HUMAN PERSONALITY
AND ITS SURVIVAL OF
BODILY DEATH

BY
FREDERIC W. H. MYERS
EDITED AND ABRIDGED
BY HIS SON
LEOPOLD HAMILTON MYERS

NEW IMPRESSION
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH
STREET, NEW YORK BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1918

COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
——
All rights reserved
First Edition, December, 1906
Reprinted, March, 1907
October, 1909; April, 1913
August, 1917; April, 1918
THE PLIMPTON PRESS
NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A

DEDICATED
TO
HENRY SIDGWICK
AND
EDMUND GURNEY

EDITOR'S NOTE

NEARLY four years have elapsed since the first appearance of my Father's book "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death." It cost two guineas and was published in two volumes, each of which was little under 700 pages in length.

The price and dimensions of such a work made the future issue of a more popular edition not improbable. Indeed, my Father himself indicated briefly the lines on which an abridgment could best be made. In accordance with his indications I have endeavoured to keep as closely as possible to the original scheme and construction of the book.

The task of abridging, however, must always be an ungrateful one. It is inevitable that somewhere or other I should disappoint the reader who, already acquainted with the unabridged edition, finds some admired passage curtailed in favour of others that are to him of secondary interest. This I cannot avoid. All I can hope to do is so to reconcile the principles of omission and condensation as least to do violence to the style while preserving as far as possible the completeness of the exposition.

One half of each volume in the unabridged edition consists of appendices containing examples of the various kinds of phenomena discussed and analyzed in the text. It has been possible to reduce considerably the number of these cases without, I think, detracting much from the value of the work for the purposes of the ordinary reader. Those cases, however, which are included in this edition are quoted in full, an abridged version having very little value.

It must be remembered that the author in his preface insists that "the book is an exposition rather than a proof," and the remark naturally applies with even greater force to this abridgment. Here the cases must be regarded simply as illustrative of the different types of the evidence upon which in its entirety the argument of the book ultimately rests.

The reader who may feel disposed to study this evidence will find numerous references given in the foot-notes. The cases, however, to which he is thus referred are scattered in many different publications, some of which will probably be less easy of access than the unabridged edition. In the many instances, therefore, where a case is quoted in the latter its place therein is indicated by means of a number or a number and letter in square brackets, thus [434 A]: these being in accordance with the plan of arrangement observed in the larger book.

I wish to express my sincere thanks to Miss Alice Johnson, who very kindly read over the whole of the proof of this abridgment. I have profited largely by her advice as well as from that given me by Miss Jane Barlow, to whom my thanks are also due.

L. H. M.

PREFACE

[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 (now Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research), who was therefore 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 fell to her share.]

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 and producing 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.

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 to-day. 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 contemnere will certainly be the highest compliment which what seemed to us our bold independence of men 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.

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.

GLOSSARY

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

(1) Words common only in philosophical or medical use.

(2) Words or phrases used in psychical research with some special significance.

(3) A few words, distinguished by an asterisk, for which the author is himself responsible.

Aboulia.—Loss of power of willing.

After-image.—A retinal picture of an object seen after removing the gaze from the object.

Agent.—The person who seems to initiate a telepathic transmission.

Agraphia.—Lack of power to write words.

Alexia or Word-blindness.—Lack of power to understand words written.

Anæsthesia, or the loss of sensation generally, must be distinguished from analgesia, or the loss of the sense of pain alone.

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.

Aphonia.—Incapacity of uttering sounds.

Automatic.—Used of mental images arising and movements 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 and words uttered without intention (automatic script, trance-utterance, etc.).

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.

Bilocation.—The sensation of being in two different places at once, namely where one's organism is, and in a place distant from it.

Catalepsy.—"An intermittent neurosis producing 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 Dictionary of Psychological Medicine.)

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

Chromatism.—See Secondary Sensations.

Clair-audience.—The sensation of hearing an internal (but in some way veridical) voice.

Clairvoyance (Lucidité).—The faculty or act of perceiving, as though visually, with some coincidental truth, some distant scene.

Cænesthesia.—That consensus or agreement of many organic sensations which is a fundamental element in our conception of personal identity.

Control.—This word is used of the intelligence which purports to communicate messages which are written or uttered by the automatist, sensitive or medium.

*Cosmopathic.—Open to the access of supernormal knowledge or emotion.

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

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

Diathesis.—Habit, capacity, constitutional disposition or tendency.

