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Title: Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death

Author: F. W. H. Myers

Editor: L. H. Myers

Release date: January 3, 2012 [eBook #38492]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUMAN
PERSONALITY AND ITS SURVIVAL OF BODILY DEATH ***

HUMAN PERSONALITY

AND ITS SURVIVAL OF
BODILY DEATH
BY
FREDERIC W. H. MYERS

EDITED AND ABRIDGED
BY HIS SON
LEOPOLD HAMILTON MYERS

Cessas in vota procesque,
Tros, ait, Aenea, cessas? Neque enim ante dehiscent
Adtonitœ magna ora domus.—VIRGIL.
"Nay!" quoth the Sybil, "Trojan! wilt thou spare
The impassioned effort and the conquering prayer?
Nay! not save thus those doors shall open roll,—
That Power within them burst upon the soul."

NEW IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH
STREET, NEW YORK BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1918

COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
——
All rights reserved

First Edition, December, 1906
Reprinted, March, 1907
October, 1909; April, 1913
August, 1917; April, 1918

THE PLIMPTON PRESS
NORWOOD·MASS·U·S·A

DEDICATED
TO
HENRY SIDGWICK
AND
EDMUND GURNEY

CONTENTS
PAGE
EDITOR'S NOTE vii
PREFACE ix
GLOSSARY xiii
CHAP.
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. DISINTEGRATIONS OF PERSONALITY 26
III. GENIUS 55
IV. SLEEP 93
V. HYPNOTISM 116
VI. SENSORY AUTOMATISM 168
VII. PHANTASMS OF THE DEAD 212
VIII. MOTOR AUTOMATISM 254

IX. TRANCE, POSSESSION, AND ECSTASY 297
X. EPILOGUE 340
APPENDICES TO CHAPTER II 356
APPENDICES TO CHAPTER IV 364
APPENDICES TO CHAPTER V 378
APPENDICES TO CHAPTER VI 384
APPENDICES TO CHAPTER VII 400
APPENDICES TO CHAPTER VIII 430
APPENDICES TO CHAPTER IX 441
INDEX 453

EDITOR'S NOTE
NEARLY four years have elapsed since the first appearance of my Father's
book "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death." It cost two
guineas and was published in two volumes, each of which was little under
700 pages in length.
The price and dimensions of such a work made the future issue of a more
popular edition not improbable. Indeed, my Father himself indicated briefly
the lines on which an abridgment could best be made. In accordance with
his indications I have endeavoured to keep as closely as possible to the
original scheme and construction of the book.
The task of abridging, however, must always be an ungrateful one. It is
inevitable that somewhere or other I should disappoint the reader who,
already acquainted with the unabridged edition, finds some admired
passage curtailed in favour of others that are to him of secondary interest.
This I cannot avoid. All I can hope to do is so to reconcile the principles of
omission and condensation as least to do violence to the style while
preserving as far as possible the completeness of the exposition.
One half of each volume in the unabridged edition consists of appendices
containing examples of the various kinds of phenomena discussed and
analyzed in the text. It has been possible to reduce considerably the number
of these cases without, I think, detracting much from the value of the work
for the purposes of the ordinary reader. Those cases, however, which are
included in this edition are quoted in full, an abridged version having very
little value.
It must be remembered that the author in his preface insists that "the book
is an exposition rather than a proof," and the remark naturally applies with
even greater force to this abridgment. Here the cases must be regarded
simply as illustrative of the different types of the evidence upon which in its
entirety the argument of the book ultimately rests.
The reader who may feel disposed to study this evidence will find
numerous references given in the foot-notes. The cases, however, to which
he is thus referred are scattered in many different publications, some of

which will probably be less easy of access than the unabridged edition. In
the many instances, therefore, where a case is quoted in the latter its place
therein is indicated by means of a number or a number and letter in square
brackets, thus [434 A]: these being in accordance with the plan of
arrangement observed in the larger book.

I wish to express my sincere thanks to Miss Alice Johnson, who very
kindly read over the whole of the proof of this abridgment. I have profited
largely by her advice as well as from that given me by Miss Jane Barlow, to
whom my thanks are also due.
L. H. M.

