mr. Bidder's.

(From Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 356.)

RAVENSBURY PARK,             
September 11th, 1891.   

As to ambidexterity. Of course I am ignorant of the train of thought that led you to ask the question; but oddly enough I am a very good example of it. I am not aware that my father was ambidextrous; nor are any of my children, so far as I know. For myself, in all sports,—bowling, throwing, fishing, tennis, racquets, &c.,—I almost invariably use the left hand. I cannot throw to any purpose with the right. In cricket, however, I bat with the right hand. In shaving, I shave one half of the face with the left hand and the other with the right, in each case taking the part which shaves forwards, so as to have no backward shaving. In writing I write with the right hand, being so taught; but some years ago I discovered that if I let my left hand move unconstrainedly and without conscious thought as to how it should form the letters, I could write with equal fluency, though not so well-formed letters. But the direction of the writing is reversed; so that it is requisite either to look through the paper or view it in a looking-glass to read the writing. My left hand and nerve system seems to have learnt by sympathy what the right had acquired by education and practice.

Further, I found that taking two pencils one in each hand I could write simultaneously with both hands,—the two writings proceeding in opposite directions. I have occasionally found since that other people could to some extent do the same. I repeatedly tried very hard to write one word with one hand and another with the other;—but it won't do; the result is always a nondescript production of parts of both words,—something like the nonsense words in Alice in Wonderland. I enclose a specimen which will show the simultaneous writing.

It thus appears that in the only two cases in which I have been able to make inquiry there is somewhat more of dextro-cerebral capacity than in the mass of mankind.

311. We may now pass on to review some further instances of subliminal cooperation with conscious thought;—first looking about us for any cases comparable in definiteness with the preceding; and then extending our view over the wider and vaguer realm of creative and artistic work.

Before we proceed to the highly-specialised senses of hearing and sight, let us see whether we can find traces of subliminal intensification of those perceptions of a less specialised kind which underlie our more elaborate modes of cognising the world around us. The sense of the efflux of time, and the sense of weight, or of muscular resistance, are amongst the profoundest elements in our organic being. And the sense of time is indicated in several ways as a largely subliminal faculty. {i-86} There is much evidence to show that it is often more exact in men sleeping than in men awake, and in men hypnotised than in men sleeping. The records of spontaneous somnambulism are full of predictions made by the subject as to his own case, and accomplished, presumably by self-suggestion, but without help from clocks, at the precise minute foretold. Or this hidden knowledge may take shape in the imagery of dream, as in a case published by Professor Royce, of Harvard,¹¹ Proceedings of American S.P.R., vol. i. No. 4, p. 360. where his correspondent describes “a dream in which I saw an enormous flaming clock-dial with the hands standing at 2.20. Awaking immediately, I struck a match, and upon looking at my watch found it was a few seconds past 2.20.

I should, however, have been puzzled to produce any clear example of the subliminal time-sense as manifesting itself in a sane and waking person, had not a Mr. Higton sent to me some years ago the following record of personal experiences on which he desired my opinion. I made his acquaintance, and found him a sensible, serious witness; but I did not then perceive the full significance of his communication, and I have, unfortunately, lost sight of him.

(From Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 337.)

Mr. W. Higton, 27 St. Leonard Street, Pimlico, S.W., sends me, September 1889, the following experiences—abbreviated from a long paper which I have returned to him.

1. “It is now some three years since the exact time of day presented itself to my mind independently of any internal knowledge or of any external physical appearances” (as of clock, &c.).

Mr. Higton had no idea of the exact time, when “within a few yards of Tattersall's there instantaneously appeared before me the face of a clock of an immense size. Every figure was perfectly visible; and the huge black hands distinctly indicated 11.25; while at the same moment or, correctly speaking, a fraction of a second later, I felt convinced and absolutely certain that the time indicated on the dial was the right time” (as in fact it was by his watch). “The phenomenon has recurred during the past three years at least five and, I think, six times; the first three occurring at intervals of about three months, and the last two or three being divided by a considerably longer interval.”

