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MR. MYERS' great conception of the subliminal self has been adopted, explained,
parodied, and paraded, by several writers, usually in the garbled and misleading
form that man has a dual nature or duplex soul, that sometimes the more usual,
and sometimes the less usual aspect of his personality comes to the front and
influences his actions and thoughts. In the form of a contest between two rival
principles, this idea is extremely old; and in the form of a divided soul or
bifurcated personality, a version of the conception has been elaborated by Mr.
Thomson Jay Hudson in an ambitious book extensively read in America called
The Law of Psychic Phenomena(1), wherein it is sought to explain everything,
from the Christian miracles downwards, by a crudely stated hypothesis of duplex
personality or a double soul: an idea which seems to have been borrowed, without
acknowledgment, from Mr. Myers' papers in the Proceedings, and spoiled in
the borrowing.
(1) Reviewed in Proceedings SPR., Vol.
ix, p. 230.
And in a 1903 number of the Nineteenth Century Mr. Mallock, getting hold
apparently of this version of Mr. Hudson's, has skilfully set it forth as if it
were an explanation or summary of Mr. Myers' own theory; and has pointed a
flippant finger of scorn at the triviality of the evidence, and at the futility
of a life-work which has this conclusion for its result. Few essays which bear a
superficial resemblance to the truth could readily be more misleading or less
illuminating than this article of Mr. Mallock's, and I am content to caution any
student not to accept that ostensible summary as giving any adequate or true
idea of Mr. Myers' comprehensive treatise.
The doctrine which Mr. Myers arrived at, after years of study, is that each
individual as we perceive him is but a small fraction of a larger whole, is as
it were the foliage of a tree which has its main trunk and its roots in another
order of existence; but that on this dark inconspicuous and permanent basis, now
one and now another system of leaves bud, grow, display themselves, wither, and
decay, while the great trunk and roots persist through many such temporary
appearances, not independently of the sensible manifestations, nor unassisted by
them, but supporting them, dominating them, reproducing them, assimilating their
nourishment in the form of the elaborated sap called experience, and thereby
growing continually into a more perfect and larger whole. Many metaphors could
be suggested, but this is the one which occurs to me now, and it carries us a
certain distance.
As the tree periodically buds and blossoms into an aerial life, so we bud and
blossom in a terrestrial life, clothing ourselves with material particles for a
time, assimilating and utilising the sunshine and the dew, realising the
existence and the neighbourhood of other organisms in a like stage of
development, and joyfully availing ourselves of the consequences that flow from
proximity and contemporaneous specialised existence.
The mystery of incarnation and of gradual development, of the persistence of
existence beyond bodily death and decay, and even some glimmerings of the
possible meaning of the vague dream of so-called re-incarnation, all become in
some sort intelligible on a basis of this kind - the basis of a full and never
wholly manifested persistent self, from which periodically sprouts a terrestrial
manifestation, though never twice the same. Each terrestrial appearance
flourishes and assimilates mental and moral nutriment for a time, and the result
of each is incorporated in the constant and growing memory of the underlying,
supporting, but inconspicuously manifesting, and at present barely recognised,
fundamental self.
And whereas we, the visible manifestations, exposed to sun and air, can signal
to each other and receive impressions through rays of light and sound and heat,
our transcendental portions with roots in another order of being must be
supposed capable of communication too; they are individualised but not isolated,
being welded into the framework of things in such way as to receive nutriment
from subterranean moisture and from dying relics of the past, even from things
which to the aerial portion seem useless or noxious; and they may thus send up
to the leaves strange streamings of sap laden with the common wealth of mother
earth.
The metaphor constantly breaks down, as all metaphors must sooner or later; for
some purposes it would seem better that the tree should be inverted. The
adjective "subliminal" contains no reference to what is beneath, except in the
sense of foundation and support; in every other aspect the subliminal is
probably the more real and more noble, more comprehensive, more intelligent,
self, of which the supraliminal development is but a natural and healthy and
partial manifestation.
The products of the subliminal are to be regarded as "higher," in a definite
sense, than those of the supraliminal. The supraliminal is that which is the
outcome of terrestrial evolution, and so is able to manifest itself in a
planetary manner; the subliminal has a cosmic existence, which may play a part
in terrestrial evolution hereafter, but at present only shows signs of doing so
in the supernormal uprushes which are known as the inspirations of genius; signs
which may be taken as anticipatory of the course of evolution in the future.
In this way sleep, death, genius, insanity, hysteria, hypnotism, automatism,
clairvoyance, and all other disintegrations, abnormalities, and supernormalities
of personality, fall into a consistent comprehensive scheme; and it is the
object of Myers' book to elaborate this hypothesis and to unify all these strang
features of human personality, features which have so long afforded an exercise
alternately to resolute credulity and to blatant scepticism, and have so
perennially perplexed mankind.
