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 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.
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. 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 "common-sense 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,[5] 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 it 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 to which this book will refer him.
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.[6]
"Normally at least," says one 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 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 ultra-marginal consciousness,—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 threshhold 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 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 co-operations 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.