PREFACE
[This unfinished preface consists of several passages written at different times by the author, who
died on January 17th, 1901. In 1896 he arranged that the completion of his book should be in the
hands of Dr. Richard Hodgson in case of his death before its publication. In the meantime he had
entrusted the general supervision of the press work and much of the detail in marshalling the
Appendices to Miss Alice Johnson (now Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research), who was
therefore associated with Dr. Hodgson also in the editorial work needed for the completion of the
book, and much the greater part of the labour involved fell to her share.]

THE book which is now at last given to the world is but a partial
presentation of an ever-growing subject which I have long hoped to become
able to treat in more adequate fashion. But as knowledge increases life rolls
by, and I have thought it well to bring out while I can even this most
imperfect text-book to a branch of research whose novelty and strangeness
call urgently for some provisional systematisation, which, by suggesting
fresh inquiries and producing further accumulation of evidence, may tend as
speedily as possible to its own supersession. Few critics of this book can, I
think, be more fully conscious than its author of its defects and its lacunæ;
but also few critics, I think, have yet realised the importance of the new
facts which in some fashion the book does actually present.
Many of these facts have already appeared in Phantasms of the Living;
many more in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research; but
they are far indeed from having yet entered into the scientific consciousness
of the age. In future years the wonder, I think, will be that their
announcement was so largely left to a writer with leisure so scanty, and with
scientific equipment so incomplete.
Whatever value this book may possess is in great measure due to other
minds than its actual author's. Its very existence, in the first place, probably
depends upon the existence of the two beloved friends and invaluable
coadjutors to whose memory I dedicate it now.
The help derived from these departed colleagues, Henry Sidgwick and
Edmund Gurney, although of a kind and quantity absolutely essential to the
existence of this work, is not easy to define in all its fulness under the
changed circumstances of to-day. There was indeed much which is
measurable;—much of revision of previous work of my own, of

collaborative experiments, of original thought and discovery. Large
quotations purposely introduced from Edmund Gurney indicate, although
imperfectly, how closely interwoven our work on all these subjects
continued to be until his death. But the benefit which I drew from the
association went deeper still. The conditions under which this inquiry was
undertaken were such as to emphasise the need of some intimate moral
support. A recluse, perhaps, or an eccentric,—or a man living mainly with
his intellectual inferiors, may find it easy to work steadily and confidently
at a task which he knows that the bulk of educated men will ignore or
despise. But this is more difficult for a man who feels manifold links with
his kind, a man whose desire it is to live among minds equal or superior to
his own. It is hard, I say, for such a man to disregard altogether the
expressed or implied disapproval of those groups of weighty personages to
whom in other matters he is accustomed to look up.
I need not say that the attitude of the scientific world—of all the
intellectual world—then was very much more marked than now. Even now
I write in full consciousness of the low value commonly attached to
inquiries of the kind which I pursue. Even now a book on such a subject
must still expect to evoke, not only legitimate criticism of many kinds, but
also much of that disgust and resentment which novelty and heterodoxy
naturally excite. But I have no wish to exalt into a deed of daring an
enterprise which to the next generation must seem the most obvious thing in
the world. Nihil ausi nisi vana contemnere will certainly be the highest
compliment which what seemed to us our bold independence of men will
receive. Yet gratitude bids me to say that however I might in the privacy of
my own bosom have 'dared to contemn things contemptible,' I should never
have ventured my amateurish acquirements on a publication of this scale
were it not for that slow growth of confidence which my respect for the
judgment of these two friends inspired. Their countenance and fellowship,
which at once transformed my own share in the work into a delight, has
made its presentation to the world appear as a duty.
My thanks are due also to another colleague who has passed away, my
brother, Dr. A. T. Myers, F.R.C.P., who helped me for many years in all
medical points arising in the work.
To the original furnishers of the evidence my obligations are great and
manifest, and to the Council of the S.P.R. I also owe thanks for permission
to use that evidence freely. But I must leave it to the book itself to indicate