2. On another occasion Mr. Higton was walking through a field as to which a legend ran that a young lady was murdered there, while she held a sprig of thyme, and that any one passing through the field and not thinking of the murder would smell thyme. Mr. Higton paid no credit to this legend;—often walked through the field, but thought about the murder. “However, I did walk through the field one gloomy November afternoon, absorbed so deeply in some new practical scheme that I did not think about the murder, and most certainly should not have thought about it if the strongest conceivable smell of thyme that ever rose to human nostrils had not risen to mine. The odour of it lasted at least a quarter {i-87} of a minute, until my concentrated thoughts were disorganised, and made to dwell on the magical subject.”

3. “When I was at home assisting my father in his business it used to be my work to weigh the hides which were taken from the beasts we killed, preparatory to sending them to the dealer; and it was my custom before placing them in the scale to see how near the weight I would guess them to be. By this means I became tolerably expert in estimating their weight, invariably being not more than three or four pounds out. Now on several occasions before I guessed, or even thought of guessing, a certain weight came into my mind which (as in the case of the time indicated on the dial) I was inwardly assured was correct. I remember one case distinctly, in which the hide weighed 87¾ lb., which were the exact figures which occurred to me prior to weighing, and independently of any computation whatever. Indeed, on one occasion, the fourth, I think, I ventured to ticket the hide, without weighing it, in accordance with the figures which came into my mind; and on the following Tuesday exactly the number of pounds named on the ticket were paid for at the market to which the hides were delivered. As you will easily believe, I did not tell my father I had not weighed the hide on the ground that I knew the weight without doing so!”

Setting aside for the moment the hallucination of the sense of smell, I would point out that we have here precisely such uprushes of subliminal faculty, concerned with the deep organic sensations of the efflux of time and of muscular resistance, as theory had led us to expect. We need not postulate any direct or supernormal knowledge,—but merely a subliminal calculation, such as we shall see in the case of “arithmetical prodigies,” expressing itself supraliminally, sometimes in a phantasmal picture, sometimes as a mere “conviction,” without sensory clothing. And I would interpret in much the same way the story of the smell of thyme in the haunted field. We may suppose, I think, that although Mr. Higton was not “consciously” thinking of the local legend, his subliminal self remembered it, and produced the appropriate hallucination of smell in the same way in which it produced the picture of the clock-face, as indicating that it knew the precise hour. Thus we have, I think, a reasonable explanation of what seems at first sight an extravagant ghost story;—an explanation which is the more probable insomuch as it is deduced from our own analysis of Mr. Higton's evidence, and does not seem to have occurred to himself.

312. Passing on here to subliminal products of visual type, I am glad to be able to quote the following passage, which seems to me to give in germ the very theory for which I am now contending on the authority of one of the most lucid thinkers of the last generation.

The passage occurs in an article by Sir John Herschel on “Sensorial Vision,” in his Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 1816. Sir John describes some experiences of his own, “which consist in the {i-88} involuntary production of visual impressions, into which geometrical regularity of form enters as the leading character, and that, under circumstances which altogether preclude any explanation drawn from a possible regularity of structure in the retina or the optic nerve.”¹¹ On this point see Professor James's Principles of Psychology, vol. ii. p. 84, note. Goethe's well-known phantasmal flower was clearly no mere representation of retinal structure. A near analogy to these patterns lies in the so-called “spirit drawings,” or automatic arabesques, discussed elsewhere in this chapter (see Section 324). Twice these patterns appeared in waking daylight hours,—with no illness or discomfort at the time or afterwards. More frequently they appeared in darkness; but still while Sir John was fully awake. They appeared also twice when he was placed under chloroform; “and I should observe that I never lost my consciousness of being awake and in full possession of my mind, though quite insensible to what was going on.… Now the question at once presents itself—What are these Geometrical Spectres? and how, and in what department of the bodily or mental economy do they originate? They are evidently not dreams. The mind is not dormant, but active and conscious of the direction of its thoughts; while these things obtrude themselves on notice, and by calling attention to them, direct the train of thought into a channel it would not have taken of itself.… If it be true that the conception of a regular geometrical pattern implies the exercise of thought and intelligence, it would almost seem that in such cases as those above adduced we have evidence of a thought, an intelligence, working within our own organisation distinct from that of our own personality.” And Sir John further suggests that these complex figures, entering the mind in this apparently arbitrary fashion, throw light upon “the suggestive principle” to which “we must look for much that is determinant and decisive of our volition when carried into action.” “It strikes me as not by any means devoid of interest to contemplate cases where, in a matter so entirely abstract, so completely devoid of any moral or emotional bearing, as the production of a geometrical figure, we, as it were, seize upon that principle in the very act, and in the performance of its office.”