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, in which memory, character, etc., present themselves at different times in different forms in the same person.

Discarnate.—Disembodied, opposed to incarnate.

Disintegration of Personality.—Used of any condition where the sense of personality is not unitary and continuous: especially when secondary and transitory personalities intervene.

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

Ecmnesia.—Loss of memory of a period of time.

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

Eugenics.—The science of improving the race.

Falsidical.—Of hallucinations delusive, i.e., when there is nothing objective to which they correspond. The correlative term to veridical.

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

Hallucination.—Any sensory perception which has no objective counterpart within the field of vision, hearing, etc., is termed a hallucination.

Heteræsthesia.—A form of sensibility decidedly different from any of those which can be referred to the action of the known senses.

Hyperboulia.—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.

Hyperæsthesia.—Unusual acuteness of the senses.

Hypermnesia.—"Over-activity of the memory; a condition in which past acts, feelings, or ideas are brought vividly to the mind, which, in its normal condition, has wholly lost the remembrance of them." (Tuke's Dict.)

*Hyperpromethia.—Supernormal power of foresight.

Hypnagogic.—Illusions hypnagogiques (Maury) are the vivid illusions of sight or sound—"faces in the dark," etc.—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 zones.—Regions by pressure on which hypnosis is induced in some hysterical persons.

*Hypnopompic.—See Hypnagogic.

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.). Hysterical affections are not dependent on any discoverable lesion.

Hysterogenous zones.—Points or tracts on the skin of a hysterical person, pressure on which will induce a hysterical attack.

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

Induced.—Of hallucinations, etc., intentionally produced.

Levitation.—A raising of objects from the ground by supposed supernormal means; especially of living persons.

Medium.—A person through whom communication is deemed to be carried on between living men and spirits of the departed. It is often better replaced by automatist or sensitive.

Message.—Used for any communication, not necessarily verbal, from one to another stratum of the automatist's personality, or from an external intelligence to the automatist's mind.

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, etc.

Metastasis.—Change of the seat of a bodily function from one place (e.g., 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 may be supposed to exist.

*Methectic.—Of communications between one stratum of a man's intelligence and another.

Mirror-writing (écriture renversée, Spiegel-schrift).—Writing so inverted, or, more exactly, perverted, as to resemble writing reflected in a mirror.

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

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

Negative hallucination or systematised anæthesia.—Signifies the condition of an entranced subject who, as the result of a suggestion, is unable to perceive some object or to hear some sound, etc.

Number forms.—See Secondary sensations.

Objectify.—To externalize a phantom as if it were a material object; to see it as a part of the waking world.

*Panmnesia.—A potential recollection of all impressions.

Paræsthesia.—Erroneous or morbid sensation.

Paramnesia.—All forms of erroneous memory.

Paraphasia.—The erroneous and involuntary use of one word for another.

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 apparently modified by a spirit in such a way that persons present near it perceive a phantasm.

Phobies.—Irrational restricting or disabling preoccupations or fears; e.g., agoraphobia, fear of open spaces.

Photism.—See Secondary sensations.

Point de repère.—Guiding mark. Used of some (generally inconspicuous) real object which a hallucinated subject sometimes sees as the nucleus of his hallucination, and the movements of which suggest corresponding movements of the hallucinatory object.

Polyzoism.—The property, in a complex organism, of being composed of minor and quasi-independent organisms. This is sometimes called "colonial constitution," from animal colonies.

Possession.—A developed form of motor automatism, in which the automatist's own personality disappears for a time, while there appears to be 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.—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.

*Promnesia.—The paradoxical sensation of recollecting a scene which is only now occurring for the first time; the sense of the déjà vu.

*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.

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

Psycho-therapeutics.—"Treatment of disease by the influence of the mind on the body." (Tuke's Dict.)

Reciprocal.—Used of cases where there is both agency and percipience at each end of the telepathic chain, so that 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 an individual 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, in distinction to the original, or primary, personality.

Secondary sensations (Secunddrempfindungen, audition colorée, sound-seeing, synæsthesia, etc.).—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 picture which accompanies the conception of a progression of numbers. See Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty.

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

Stigmatisation.—The production of blisters or other cutaneous changes on the hands, feet, or elsewhere, by suggestion or self-suggestion.

Subliminal.—Of thoughts, feelings, etc., lying beneath the ordinary threshold (limen) of consciousness, as opposed to supraliminal, lying above the threshold.