in fuller detail how much is owing to how many men and women:—how
widely diffused are the work and the interest which have found in this book
their temporary outcome and exposition.
The book, indeed, is an exposition rather than a proof. I cannot summarise
within my modest limits the mass of evidence already gathered together in
the sixteen volumes of Proceedings and the nine volumes of the Journal of
the S.P.R., in Phantasms of the Living and other books hereafter referred to,
and in MS. collections. The attempt indeed would be quite out of place.
This branch of knowledge, like others, must be studied carefully and in
detail by those who care to understand or to advance it.
What I have tried to do here is to render that knowledge more assimilable
by co-ordinating it in a form as clear and intelligible as my own limited
skill and the nature of the facts themselves have permitted. I have tried to
give, in text and in Appendices, enough of actual evidence to illustrate each
step in my argument:—and I have constantly referred the reader to places
where further evidence will be found.
In minor matters I have aimed above all things at clearness and readiness
in reference. The division of the book into sections, with Appendices
bearing the same numbers, will, it is hoped, facilitate the use both of
syllabus and of references in general. I have even risked the appearance of
pedantry in adding a glossary. Where many unfamiliar facts and ideas have
to be dealt with, time is saved in the end if the writer explains precisely
what his terms mean.
.........................
F. W. H. MYERS.

GLOSSARY
Note.—The words and phrases here included fall under three main heads:—
(1) Words common only in philosophical or medical use.
(2) Words or phrases used in psychical research with some special significance.
(3) A few words, distinguished by an asterisk, for which the author is himself responsible.

Aboulia.—Loss of power of willing.
After-image.—A retinal picture of an object seen after removing the gaze
from the object.
Agent.—The person who seems to initiate a telepathic transmission.
Agraphia.—Lack of power to write words.
Alexia or Word-blindness.—Lack of power to understand words written.
Anæsthesia, or the loss of sensation generally, must be distinguished from
analgesia, or the loss of the sense of pain alone.
Analgesia.—Insensibility to pain.
Aphasia.—Incapacity of coherent utterance, not caused by structural
impairment of the vocal organs, but by lesion of the cerebral centres for
speech.
Aphonia.—Incapacity of uttering sounds.
Automatic.—Used of mental images arising and movements made without
the initiation, and generally without the concurrence, of conscious thought
and will. Sensory automatism will thus include visual and auditory
hallucinations. Motor automatism will include messages written and words
uttered without intention (automatic script, trance-utterance, etc.).
Automnesia.—Spontaneous revival of memories of an earlier condition of
life.
Autoscope.—Any instrument which reveals a subliminal motor impulse or
sensory impression, e.g., a divining rod, a tilting table, or a planchette.
Bilocation.—The sensation of being in two different places at once,
namely where one's organism is, and in a place distant from it.
Catalepsy.—"An intermittent neurosis producing inability to change the
position of a limb, while another person can place the muscles in a state of

flexion or contraction as he will." (Tuke's Dictionary of Psychological
Medicine.)
Centre of Consciousness.—The place where a percipient imagines himself
to be. The point of view from which he seems to himself to be surveying
some phantasmal scene.
Chromatism.—See Secondary Sensations.
Clair-audience.—The sensation of hearing an internal (but in some way
veridical) voice.
Clairvoyance (Lucidité).—The faculty or act of perceiving, as though
visually, with some coincidental truth, some distant scene.
Cænesthesia.—That consensus or agreement of many organic sensations
which is a fundamental element in our conception of personal identity.
Control.—This word is used of the intelligence which purports to
communicate messages which are written or uttered by the automatist,
sensitive or medium.
*Cosmopathic.—Open to the access of supernormal knowledge or
emotion.
Cryptomnesia.—Submerged or subliminal memory of events forgotten by
the supraliminal self.
*Dextro-cerebral (opposed to *Sinistro-cerebral) of left-handed persons
as employing preferentially the right hemisphere of the brain.
Diathesis.—Habit, capacity, constitutional disposition or tendency.
Dimorphism.—In crystals the property of assuming two incompatible
forms: in plants and animals, difference of form between members of the
same species. Used of a condition of alternating personalities, in which
memory, character, etc., present themselves at different times in different
forms in the same person.
Discarnate.—Disembodied, opposed to incarnate.
Disintegration of Personality.—Used of any condition where the sense of
personality is not unitary and continuous: especially when secondary and
transitory personalities intervene.
Dynamogeny.—The increase of nervous energy by appropriate stimuli,
often opposed to inhibition.
Ecmnesia.—Loss of memory of a period of time.

