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mental achievement. To the savage, indeed, this 

 power of classification is so mysterious that from the 

 spoken word, to us indicating a class association, 

 springs the idea of a mystic or divine unity, binding 

 together in blood-relationship all the members of that 

 class. Hence comes tabu, and perhaps a tutelary 

 deity. The continued fascination of the concept of 

 class is seen passing from Plato and Aristotle to the 

 Scholastics of the Middle Ages. 



Besides our conscious mental processes, a subliminal 

 mind may be traced, working " sub limine " beneath 

 the threshold. At length the phenomena of trance, 

 of hypnotism, of suggestion, of multiple personality, 

 are being submitted to scientific examination. The 

 results of these researches are not confined to the 

 special states inquired into ; they throw light also 

 on our normal psychological processes and are in- 

 timately connected with the phenomena now being 

 investigated in " psychical research." To some ob- 

 servers recent experiments appear to reveal direct 

 thought-transference from mind to mind, and even 

 to suggest the continued existence of the spirits of 

 the dead, and the possibility of difficult, but still in- 

 telligible, intercourse between them and the living. 

 We seem to return to the " aerial " and " terrestrial " 

 states of the soul, outlined by the Cambridge Christian 

 Platonists of the late seventeenth century, and to be 

 testing some of their theories of possible intercom- 

 munication between the two conditions. 



The realization of the importance of conscious and 

 subconscious association of ideas is helping us to 

 understand in a new way many dark phases of human 

 life and society. We find that our social, political and 



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