Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death

by F. W. H. Myers

The coming chapters on Sleep and Hypnotism will illustrate this point more fully. But I may here anticipate my discussion of dreams by quoting one instance where dreams, self-suggested by waking will, formed, as one may say, an integral element in distinguished genius.

The late Robert Louis Stevenson, being in many ways a typical man of genius, was in no way more markedly gifted with that integrating faculty—that increased power over all strata of the personality—which I have ascribed to genius, than in his relation to his dreams (see "A Chapter on Dreams" in his volume Across the Plains). Seldom has the essential analogy between dreams and inspiration been exhibited in such a striking way. His dreams had always (he tells us) been of great vividness, and often of markedly recurrent type. But the point of interest is that, when he began to write stories for publication, the "little people who managed man's internal theatre" understood the change as well as he.

When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off in his box-seat, his little people continued their evolutions with the same mercantile designs.... For the most part, whether awake or asleep, he is simply occupied—he or his little people—in consciously making stories for the market....

The more I think of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world my question: "Who are the Little People?" They are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank book; they share plainly in his training; ... they have plainly learned like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt,—they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim....

That part [of my work] which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.

Slight and imperfect as the above statistics and observations admittedly are, they seem to me to point in a more useful direction than do some of the facts collected by that modern group of anthropologists who hold that genius is in itself a kind of nervous malady, a disturbance of mental balance, akin to criminality or even to madness.

It is certainly not true, as I hold, either that the human race in general is nervously degenerating, or that nervous degeneration tends to a maximum in its most eminent members. But it can be plausibly maintained that the proportion of nervous to other disorders tends to increase. And it is certain that not nervous degeneration but nervous change or development is now proceeding among civilised peoples more rapidly than ever before, and that this self-adaptation to wider environments must inevitably be accompanied in the more marked cases by something of nervous instability. And it is true also that from one point of view these changes might form matter for regret; and that in order to discern what I take to be their true meaning we have to regard the problem of human evolution from a somewhat unfamiliar standpoint.

The nervous system is probably tending in each generation to become more complex and more delicately ramified. As is usual when any part of an organism is undergoing rapid evolutive changes, this nervous progress is accompanied with some instability. Those individuals in whom the hereditary or the acquired change is the most rapid are likely also to suffer most from a perturbation which masks evolution—an occasional appearance of what may be termed "nervous sports" of a useless or even injurious type. Such are the fancies and fanaticisms, the bizarre likes and dislikes, the excessive or aberrant sensibilities, which have been observed in some of the eminent men whom Lombroso discusses in his book on the Man of Genius. Their truest analogue, as we shall presently see more fully, lies in the oddities or morbidities of sentiment or sensation which so often accompany the development of the human organism into its full potencies, or precede the crowning effort by which a fresh organism is introduced into the world.

Such at least is my view; but the full acceptance of this view must depend upon some very remote and very speculative considerations bearing upon the nature and purport of the whole existence and evolution of man. Yet however remote and speculative the thesis which I defend may be, it is not one whit remoter or more speculative than the view which, faute de mieux, is often tacitly assumed by scientific writers.

In our absolute ignorance of the source from whence life came, we have no ground for assuming that it was a purely planetary product, or that its unknown potentialities are concerned with purely planetary ends. It would be as rash for the biologist to assume that life on earth can only point to generations of further life on earth as it would have been for some cosmic geologist to assume—before the appearance of life on earth—that geological forces must needs constitute all the activity which could take place on this planet.