*Entencephalic.—On the analogy of entoptic: of sensations, etc., which
have their origin within the brain, not in the external world.
Eugenics.—The science of improving the race.
Falsidical.—Of hallucinations delusive, i.e., when there is nothing
objective to which they correspond. The correlative term to veridical.
Glossolaly.—"Speaking with tongues," i.e., automatic utterance of words
not belonging to any real language.
Hallucination.—Any sensory perception which has no objective
counterpart within the field of vision, hearing, etc., is termed a
hallucination.
Heteræsthesia.—A form of sensibility decidedly different from any of
those which can be referred to the action of the known senses.
Hyperboulia.—Increased power over the organism,—resembling the
power which we call will when it is exercised over the voluntary muscles,—
which is seen in the bodily changes effected by self-suggestion.
Hyperæsthesia.—Unusual acuteness of the senses.
Hypermnesia.—"Over-activity of the memory; a condition in which past
acts, feelings, or ideas are brought vividly to the mind, which, in its normal
condition, has wholly lost the remembrance of them." (Tuke's Dict.)
*Hyperpromethia.—Supernormal power of foresight.
Hypnagogic.—Illusions hypnagogiques (Maury) are the vivid illusions of
sight or sound—"faces in the dark," etc.—which sometimes accompany the
oncoming of sleep. To similar illusions accompanying the departure of
sleep, as when a dream-figure persists for a few moments into waking life, I
have given the name *hypnopompic.
Hypnogenous zones.—Regions by pressure on which hypnosis is induced
in some hysterical persons.
*Hypnopompic.—See Hypnagogic.
Hysteria.—"A disordered condition of the nervous system, the anatomical
seat and nature of which are unknown to medical science, but of which the
symptoms consist in well-marked and very varied disturbances of nerve-
function" (Ency. Brit.). Hysterical affections are not dependent on any
discoverable lesion.
Hysterogenous zones.—Points or tracts on the skin of a hysterical person,
pressure on which will induce a hysterical attack.

Ideational.—Used of impressions which display some distinct notion, but
not of sensory nature.
Induced.—Of hallucinations, etc., intentionally produced.
Levitation.—A raising of objects from the ground by supposed
supernormal means; especially of living persons.
Medium.—A person through whom communication is deemed to be
carried on between living men and spirits of the departed. It is often better
replaced by automatist or sensitive.
Message.—Used for any communication, not necessarily verbal, from one
to another stratum of the automatist's personality, or from an external
intelligence to the automatist's mind.
Metallæsthesia.—A form of sensibility alleged to exist which enables
some hypnotised or hysterical subjects to discriminate between the contacts
of various metals by sensations not derived from their ordinary properties of
weight, etc.
Metastasis.—Change of the seat of a bodily function from one place (e.g.,
brain-centre) to another.
*Metetherial.—That which appears to lie after or beyond the ether: the
metetherial environment denotes the spiritual or transcendental world in
which the soul may be supposed to exist.
*Methectic.—Of communications between one stratum of a man's
intelligence and another.
Mirror-writing (écriture renversée, Spiegel-schrift).—Writing so inverted,
or, more exactly, perverted, as to resemble writing reflected in a mirror.
Mnemonic chain.—A continuous series of memories, especially when the
continuity persists after an interruption.
Motor.—Used of an impulse to action not carrying with it any definite
idea or sensory impression.
Negative hallucination or systematised anæthesia.—Signifies the
condition of an entranced subject who, as the result of a suggestion, is
unable to perceive some object or to hear some sound, etc.
Number forms.—See Secondary sensations.
Objectify.—To externalize a phantom as if it were a material object; to see
it as a part of the waking world.

*Panmnesia.—A potential recollection of all impressions.
Paræsthesia.—Erroneous or morbid sensation.
Paramnesia.—All forms of erroneous memory.
Paraphasia.—The erroneous and involuntary use of one word for another.
Percipient.—The correlative term to Agent; the person on whose mind the
telepathic impact falls; or, more generally, the person who perceives any
motor or sensory impression.
Phantasm and Phantom.—Phantasm and phantom are, of course, mere
variants of the same word; but since phantom has become generally
restricted to visual hallucinations, it is convenient to take phantasm to cover
a wider range, and to signify any hallucinatory sensory impression,
whatever sense—whether sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, or diffused
sensibility—may happen to be affected.
Phantasmogenetic centre.—A point in space apparently modified by a
spirit in such a way that persons present near it perceive a phantasm.
Phobies.—Irrational restricting or disabling preoccupations or fears; e.g.,
agoraphobia, fear of open spaces.
Photism.—See Secondary sensations.
Point de repère.—Guiding mark. Used of some (generally inconspicuous)
real object which a hallucinated subject sometimes sees as the nucleus of
his hallucination, and the movements of which suggest corresponding
movements of the hallucinatory object.
Polyzoism.—The property, in a complex organism, of being composed of
minor and quasi-independent organisms. This is sometimes called "colonial
constitution," from animal colonies.
Possession.—A developed form of motor automatism, in which the
automatist's own personality disappears for a time, while there appears to be
a more or less complete substitution of personality, writing or speech being
given by another spirit through the entranced organism.
Post-hypnotic.—Used of a suggestion given during the hypnotic trance,
but intended to operate after that trance has ceased.
Precognition.—Knowledge of impending events supernormally acquired.
Premonition.—A supernormal indication of any kind of event still in the
future.

