284 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE 



must be made, if the road is not inexorably barred to 

 human penetration. 



The inquiry is concentrated upon the spiritual part 

 of the human animal. ' Human personality, as it has de- 

 veloped from lowly ancestors, has become differentiated 

 into two phases: one of them mainly adapted to 

 material or planetary — the other to spiritual or cosmic 

 operation ' ; and he proceeds upon the assumption that 

 the first is the * self of -which every human being, from 

 the West Australian savage to the veriest inondaine, 

 is conscious ; and that the second is a subliminal self, 

 withdrawn from normal consciousness, below or behind 

 the natural man or woman, distinct from the workaday 

 intellect, and beyond the control of the will except so 

 far as the individual may* deliberately suppress its 

 monitions.^ Now I have neither the wish nor the 

 power to pronounce whether Mr. Myers's conclusions 

 are soundly deduced from accumulated and well-sifted 

 evidence, or whether they should be dismissed as plaus- 

 ible and seductive hypotheses. But I will go so far as 

 to suggest that, supposing Mr. Myers to have touched 

 a clue which may lead to proof of the existence of a 

 subliminal self — the receptacle of the spirit of man — 

 and that this spirit, as has been firmly believed by 

 many persons of all ages, is sensible of and obedient to 

 the promptings, injunctions, and warnings of an exter- 

 nal Power, further research may identify in creatures 

 lower than man a subliminal self, similar in function 



' The moat primitive races act in the belief that there is part of a 

 man's being beyond his body and his mind. Some of them dread 

 suddenly rousing a person from his sleep, lest his soul be wandering, 

 and, being unable to return in time, de^ith should ^nsue iiqm^diately. 