Suggestion.—The process of effectively impressing upon the subliminal intelligence the wishes of some other person. Self-suggestion means a suggestion conveyed by the subject himself from one stratum of his personality to another, without external intervention.

*Supernormal.—Of a faculty or phenomenon which transcends ordinary experience. Used in preference to the word supernatural, as not assuming that there is anything outside nature or any arbitrary interference with natural law.

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.—The communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense.

*Telæsthesia.—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.—Of hallucinations, when they correspond to real events happening elsewhere and unknown to the percipient.

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

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.

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"—is no doubt held at the present date by many learned minds. But it has never been 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 prerequisite 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 within which, by ancient convention, disputants on either side of these questions are commonly confined.

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 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.

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, Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, 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; but it was conducted in the dark, and when the barbarous explanation dropped out of credence much of possible discovery was submerged as well.

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 psycho-therapeutics, 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.

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[1] 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[2] gift, did not press further an inquiry surpassed in importance by none of those upon which his master-mind 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.

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.[3] 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, 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.

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 of 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 to-day, and which we may hope to carry further to-morrow. 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, 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 without the agency 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.[4]

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 metetherial 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 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.

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 common-sense 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I believe, indeed, that it will become plain as we proceed that some such hypothesis as this,—of almost continuous spirit-intervention and 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.

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 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.

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.

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. 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 ultimate 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.

Even the first stages of this progress are long and labyrinthine; and it may be useful to conclude this introductory chapter by a brief summary of the main tracts across which our winding road must lie. It will 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.

Following then on this first or introductory chapter is one containing a discussion of the ways in which human personality disintegrates and decays. Alternations of personality and hysterical phenomena generally are in this connection the most instructive to us.

In the third chapter we utilize the insight thus gained and discuss the line of evolution which enables man to maintain and intensify his true normality. What type of man is he to whom the epithet of normal,—an epithet often obscure and misleading,—may be most fitly applied? I 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 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; and I attempt to show that those who reap most advantage from this submerged mentation are men of genius.

The fourth chapter deals 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. In this chapter I also discuss certain supernormal phenomena which sometimes occur in the state of sleep.

The fifth chapter treats of hypnotism, considered as an empirical development of sleep. It will be seen that hypnotic suggestion intensifies the physical recuperation of sleep, and aids the emergence of those supernormal phenomena which ordinary sleep and spontaneous somnambulism sometimes exhibit.

From hypnotism we pass on in the sixth chapter to experiments, less familiar to the public than those classed as hypnotic, but which give a still further insight into our subliminal faculty. With these experiments are 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 the form of sensory hallucinations:—the visions 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.

These sensory automatisms, as I have termed them, are very often telepathic—involve, that is to say, the transmission of ideas and sensations from one mind to another without the agency of the recognised organs of sense. Nor would it seem that such transmission need necessarily cease with the bodily death of the transmitting agent. In the seventh chapter evidence is brought forward to show that those who communicated with us telepathically in this world may communicate with us telepathically from the other. Thus phantasms of the dead receive a new meaning from observations of the phenomena occurring between living men.

But besides the hallucinatory hearing or picture-seeing which we have classed as sensory automatisms, there is another method by which the subliminal may communicate with the supraliminal self.

In Chapter VIII., we consider in what ways motor automatism—the unwilled activity of hand or voice—may be used as a means of such communication. Unwilled writings and utterances furnish the opportunity for experiment more prolonged and continuous than the phantasms or pictures of sensory automatism can often give, and, like them, may sometimes originate in telepathic impressions received by the subliminal self from another mind. These motor automatisms, moreover, as the ninth chapter shows, are apt to become more complete, more controlling, than sensory automatisms. They may lead on, in some cases, to the apparent possession of the sensitive by some extraneous spirit, who seems to write and talk through the sensitive's organism, giving evidence of his own surviving identity.

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, 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 ordinary material 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 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 co-existence 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; 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 subjection 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 conclude 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.

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 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.

CHAPTER II
DISINTEGRATIONS OF PERSONALITY

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 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 as the life of the phagocytes in the philosopher's veins, in their relation to his central thought.[7]

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.

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 to be discussed. 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 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 of 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.

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 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. Commonsense 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 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.

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 co-ordination, 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.

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 to 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.

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 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.

The fixed idea, thus originating, 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, co-existing 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-main. (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.

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 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 far back into a prehistoric past. In a recent "Study of Fears," which Professor Stanley Hall has based on a wide statistical collection,[8] it would seem that the fears of childhood 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 thunder-storms, 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.[9] And indeed there are few cases to show which have been cured by any methods except the 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.