*Preversion.—A tendency to characteristics assumed to lie at a further
point of the evolutionary progress of a species than has yet been reached;
opposed to reversion.
*Promnesia.—The paradoxical sensation of recollecting a scene which is
only now occurring for the first time; the sense of the déjà vu.
*Psychorrhagy.—A special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the
phantasm of a person easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a psychical
element, definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm,
perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion of space.
*Psychorrhagic diathesis.—A habit or capacity of detaching some
psychical element, involuntarily and without purpose, in such a manner as
to produce a phantasm.
Psycho-therapeutics.—"Treatment of disease by the influence of the mind
on the body." (Tuke's Dict.)
Reciprocal.—Used of cases where there is both agency and percipience at
each end of the telepathic chain, so that A perceives P, and P perceives A
also.
*Retrocognition.—Knowledge of the past, supernormally acquired.
Secondary personality.—It sometimes happens, as the result of shock,
disease, or unknown causes, that an individual experiences an alteration of
memory and character, amounting to a change of personality, which
generally seems to have come on during sleep. The new personality is in
that case termed secondary, in distinction to the original, or primary,
personality.
Secondary sensations (Secunddrempfindungen, audition colorée, sound-
seeing, synæsthesia, etc.).—With some persons every sensation of one type
is accompanied by a sensation of another type; as for instance, a special
sound may be accompanied by a special sensation of colour or light
(chromatisms or photisms). This phenomenon is analogous to that of
number-forms,—a kind of diagrammatic mental picture which accompanies
the conception of a progression of numbers. See Galton's Inquiries into
Human Faculty.
Shell-hearing.—The induction of hallucinatory voices, etc., by listening to
a shell. Analogous to crystal-gazing.

Stigmatisation.—The production of blisters or other cutaneous changes on
the hands, feet, or elsewhere, by suggestion or self-suggestion.
Subliminal.—Of thoughts, feelings, etc., lying beneath the ordinary
threshold (limen) of consciousness, as opposed to supraliminal, lying above
the threshold.
Suggestion.—The process of effectively impressing upon the subliminal
intelligence the wishes of some other person. Self-suggestion means a
suggestion conveyed by the subject himself from one stratum of his
personality to another, without external intervention.
*Supernormal.—Of a faculty or phenomenon which transcends ordinary
experience. Used in preference to the word supernatural, as not assuming
that there is anything outside nature or any arbitrary interference with
natural law.
Supraliminal.—See Subliminal.
Synæsthesia.—See Secondary Sensations.
Synergy.—A number of actions correlated together, or combined into a
group.
Telekinesis.—Used of alleged supernormal movements of objects, not due
to any known force.
*Telepathy.—The communication of impressions of any kind from one
mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense.
*Telæsthesia.—Any direct sensation or perception of objects or conditions
independently of the recognised channels of sense, and also under such
circumstances that no known mind external to the percipient's can be
suggested as the source of the knowledge thus gained.
*Telergy.—The force exercised by the mind of an agent in impressing a
percipient,—involving a direct influence of the extraneous spirit on the
brain or organism of the percipient.
Veridical.—Of hallucinations, when they correspond to real events
happening elsewhere and unknown to the percipient.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Maior agit deus, atque opera la maiora remittit.
—VIRGIL.
IN the long story of man's endeavours to understand his own environment
and to govern his own fates, there is one gap or omission so singular that,
however we may afterwards contrive to explain the fact, its simple
statement has the air of a paradox. Yet it is strictly true to say that man has
never yet applied to the problems which most profoundly concern him those
methods of inquiry which in attacking all other problems he has found the
most efficacious.
The question for man most momentous of all is whether or no he has an
immortal soul; or—to avoid the word immortal, which belongs to the realm
of infinities—whether or no his personality involves any element which can
survive bodily death. In this direction have always lain the gravest fears, the
farthest-reaching hopes, which could either oppress or stimulate mortal
minds.
On the other hand, the method which our race has found most effective in
acquiring knowledge is by this time familiar to all men. It is the method of
modern Science—that process which consists in an interrogation of Nature
entirely dispassionate, patient, systematic; such careful experiment and
cumulative record as can often elicit from her slightest indications her
deepest truths. That method is now dominant throughout the civilised
world; and although in many directions experiments may be difficult and
dubious, facts rare and elusive, Science works slowly on and bides her time,
—refusing to fall back upon tradition or to launch into speculation, merely
because strait is the gate which leads to valid discovery, indisputable truth.
I say, then, that this method has never yet been applied to the all-important
problem of the existence, the powers, the destiny of the human soul.
Nor is this strange omission due to any general belief that the problem is
in its nature incapable of solution by any observation whatever which