From my point of view, of course, I can but admire the acumen which enabled this great thinker to pierce to the root of the matter by the aid of so few observations. He does not seem to have perceived the connection between these “schematic phantasms,” to borrow a phrase from Professor Ladd,²² See Professor Ladd's paper on this subject in Mind, April 1892. and the hallucinatory figures of men or animals seen in health or in disease. But even from his scanty data his inference seems to me irresistible;—“we have evidence of a thought, an intelligence, working within our own organisation, distinct from that of our own personality.” I shall venture to claim him as the first originator of the theory to which the far fuller evidence now accessible had independently led myself.

{i-89}

313. Cases observed as definitely as those just quoted are few in number; and I must pass on into a much-trodden—even a confusedly trampled—field;—the records, namely, left by eminent men as to the element of subconscious mentation, which was involved in their best work. Most of these stories have been again and again repeated;—and they have been collected on a large scale in a celebrated work,—to me especially distasteful, as containing what seems to me the loose and extravagant parody of important truth. It is not my business here to criticise Dr. Von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious in detail; but I prefer to direct my readers' attention to a much more modest volume, in which a young physician has put together the results of a direct inquiry addressed to some Frenchmen of distinction as to their methods especially of imaginative work.¹¹ “Le Subconscient chez les Artistes, les Savants, et les Ecrivains,” par le Dr. Paul Chabaneix, Paris, 1897. I quote a few of the replies addressed to him, beginning with some words from M. Sully Prudhomme,—at once psychologist and poet,—who is here speaking of the subconscious clarification of a chain of abstract reasoning. “I have sometimes suddenly understood a geometrical demonstration made to me a year previously without having in any way directed thereto my attention or will. It seemed that the mere spontaneous ripening of the conceptions which the lectures had implanted in my brain had brought about within me this novel grasp of the proof.”

With this we may compare a statement of Arago's—“Instead of obstinately endeavouring to understand a proposition at once, I would admit its truth provisionally;—and next day I would be astonished at understanding thoroughly that which seemed all dark before.”

Condillac similarly speaks of finding an incomplete piece of work finished next day in his head.

Somewhat similarly, though in another field, M. Retté, a poet, tells Dr. Chabaneix that he falls asleep in the middle of an unfinished stanza, and when thinking of it again in the morning finds it completed. And M. Vincent d'Indy, a musical composer, says that he often has on waking a fugitive glimpse of a musical effect which (like the memory of a dream) needs a strong immediate concentration of mind to keep it from vanishing.

De Musset writes, “On ne travaille pas, on écoute, c'est comme un inconnu que vous parle à l'oreille.”One does not work, one listens, it's like a stranger who speaks at your ear.

Lamartine says,“Ce n'est pas moi qui pense; ce sont mes idées qui pensent pour moi.”It is not I who thinks; it is my ideas which think through me.

Rémy de Gourmont: “My conceptions rise into the field of consciousness like a flash of lightning or like the flight of a bird.”

M.S. writes: “In writing these dramas I seemed to be a spectator at the play; I gazed at what was passing on the scene in an eager, {i-90} wondering expectation of what was to follow. And yet I felt that all this came from the depth of my own being.”

Saint-Saens had only to listen, as Socrates to his Dæmon: and M. Ri