FREDERIC MYERS. 387 



and integrate still farther, or evolve by growing into yet untried direc- 

 tions. In veridical automatisms it actually seems to do so. It drops 

 some of its usual modes of increase, its ordinary use of the senses, for 

 example, and lays hold of bits of information which, in ways that we 

 cannot even follow conjecturally, leak into it by way of the Subliminal. 

 The ulterior source of a certain part of this information (limited and 

 perverted as it always is by the organism's idiosyncrasies in the way 

 of transmission and expression) Myers thought he could reasonably 

 trace to departed human intelligence, or its existing equivalent. I pre- 

 tend to no opinion on this point, for I have as yet studied the evidence 

 with so little critical care that Myers was always surprised at my negli- 

 gence. I can therefore speak with detachment from this question and, 

 as a mere empirical psychologist, of Myers's general evolutionary 

 conception. As such a psychologist I feel sure that the latter is a 

 hypothesis of first-rate philosophic importance. It is based, of course, 

 on his conviction of the extent of the Subliminal, and will stand or fall 

 as that is verified or not; but whether it stand or fall, it looks to me 

 like one of those sweeping ideas by which the scientific researches of 

 an entire generation are often moulded. It would not be suprising 

 if it proved such a leading idea in the investigation of the near future ; 

 for in one shape or another, the Subliminal has come to stay with us, 

 and the only possible course to take henceforth is radically and 

 thoroughly to explore its significance. 



Looking back from Frederic Myers's vision of vastness in the field 

 of psychological research upon the programme as most academic 

 psychologists frame it, one must confess that its limitation at their 

 hands seems not only unplausible, but, in truth, a little ridiculous. 

 Even with brutes and madmen, even with hysterics and hypnotics 

 admitted as the academic psychologists admit them, the official out- 

 lines of the subject are far too neat to stand in the light of analogy 

 with the rest of nature. The ultimates of nature — her simple ele- 

 ments, if there be such — may indeed combine in definite proportions 

 and follow classic laws of architecture; but in her proximates, in her 

 phenomena as we immediately experience them, nature is everywhere 

 gothic, not classic. She forms a real jungle, where all things are pro- 

 visional, half -fitted to each other, and untidy. When we add such a 

 complex kind of subliminal region as Myers believed in to the official 

 region, we restore the analogy; and, though we may be mistaken in 

 much detail, in a general way, at least, we become plausible. In com- 

 parison with Myers's way of attacking the question of immortality in 

 particular, the official way is certainly so far from the mark as to be 

 almost preposterous. It assumes that when our ordinary consciousness 

 goes out, the only alternative surviving kind of consciousness that 

 could be possible is abstract mentality, living on spiritual truth, and 