The book begins with an explanatory and properly prosaic Introduction, and
closes with a more poetic Epilogue.
Successive chapters deal with the following subjects:
First. Disintegration of personality, such as Multiple personality, and other
hysterical and pathological cases.
Second. Genius; which is one of the most illuminating and brilliant chapters in
the book, where the man of genius so far from being regarded as afflicted with
any form of nascent insanity is regarded as the standard or norm of the race - a
product of a higher stage of evolution than the average man has yet attained.
Clearly a genius is one who can draw more than others on his central and
sustaining subliminal organisation, one who can breathe out products obtained
not from sun and air alone, but from roots driven deep into the heart of the
universe: one whose existence is not planetary merely, but cosmic, and in whom
subliminal uprushes of fructifying sap are frequent.
The next chapter deals with sleep, or the state when the supraliminal activities
are dormant: when the sun has ceased to awaken full activities, when the whole
self is more massed together and partially withdrawn from its active planetary
existence; and when by dreams and visions some reminiscence of a wider though
dimmer purview can sometimes be retained for a time and carried over into the
waking or terrestrially conscious existence.
This leads up to the chapter which deals with the artificial or experimental
induction of this state, the chapter on Hypnotism; a process whereby the deeper
strata of personality can be reached, and suggestion and other influences
implanted, which may subsequently bear fruit in waking life. One may liken this
to gardening operations, such as grafting and manuring and other systems of
treatment, applied not to the leaves or flowers of a tree direct, but to its
branches and roots; operations which nevertheless influence those leaves and
flowers in a subsequent and unmistakable manner.
The chapter on Sensory Automatism deals with those conditions of hallucination
of the senses under which clairvoyance or pseudo-sense-impressions of various
kinds are generated: furnishing avenues whereby telepathy, crystal vision, and
other perceptions, not received through the normal organs of sense but by some
ill-understood subliminal reaction, become possible.
And chapter viii. in the second volume, on Motor Automatism, expands this same
region into the muscular or efferent output of the same kind of faculty;
resulting in automatic writing, and other physical manifestations of subliminal
activity, whether of the nature of inhibition or of propulsion, up to such
strenuously active but subliminally guided lives, as for instance those of
Socrates and Joan of Arc. Between these two is interpolated a chapter on
Phantasms of the Dead: those hallucinatory appearances or visions of departed
persons, which are here treated as an example of sensory automatism on the part
of the percipient, excited however in many cases veridically by external
influence, and capable of conveying real information.
And the chapter on Motor Automatism is similarly followed by a chapter on the
developed form of the same, viz., a chapter headed "Trance Possession, Ecstasy,"
in which certain well-known cases of veridical trance utterance are partially
included, though with many serious omissions, due to the recent occurrence of
some of the cases, so that insufficient time had been afforded for their
complete digestion and for a final decision as to their place and purport. This,
together with sensory and motor automatisms, may be regarded as the part of the
subject-matter which has attracted most popular attention, and the part which
when stated by itself seems to excite nothing but scepticism on the one hand and
superstition on the other. It was Mr. Myers' plan to so gradually build or lead
up to these strange phenomena that when reached they should be realised as a
fitting and natural consequence of what had gone before, leaving them no longer
as an inaccessible or aerial structure without foundation, but as the upper
storey of a large and lofty building through which a fairly sound staircase had
been constructed.
Myers' life-work either achieves this unification or it does not. If it does,
this book, as I suggested last January in my Presidential Address to the
Society, will stand as a Novum Organon in psychical science. If it does
not, it may mean either that the attempt is impossible, or that it still remains
for some future pioneer to achieve a task which for the present generation has
turned out too difficult.
Myers himself took a modest, but I think hopeful, view of his labours. He must
have felt, at any rate his friends felt for him, that by the industry of himself
and Gurney and the other founders of the Society, he had, amassed and ready to
his hands, a fund of material to draw upon, such as no philosopher or
psychologist had ever had before; and although he himself would have seriously
deprecated any comparison with the sages of the past, some of us felt that,
building on their foundation, utilising their work, and fortified with such a
vast mass of modern information, aided also by his classical learning and by a
great natural scientific insight, with the opportunity of consulting many
scientific men, some hostile, some sympathetic to his researches, and with the
nineteenth century of science behind him, gifted also with considerable leisure,
persistent enthusiasm, and industry, he was a man supremely fitted to push back
the barriers of ignorance in this region farther than had been accomplished
before, and to give to the human race an insight into the hidden faculties and
destiny of man such as not even the gigantic genius of Plato, nor the profound
insight of Kant had been able to bestow.