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 presence of insistent ideas implies an instability of the conscious threshold; and this, in its turn, indicates 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.

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,[10] 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.

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 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 dorsalis.

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 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.

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 arbitrary arrangements;—sometimes corresponding to rough popular notions of divisions of the body,—sometimes seeming to reflect a merely childish caprice.

In these cases what is only a silly fancy seems to produce 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 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 straight-way is so; and the hysteric loses supraliminal sensation in this fantastic belt. That the notion does not originate in the hysteric's supraliminal self is proved by the fact that the patient is generally unaware of the existence of the bracelet 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. Such cases are most instructive; for they begin 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.

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, 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.

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.

In such cases the action of the submerged perceptions, while provoked by very shallow artifices, continues 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.

These hysterical anæsthesiæ, it may be added here, may be not 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 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.

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

Very numerous are the cases which might be cited 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 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.[11]

"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 monde. 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 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.

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 discussed have been mainly cases of isolation of elements of personality. We have not dealt as yet with secondary personalities as such. There is, however, a close connection between these two classes. There are cases, for example, where a kind of secondary state at times intervenes—a sort of bewilderment arising from confluent idées fixes and overrunning the whole personality. This new state is often 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.

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.[12] 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. [See R. L. Stevenson's dream, given in Appendix II. A] 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 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, etc.—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 Appendix II. C) into a continuous or dimorphic new personality.

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 Appendix II. B. 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.

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.

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.[13]

And now, as an illustration of a secondary condition purely degenerative, I may first mention post-epileptic states, although they belong too definitely to pathology for full discussion here. Post-epileptic conditions may run parallel to almost all the secondary phases which we have described. They 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.[14]

The case of Ansel Bourne is interesting in this connection.[15] Subject from childhood to fits of deep depression, and presenting in later life symptoms suggestive of epilepsy, Ansel Bourne was struck down in his thirty-first year by what was supposed to be a severe sunstroke. Connected with this event were circumstances which led to a profound religious conversion. At sixty-one years of age, being at that time an itinerant preacher, and living in the small town of Greene, in the State of Rhode Island, Ansel Bourne disappeared one morning, whilst apparently in his usual state of health, and remained undiscovered for a period of two months. At the end of this time he turned up at Norristown, Pennsylvania, where for the previous six weeks he had been keeping a small variety store under the name of A. J. Brown, appearing to his neighbours and customers as an ordinary normal person, but being, as it would seem, in a somnambulistic condition all the while. When he regained his ordinary waking consciousness, Ansel Bourne lost all memory of his actions while in his secondary state. In the year 1890, however, having been hypnotised by Professor James, he was able while in the trance state to give an account of his doings during the eight weeks that the Brown personality lasted.

In this case it is perhaps safest to regard the 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 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 latter 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.

Next we may mention two cases reported by Dr. Proust and M. Boeteau. Dr. Proust's patient,[16] Emile X., aged thirty-three, was a barrister in Paris. Although of good ability and education in classical studies, both as a boy and at the university he was always nervous and over sensitive, showing signs, in fact, of la grande hystérie. During his attacks he apparently underwent no loss of consciousness, but would lose the memory of all his past life during a few minutes or a few days, and in this condition of secondary consciousness would lead an active and apparently normal life. From such a state he woke suddenly, and was entirely without memory of what had happened to him in this secondary state. This memory was, however, restored by hypnotism.

M. Boeteau's patient, Marie M.,[17] had been subject to hysterical attacks since she was twelve years old. She became an out-patient at the Hôpital Andral for these attacks: and on April 24, 1891, being then twenty-two years old, the house physician there advised her to enter the surgical ward at the Hôtel-Dieu, as she would probably need an operation for an internal trouble. Greatly shocked by this news, she left the hospital at ten A.M., and lost consciousness. When she recovered consciousness she found herself in quite another hospital—that of Ste. Anne—at six A.M. on April 27. She had been found wandering in the streets of Paris, in the evening of the day on which she left the Hôpital Andral. On returning to herself, she could recollect absolutely nothing of what had passed in the interval. While she was thus perplexed at her unexplained fatigue and footsoreness, and at the gap in her memory, M. Boeteau hypnotised her. She passed with ease into the hypnotic state, and at once remembered the events which filled at least the earlier part of the gap in her primary consciousness.

These two cases 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.