mankind could make. That resolutely agnostic view—I may almost say that
scientific superstition—"ignoramus et ignorabimus"—is no doubt held at
the present date by many learned minds. But it has never been the creed,
nor is it now the creed, of the human race generally. In most civilised
countries there has been for nearly two thousand years a distinct belief that
survival has actually been proved by certain phenomena observed at a given
date in Palestine. And beyond the Christian pale—whether through reason,
instinct, or superstition—it has ever been commonly held that ghostly
phenomena of one kind or another exist to testify to a life beyond the life
we know.
But, nevertheless, neither those who believe on vague grounds nor those
who believe on definite grounds that the question might possibly be solved,
or has actually been solved, by human observation of objective facts, have
hitherto made any serious attempt to connect and correlate that belief with
the general scheme of belief for which Science already vouches. They have
not sought for fresh corroborative instances, for analogies, for explanations;
rather they have kept their convictions on these fundamental matters in a
separate and sealed compartment of their minds, a compartment
consecrated to religion or to superstition, but not to observation or to
experiment.
It is my object in the present work—as it has from the first been the object
of the Society for Psychical Research, on whose behalf most of the
evidence here set forth has been collected,—to do what can be done to
break down that artificial wall of demarcation which has thus far excluded
from scientific treatment precisely the problems which stand in most need
of all the aids to discovery which such treatment can afford.
Yet let me first explain that by the word "scientific" I signify an authority
to which I submit myself—not a standard which I claim to attain. Any
science of which I can here speak as possible must be a nascent science—
not such as one of those vast systems of connected knowledge which
thousands of experts now steadily push forward in laboratories in every
land—but such as each one of those great sciences was in its dim and poor
beginning, when a few monks groped among the properties of "the noble
metals," or a few Chaldean shepherds outwatched the setting stars.
What I am able to insist upon is the mere Socratic rudiment of these
organisms of exact thought—the first axiomatic prerequisite of any valid

progress. My one contention is that in the discussion of the deeper problems
of man's nature and destiny there ought to be exactly the same openness of
mind, exactly the same diligence in the search for objective evidence of any
kind, exactly the same critical analysis of results, as is habitually shown, for
instance, in the discussion of the nature and destiny of the planet upon
which man now moves.
Obvious truism although this statement may at first seem, it will presently
be found, I think, that those who subscribe to it are in fact committing
themselves to inquiries of a wider and stranger type than any to which they
are accustomed;—are stepping outside certain narrow limits within which,
by ancient convention, disputants on either side of these questions are
commonly confined.
A brief recall to memory of certain familiar historical facts will serve to
make my meaning clearer. Let us consider how it has come about that,
whereas the problem of man's survival of death is by most persons regarded
as a problem in its nature soluble by sufficient evidence, and whereas to
many persons the traditional evidence commonly adduced appears
insufficient,—nevertheless no serious effort has been made on either side to
discover whether other and more recent evidence can or cannot be brought
forward.
A certain broad answer to this inquiry, although it cannot be said to be at
all points familiar, is not in reality far to seek. It is an answer which would
seem strange indeed to some visitant from a planet peopled wholly by
scientific minds. Yet among a race like our own, concerned first and
primarily to live and work with thoughts undistracted from immediate
needs, the answer is natural enough. For the fact simply is that the intimate
importance of this central problem has barred the way to its methodical, its
scientific solution.
There are some beliefs for which mankind cannot afford to wait. "What
must I do to be saved?" is a question quite otherwise urgent than the cause
of the tides or the meaning of the marks on the moon. Men must settle
roughly somehow what it is that from the Unseen World they have reason to
fear or to hope. Beliefs grow up in direct response to this need of belief; in
order to support themselves they claim unique sanction; and thus along with
these specific beliefs grows also the general habit of regarding matters that

