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KNOWLEDGE. 



July, 1913. 



is often found that these curiously endowed people 

 can solve in a few seconds — and sometimes almost 

 instantaneously — problems which would utterly 

 baffle most ordinarily educated people, and which 

 would take an average arithmetician a quarter of an 

 hour's rapid work with pencil and paper. Yet these 

 prodigies — who, by the way, are often, like Dase, 

 Buxton and Mondeux, of very low mental power so 

 far as their normal faculties are concerned — are 

 entirely unable to tell how they do it. They do 

 not consciously work the sum out. They let it 

 sink into their minds and then wait for the answer 

 to be shot up. It is like putting the plum-pudding 

 into the geyser to be boiled ; or like putting the pig 

 into the Chicago machine. It goes in pig and 

 comes out sausages. The intermediate processes 

 are hidden from us. The calculation is made 

 subliminally — below the threshold of ordinary 

 consciousness. 



Subliminal Memory. — The results of hypnotic 

 experiment and of the study of pathological cases 

 of split personality (such as Dr. Morton Prince's 

 Miss Beauchamp) are sufficient to prove beyond 

 question that the subliminal memory is wider than 

 the normal one. Many things which we " forget " 

 seem to slip down below the threshold, thus 

 becoming lost to ordinary consciousness, but 

 remaining accessible by hypnotic methods. Or it 

 sometimes happens that they are recovered in sleep, 

 when the conscious self is in abeyance, and the 

 other strata of the mind come to the top. Or they 

 turn up in automatic writing with planchette or a 

 pencil. In a recent striking case, reported to the 

 Society for Psychical Research, an automatic writer 

 had communications from a " spirit," who called 

 herself Blanche Poynings, and gave a great deal of 

 historical detail which the automatist did not con- 

 sciously know. But it was afterwards found that 

 Blanche Poynings was a character in a novel which 

 the automatist had had read to her many years 

 before, and the novel contained all the historical 

 details given. All this had been " forgotten." It 

 had slipped down below the threshold. But the 

 subliminal strata still retained it and could produce 

 it (in the usual mystifying spirit style) when tapped 

 by a borehole, sunk, so to speak, through the 

 upper level of consciousness, by means of automatic 

 writing. 



Subliminal Emotion. — This is a reality also, 

 though perhaps less provable. An interesting 

 example of the necessary evidence occurred in 

 Mrs. Verrall's experience with automatic writing 

 some time ago. [Mrs. Verrall is a classical lecturer 

 at Cambridge ; translator of " Pausanias " ; widow 

 of Dr. A. W. Verrall, late King Edward Seventh 

 Professor of English Literature.] This automatist, 

 without experiencing conscious emotion, found the 

 tears running down her face when she roused herself 

 from a semi-conscious state in which she had been 

 writing automatically. The script, on examination, 

 turned out to contain references to two friends who 



had died under tragic circumstances ; but Mrs. 

 Verrall was quite unaware of the contents of the 

 script until she had read it. Evidently some part 

 of the mind was not only thinking and remembering 

 and making the fingers write without conscious 

 direction, but was also feeling and suffering, and 

 making the eyes overflow without the conscious 

 mind knowing why. (Proceedings S. P. R., XX., p. 15.) 



Subliminal Creation. — This is the best proved of 

 all, for most of us prove it for ourselves every 

 night. In dreams every one of us becomes novelist 

 or dramatist, inventing situations — usually absurd 

 to the waking mind — which are absolutely novel in 

 our experience. And, to step at once to the higher 

 plane, it can be said, without fear of contradiction, 

 that all works of genius, all creations, are uprushes 

 from subliminal depths. They are not produced by 

 taking thought. The process is felt to be quite 

 different from that of the faculty which thinks and 

 reasons consciously. It is more a waiting than a 

 working. " All is as if given," said Goethe. (Alles 

 ist als ivie geschenkt.) The inspiration comes from 

 below the threshold. Many great writers amply 

 bear out Goethe's dictum. Ibsen wrote " Brand " 

 in three weeks in a state of feverish exaltation, 

 scrambling out of bed to write down, half asleep, 

 the lines which rose tumultuously to the surface of 

 his mind. Charlotte Bronte could write freely on 

 some days, while at other times the story hung fire 

 for weeks at a time, refusing to unroll itself ; then a 

 volcanic burst, and she would write furiously until 

 she was ill with the strain. In her preface to 

 Emily's " Wuthering Heights," discussing the Tight- 

 ness of creating such characters as Heathcliff, she 

 states the case in unsurpassed language : — 



" But this I know ; the writer who possesses the creative 

 gift owns something of which he is not always master — some- 

 thing that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. He 

 may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and 

 principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection ; and then, 

 haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when 

 it will no longer consent to ' harrow the valleys, or be bound 

 with a band in the furrow ' — when it ' laughs at the multitude 

 of the city, and regards not the crying of the driver '—when, 

 refusing absolutely to make ropes out of sea-sand any longer, 

 it sets to work on statue-hewing, and you have a Pluto or a 

 Jove, a Tisiphone or a Psyche, a Mermaid or a Madonna, as 

 Fate or Inspiration direct. Be the work grim or glorious, 

 dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent 

 adoption. As for you — the nominal artist — your share in it 

 has been to work passively under dictates you neither 

 delivered nor could question — that would not be uttered at 

 your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice. If 

 the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little 

 deserve praise ; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame 

 you, who almost as little deserve blame." 



This would be endorsed by Scott, who dictated 

 " The Bride of Lammermoor " while ill and in an 

 abnormal mental state, and found a great part of the 

 story quite new to him when he read it in the book. 

 Also by Stevenson, who tells us that he wrote 

 fifteen chapters of " Treasure Island " in fifteen 

 days, then stuck completely ; " my mouth was 

 empty ; there was not one word of ' Treasure Island ' 

 in my bosom " ; but again the tide rose, " and 



