1895.] Psychology. 505 
associated, may be regarded as representing an earlier stage in the 
consciousness of the individual, and even, it may be, an earlier stage in 
the history of the race. The readiest means of summoning into activ- 
ity this subterranean consciousness is in the hypnotic trance. Now, 
the consciousness displayed by the hypnotized subject includes, as a 
rule, the whole of the normal consciousness, and also extends beyond 
it. That is, the hypnotized subject is aware, not only of what goes on 
in the trance, but also of his normal life: when awakened, the events 
of the trance have passed from his memory and are not revived until 
the next period of trance. Our work-a-day consciousness would ap- 
pear to be, in fact, a selection from a much larger field of potential 
consciousness. Or, to put it in another way, the pressure on the narrow 
limits of our working consciousness is so great that ideas and sensa- 
tions are continually being crowded out and forced down below the 
threshhold. The subliminal consciousness thus becomes the receptacle 
of lapsed memories and sensations; and up to a certain point in the 
history of each individual these lapsed ideas can be temporarily re- 
vived. Long forgotten memories of childhood, for instance, can be 
resuscitated in the hypnotic trance, and ideas which have demonstra- 
bly never penetrated into consciousness at all can be brought to light 
by crystal vision, planchette-writing and other automatic processes. 
“ Again, one of the most marked characteristics of the subliminal 
consciousness, whether in dream, hypnosis, spontaneous trance, or in 
crystal vision and other automatism, is its power of visualization—a 
power which, as Mr. Galton has shown, and our daily experience 
proves, tends to become aborted in later life. And beyond these indi- 
cations of memories lost and imagery crowded out in the lifetime of the 
individual, we come across traces of faculties which have long ceased 
to obey the guidance or minister to the needs of civilized man—the 
psychological lumber of many generations ago. Such, at least, it may 
be suggested, is a possible interpretation of the control frequently ex- 
ercised by the hypnotic over the processes of digestion and circulation 
and the functions of the organic life generally. And the more doubt- 
ful observations, which seem to indicate the posséssion, by the sub-con- 
scious life, of a sense of the passage of time and of a muscular sense 
superior to that of the waking state, may be held to point in the same 
direction. 
“ From such facts and such analogies as these it may be argued that 
telepathy is, perchance, the relic of a once serviceable faculty which 
eked out the primitive language of gesture, and held to bind our an- 
cestors of the cave or the tree in, as yet, inarticulate community. Dr. 
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