concern that Unseen World as somehow tabooed or segregated from
ordinary observation or inquiry.
Let us pass from generalities to the actual history of Western civilisation.
In an age when scattered ritual, local faiths—tribal solutions of cosmic
problems—were destroying each other by mere contact and fusion, an event
occurred which in the brief record of man's still incipient civilisation may
be regarded as unique. A life was lived in which the loftiest response which
man's need of moral guidance had ever received was corroborated by
phenomena which have been widely regarded as convincingly miraculous,
and which are said to have culminated in a Resurrection from the dead. To
those phenomena or to that Resurrection it would at this point be
illegitimate for me to refer in defence of my argument. I have appealed to
Science, and to Science I must go;—in the sense that it would be unfair for
me to claim support from that which Science in her strictness can set aside
as the tradition of a pre-scientific age. Yet this one great tradition, as we
know, has, as a fact, won the adhesion and reverence of the great majority
of European minds. The complex results which followed from this triumph
of Christianity have been discussed by many historians. But one result
which here appears to us in a new light was this—that the Christian
religion, the Christian Church, became for Europe the accredited
representative and guardian of all phenomena bearing upon the World
Unseen. So long as Christianity stood dominant, all phenomena which
seemed to transcend experience were absorbed in her realm—were
accounted as minor indications of the activity of her angels or of her fiends.
And when Christianity was seriously attacked, these minor manifestations
passed unconsidered. The priests thought it safest to defend their own
traditions, their own intuitions, without going afield in search of
independent evidence of a spiritual world. Their assailants kept their
powder and shot for the orthodox ramparts, ignoring any isolated
strongholds which formed no part of the main line of defence.
Meantime, indeed, the laws of Nature held their wonted way. As ever, that
which the years had once brought they brought again; and every here and
there some marvel, liker to the old stories than any one cared to assert,
cropped up between superstition on the one hand and contemptuous
indifference on the other. Witchcraft, Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism,
Spiritism—these especially, amid many minor phenomena, stood out in turn
as precursory of the inevitable wider inquiry. A very few words on each of

these four movements may suffice here to show their connection with my
present theme.
Witchcraft.—The lesson which witchcraft teaches with regard to the
validity of human testimony is the more remarkable because it was so long
and so completely misunderstood. The belief in witches long passed—as
well it might—as the culminant example of human ignorance and folly; and
in so comparatively recent a book as Mr. Lecky's "History of Rationalism,"
the sudden decline of this popular conviction, without argument or
disapproval, is used to illustrate the irresistible melting away of error and
falsity in the "intellectual climate" of a wiser age. Since about 1880,
however, when French experiments especially had afforded conspicuous
examples of what a hysterical woman could come to believe under
suggestion from others or from herself, it has begun to be felt that the
phenomena of witchcraft were very much what the phenomena of the
Salpêtrière would seem to be to the patients themselves, if left alone in the
hospital without a medical staff. And in Phantasms of the Living, Edmund
Gurney, after subjecting the literature of witchcraft to a more careful
analysis than any one till then had thought it worth while to apply, was able
to show that practically all recorded first-hand depositions (made apart from
torture) in the long story of witchcraft may quite possibly have been true, to
the best belief of the deponents; true, that is to say, as representing the
conviction of sane (though often hysterical) persons, who merely made the
almost inevitable mistake of confusing self-suggested hallucinations with
waking fact. Nay, even the insensible spots on the witches were no doubt
really anæsthetic—involved a first discovery of a now familiar clinical
symptom—the zones analgésiques of the patients of Pitres or Charcot.
Witchcraft, in fact, was a gigantic, a cruel psychological and pathological
experiment conducted by inquisitors upon hysteria; but it was conducted in
the dark, and when the barbarous explanation dropped out of credence
much of possible discovery was submerged as well.
Mesmer.—Again, the latent possibilities of "suggestion,"—though not yet
under that name, and mingled with who knows what else?—broke forth into
a blaze in the movement headed by Mesmer;—at once discoverer and
charlatan. Again the age was unripe, and scientific opposition, although not
so formidable as the religious opposition which had sent witches to the
stake, was yet strong enough to check for the second time the struggling
science. Hardly till our own generation—hardly even now—has a third

