THE SUBLIMINAL SELVES 289 



bearing on the question of the nature and origin of 

 sexual display, and whether there is or is not, 

 amongst certain birds, an intersexual selection, but 

 that some of those odd facts, such as dual or multi- 

 plex personality, which have been made too ex- 

 clusively the subject of psychical research — or rather 

 of psychical societies — may receive, through them, 

 a truer explanation than that suggested by the 

 hypothesis of the subliminal self, in that they 

 may help us to see the true nature of that part 

 of us to which this name has been applied. Surely 

 if both the male and the female bird act, in an 

 important office for the performance of which they 

 are structurally distinct, as though they were one 

 and the same, this proves that the nature of either 

 sex, though, for the most part, it may lie latent in 

 the opposite one, must yet reside equally in each. 

 Here, then, we have a subliminal element, but as this 

 can only have been passed on, through individuals in 

 the bird's ancestral line, by the ordinary laws of 

 inheritance, is it not likely that other characteristics 

 which seldom, or perhaps never, emerge, have also 

 been passed on, in the same way, thus making many 

 subliminal selves, instead of one subliminal self, 

 merely.^ Of what, indeed, is any self — is any 

 personality — made up, but of those countless ones 

 which have gone before it, in the direct line of its 

 ancestry ^. What is any bird or beast but a blend 

 between its parents, their parents, and the parents 

 before those parents, going back to the beginnings of 

 life .? But that much — more, probably, than nineteen 

 twentieths — of this complicated mosaic lies latent, is 

 an admitted fact both in physiology and psychology, 



