386 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of view. The word Subliminal for him denotes only a region, with 

 possibly the most heterogeneous contents. Much of the content is cer- 

 tainly rubbish, matter that Myers calls dissolutive, stuff that dreams 

 are made of, fragments of lapsed memory, mechanical effects of habit 

 and ordinary suggestion ; some belongs to a middle region where a 

 strange manufacture of inner romances perpetually goes on; finally, 

 some of the content appears superiorly and subtly perceptive. But each 

 has to appeal to us by the same channels and to use organs partly 

 trained to their performance by messages from the other levels. Under 

 these conditions what could be more natural to expect than a confusion, 

 which Myers's suggestion would then have been the first indispensable 

 step towards finally clearing away. 



Once more, then, whatever be the upshot of the patient work 

 required here, Myers's resourceful intellect has certainly done a service 

 to psychology. 



I said a while ago that his intellect was not by nature philosophic in 

 the narrower sense of being that of a logician. In the broader sense 

 of being a man of wide scientific imagination, Myers was most 

 eminently a philosopher. He has shown this by his unusually daring 

 grasp of the principle of evolution, and by the wonderful way in which 

 he has worked out suggestions of mental evolution by means of bio- 

 logical analogies. These analogies are, if anything, too profuse and 

 dazzling in his pages; but his conception of mental evolution is more 

 radical than anything yet considered by psychologists as possible. It 

 is absolutely original; and, being so radical, it becomes one of those 

 hypotheses which, once propounded, can never be forgotten, but soon 

 or later have to be worked out and submitted in every way to criticism 

 and verification. 



The corner-stone of his conception is the fact that consciousness has 

 no essential unity. It aggregates and dissipates, and what we call 

 normal consciousness — the 'Human Mind' of classic psychology — is 

 not even typical, but only one case out of thousands. Slight organic 

 alterations, intoxications and auto-intoxications, give supraliminal 

 forms completely different, and the subliminal region seems to have 

 laws in many respects peculiar. Myers thereupon makes the sugges- 

 tion that the whole system of consciousness studied by the classic 

 psychology is only an extract from a larger total, being a part told off, 

 as it were, to do service in the adjustments of our physical organism to 

 the world of nature. This extract, aggregated and personified for this 

 particular purpose, has, like all evolving things, a variety of peculiari- 

 ties. Having evolved, it may also dissolve, and in dreams, hysteria, and 

 divers forms of degeneration it vseems to do so. This is a retrograde 

 process of separation in a consciousness of which the unity was once 

 effected. But again the consciousness may follow the opposite course 



