384 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



research, reagents like litmus paper or the galvanometer, for revealing 

 what would otherwise be hidden. These are so many ways of putting 

 the Subliminal on tap. Of course without the simultaneous work on 

 hypnotism and hysteria independently begun by others, he could not 

 have pushed his own work so far. But he is so far the only 

 generalizer of the problem and the only user of all the methods; 

 and even though his theory of the extent of the Subliminal should 

 have to be subverted in the end, its formulation will, I am sure, 

 figure always as a rather momentous event in the history of our 

 science. 



Any psychologist who should wish to read Myers out of the pro- 

 fession — and there are probably still some who would be glad to do so 

 to-day — is committed to a definite alternative. Either he must say 

 that we knew all about the subliminal region before Myers took it up, 

 or he must say that it is certain that states of super-normal cognition 

 form no part of its content. The first contention would be too absurd. 

 The second one remains more plausible. There are many first-hand 

 investigators into the Subliminal who, not having themselves met with 

 anything super-normal, would probably not hesitate to call all the re- 

 ports of it erroneous, and who would limit the Subliminal to dissolutive 

 phenomena of consciousness exclusively, to lapsed memories, sub- 

 conscious sensations, impulses and phobias, and the like. Messrs. Janet 

 and Binet, for aught I know, may hold some such position as this. 

 Against it Myers's thesis would stand sharply out. Of the Subliminal, 

 he would say, we can give no ultra-simple account: there are discrete 

 regions in it, levels separated by critical points of transition, and no 

 one formula holds true of them all. And any conscientious psycholo- 

 gist ought, it seems to me, to see that, since these multiple modifica- 

 tions of personality are only beginning to be reported and observed 

 with care, it is obvious that a dogmatically negative treatment of them 

 must be premature, and that the problem of Myers still awaits us as 

 the problem of far the deepest moment for our actual psychology, 

 whether his own tentative solutions of certain parts of it be correct 

 or not. 



Meanwhile, descending to detail, one cannot help admiring the great 

 originality with which Myers wove such an extraordinarily detached 

 and discontinuous series of phenomena together. Unconscious cerebra- 

 tion, dreams, hypnotism, hysteria, inspirations of genius, the willing- 

 game, planchette, crystal-gazing, hallucinatory voices, apparitions of 

 the dying, medium-trances, demoniacal possession, clairvoyance, 

 thought-transference — even ghosts and other facts more doubtful — 

 these things form a chaos at first sight most discouraging. No wonder 

 that scientists can think of no other principle of unity among them 

 than their common appeal to men's perverse propensity to superstition. 



