FREDERIC MYERS. 385 



Yet Myers has actually made a system of them, stringing them con- 

 tinuously upon a perfectly legitimate objective hypothesis, verified in 

 some cases and extended to others by analogy. Taking the name 

 automatism from the phenomenon of automatic writing — I am not sure 

 that he may not himself have been the first so to baptize this latter 

 phenomenon — he made one great simplification at a stroke by treating 

 hallucinations and active impulses under a common head, as sensory 

 and motor automatisms. Automatism he then conceived broadly as a 

 message of any kind from the Subliminal to the Supraliminal. And he 

 went a step farther in his hypothetic interpretation, when he insisted 

 on 'symbolism' as one of the ways in which one stratum of our per- 

 sonality will often interpret the influences of another. Obsessive 

 thoughts and delusions, as well as voices, visions, and impulses, thus 

 fall subject to one mode of treatment. To explain them, we must 

 explore the Subliminal; to cure them we must practically influence it. 



Myers's work on automatism led to his brilliant conception, in 1891, 

 of hysteria. He defined it, with good reasons given, as "a disease of 

 the hypnotic stratum." Hardly had he done so when the wonderfully 

 ingenious observations of Binet, and especially of Janet in France, gave 

 to this view the completest of corroborations. These observations have 

 been extended in Germany, America, and elsewhere; and although 

 Binet and Janet worked independently of Myers, and did work far 

 more objective, he nevertheless will stand as the original announcer 

 of a theory which, in my opinion, makes an epoch, not only in 

 medical, but in psychological science, because it brings in an entirely 

 new conception of our mental possibilities. 



Myers's manner of apprehending the problem of the Subliminal 

 shows itself fruitful in every possible direction. While official science 

 practically refuses to attend to Subliminal phenomena, the circles 

 which do attend to them treat them with a respect altogether too undis- 

 criminating — every Subliminal deliverance must be an oracle. The 

 result is that there is no basis of intercourse between those who best 

 know the facts and those who are most competent to discuss them. 

 Myers immediately establishes a basis by his remark that in so far as 

 they have to use the same organism, with its preformed avenues of ex- 

 pression — what may be very different strata of the Subliminal are 

 condemned in advance to manifest themselves in similar ways. This 

 might account for the great generic likeness of so many automatic 

 performances, while their different starting points behind the threshold 

 might account for certain differences in them. Some of them, namely, 

 seem to include elements of supernormal knowledge; others to show a 

 curious subconscious mania for personation and deception; others 

 again to be mere drivel. But Myers's conception of various strata or 

 levels in the Subliminal sets us to analyzing them all from a new point 



VOL. LIX. — 26 