It is not a matter on which an opinion of mine would be of value, nor would I be
understood as expressing one; but the glorious sense of having accomplished a
work worthy of the serious attention of humanity has blossomed in an Epilogue
where the cosmic import and religious significance of the whole vista of human
faculty is eloquently set forth. This specially written epilogue is happily
completed and supplemented by his one Presidential Address to the Society, and
this is further supplemented by two, short essays, one on the "Decline of
Dogmatism," wherein the ultimate upshot of the messages which claim to come from
another order of existence are briefly summarised, and another on "Prayer and
Supplication," regarded from the illuminating point of view of the telepathic
law. From this last I extract the following quotation:
"In the law of telepathy, developing into the law of spiritual
intercommunication between incarnate and discarnate spirits, we see dimly
adumbrated before our eyes the highest law with which our human science can
conceivably have to deal. The discovery of telepathy opens before us a potential
communication between all life. And if, as our present evidence indicates, this
telepathic intercourse can subsist between embodied and disembodied souls, that
law must needs lie at the very centre of cosmic evolution. It will be
evolutionary, as depending on a faculty now in actual course of development. It
will be cosmic; for it may - it almost must -, by analogy, subsist not on
this planet only but wherever in the universe discarnate and incarnate spirits
may be intermingled or juxtaposed."
One other portion of the book must be mentioned, for it was a laborious attempt
at a synthesis or conspectus of the whole, viz., his "Scheme of Vital Faculty" -
sadly buried by the arrangement of the book between pages 505 and 555 of the
second volume - a scheme wherein the usual orthodox view of the tripartite
nature of man is utilised, and each vital faculty is displayed under the aspects
appropriate to the three heads, somatic, psychic, and pneumatic; or, as he
styles them, supraliminal, subliminal, and spiritual. The scheme was the result
of a great deal of thought, but it is open to question in many points of detail,
and Myers would have been the last to insist that each subject is classified
precisely in the most appropriate manner, or that it always fits the niche
provided for it. At the same time it would be well for future students to
realise that Myers had a reason for his system of classification, and that
though it may be changed, it is worthy of being changed not lightly, but after
due consideration.
How far such a scheme as this soars above the range of the orthodox science of
to-day is apparent from the fact that few of the faculties catalogued and
classified in it, beyond those in the first category, are as yet generally
recognised as existing at all. A few from the second or middle category are
coming into recognition - such as suggestion, hyperaesthesia,
psycho-therapeutics, and telepathy - but the greater part even of this second
list is still only on the outskirts of recognised knowledge; while in Myers'
view it is the third and at present wholly ultra-scientific category which lies
in the path of future knowledge and development, and constitutes the most
pregnant portion of his message to mankind.
It is not to be claimed for a moment that these volumes will convince a reader
of the survival of personality beyond bodily death, if he was previously hostile
to or otherwise fortified against such an idea. Perhaps they will convince
nobody: I see no reason why they should. The main object of the book is not
edification and finality, but stimulation to enquiry; convictions of any value
are seldom attained by mere reading: they can only be formed by soaking one's
mind in a subject for years, by "continually thinking unto it," as Newton said.
As the outcome of such a process it became Myers' undoubted belief that
intelligence and human personality persist beyond bodily death; and that,
between the two states or conditions of being, intercommunication though
extremely difficult was not altogether impossible. But this conclusion of his
has been popularly seized and over-emphasised till to many contemporaries it
seems that an easy credulity on this point was his characteristic attitude.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Easy credulity does not lead to a
life-long labour and evolution of a comprehensive scheme such as this. To those
who have not been through it, the assured conviction which was the outcome of
his long training may seem like easy credulity; just as the physicist is often
twitted for believing in the reality of an "ether," which to the onlooker is a
mere hypothesis - a blank form to be filled up arbitrarily at pleasure, and with
no more reality than the figment of a dream.
This is one of those cases, and there are several, where the onlooker does not
see most of the game, where the man in the street with all his conspicuous
ability is not an ultimate authority, and where the profound gibes of the clubs,
or of a monthly magazine, are not the conclusion of the whole matter.
For people who are immersed in such an atmosphere it is difficult to realise the
strenuously-acquired full-bodied certitude, or the clear-visioned perception and
what one can hardly help calling, in some sense, knowledge, whether it be
concerning the "ether" or concerning the problem of what is known as human
"immortality," which may be possessed by a specially trained man of science.
That is the position in which the author of these two volumes seems to me
definitely to have acquired the right to range himself; and in this estimate of
his position I believe that scientific posterity will acclaim agreement. It is
by the name of Man of Science that I wish to hail our late chief and leader,
Frederic Myers.
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