CHAPTER VI
SENSORY AUTOMATISM
Βλἑπομεν γἁρ ἁρτι δἱ'ἑσὑπτρου ἑν ἁινἱγματι.
EACH of the several lines of inquiry pursued in the foregoing chapters has brought indications of something transcending sensory experience in the reserves of human faculty; and we have come to a point where we need some further colligating generalisation—some conception under which these scattered phenomena may be gathered in their true kinship.
Some steps at least towards such a generalisation the evidence to be presented in these next chapters may allow us to take. Considering together, under the heading of sensory and motor automatism, the whole range of that subliminal action of which we have as yet discussed fragments only, we shall gradually come to see that its distinctive faculty of telepathy or telæsthesia is in fact an introduction into a realm where the limitations of organic life can no longer be assumed to persist. Considering, again, the evidence which shows that that portion of the personality which exercises these powers during our earthly existence does actually continue to exercise them after our bodily decay, we shall recognise a relation—obscure but indisputable—between the subliminal and the surviving self.
I begin, then, with my definition of automatism, as the widest term under which to include the range of subliminal emergences into ordinary life. The turbulent uprush and downdraught of hysteria; the helpful uprushes of genius, co-operating with supraliminal thought; the profound and recuperative changes which follow on hypnotic suggestion; these have been described under their separate headings. But the main mass of subliminal manifestations remains undescribed. I have dealt little with veridical hallucinations, not at all with automatic writing, nor with the utterances of spontaneous trance. The products of inner vision or inner audition externalised into quasi-percepts,—these form what I term sensory automatisms. The messages conveyed by movement of limbs or hand or tongue, initiated by an inner motor impulse beyond the conscious will—these are what I term motor automatisms. And I claim that when all these are surveyed together their essential analogy will be recognised beneath much diversity of form. They will be seen to be messages from the subliminal to the supraliminal self; endeavours—conscious or unconscious—of submerged tracts of our personality to present to ordinary waking thought fragments of a knowledge which no ordinary waking thought could attain.
I regard supraliminal life merely as a privileged case of personality; a special phase of our personality, which is easiest for us to study, because it is simplified for us by our ready consciousness of what is going on in it; yet which is by no means necessarily either central or prepotent, could we see our whole being in comprehensive view.
Now if we thus regard the whole supraliminal personality as a special case of something much more extensive, it follows that we must similarly regard all human faculty, and each sense severally, as mere special or privileged cases of some more general power.
All human terrene faculty will be in this view simply a selection from faculty existing in the metetherial world; such part of that antecedent, even if not individualised, faculty as may be expressible through each several human organism.
Each of our special senses, therefore, may be conceived as straining towards development of a wider kind than earthly experience has as yet allowed. And each special sense is both an internal and an external sense; involves a tract of the brain, of unknown capacity, as well as an end-organ, whose capacity is more nearly measurable. The relation of this internal, mental, mind's-eye vision to non-sensory psychological perception on the one hand, and to ocular vision on the other hand, is exactly one of the points on which some profounder observation will be seen to be necessary. One must at least speak of "mind's eye" perception in these sensory terms, if one is to discuss it at all.
But ordinary experience at any rate assumes that the end-organ alone can acquire fresh information, and that the central tract can but combine this new information already sent in to it. This must plainly be the case, for instance, with optical or acoustic knowledge;—with such knowledge as is borne on waves of ether or of air, and is caught by a terminal apparatus, evolved for the purpose. But observe that it is by no means necessary that all seeing and all hearing should be through eye or ear.