effort found better acceptance, and hypnotism and psycho-therapeutics, in
which every well-attested fact of witchcraft or of mesmerism finds, if not its
explanation, at least its parallel, are establishing themselves as a recognised
and advancing method of relieving human ills.
This brief sketch of the development as it were by successive impulses,
under strong disbelief and discouragement, of a group of mental tendencies,
faculties, or sensibilities now recognised as truly existing and as often
salutary, is closely paralleled by the development, under similar difficulties,
of another group of faculties or sensibilities, whose existence is still
disputed, but which if firmly established may prove to be of even greater
moment for mankind.
At no time known to us, whether before or since the Christian era, has the
series of trance-manifestations,—of supposed communications with a
supernal world,—entirely ceased. Sometimes, as in the days of St. Theresa,
such trance or ecstasy has been, one may say, the central or culminant fact
in the Christian world. Of these experiences I must not here treat. The
evidence for them is largely of a subjective type, and they may belong more
fitly to some future discussion as to the amount of confidence due to the
interpretation given by entranced persons to their own phenomena.
But in the midst of this long series, and in full analogy to many minor
cases, occurs the exceptional trance-history of Emmanuel Swedenborg. In
this case, as is well known, there appears to have been excellent objective
evidence both of clairvoyance or telæsthesia[1] and of communication with
departed persons;—and we can only regret that the philosopher Kant, who
satisfied himself of some part of Swedenborg's supernormal[2] gift, did not
press further an inquiry surpassed in importance by none of those upon
which his master-mind was engaged. Apart, however, from these objective
evidences, the mere subject-matter of Swedenborg's trance-revelations was
enough to claim respectful attention. I cannot here discuss the strange
mixture which they present of slavish literalism with exalted speculation, of
pedantic orthodoxy with physical and moral insight far beyond the level of
that age. It is enough to say here that even as Socrates called down
philosophy from heaven to earth, so in a somewhat different sense it was
Swedenborg who called up philosophy again from earth to heaven;—who
originated the notion of science in the spiritual world, as earnestly, though
not so persuasively, as Socrates originated the idea of science in this world
which we seem to know. It was to Swedenborg first that that unseen world

appeared before all things as a realm of law; a region not of mere emotional
vagueness or stagnancy of adoration, but of definite progress according to
definite relations of cause and effect, resulting from structural laws of
spiritual existence and intercourse which we may in time learn partially to
apprehend. For my own part I regard Swedenborg,—not, assuredly, as an
inspired teacher, nor even as a trustworthy interpreter of his own
experiences,—but yet as a true and early precursor of that great inquiry
which it is our present object to advance.
The next pioneer—fortunately still amongst us—whom I must mention
even in this summary notice, is the celebrated physicist and chemist, Sir W.
Crookes. Just as Swedenborg was the first leading man of science who
distinctly conceived of the spiritual world as a world of law, so was Sir W.
Crookes the first leading man of science who seriously endeavoured to test
the alleged mutual influence and interpenetration of the spiritual world and
our own by experiments of scientific precision.[3] Beyond the establishment
of certain supernormal facts Crookes declined to go. But a large group of
persons have founded upon these and similar facts a scheme of belief
known as Modern Spiritualism, or Spiritism. Later chapters in this book
will show how much I owe to certain observations made by members of this
group—how often my own conclusions concur with conclusions at which
they have previously arrived. And yet this work of mine is in large measure
a critical attack upon the main Spiritist position, as held, say, by Mr. A. R.
Wallace, its most eminent living supporter,—the belief, namely, that all or
almost all supernormal phenomena are due to the action of spirits of the
dead. By far the larger proportion, as I hold, are due to the action of the still
embodied spirit of the agent or percipient himself. Apart from speculative
differences, moreover, I altogether dissent from the conversion into a
sectarian creed of what I hold should be a branch of scientific inquiry,
growing naturally out of our existing knowledge. It is, I believe, largely to
this temper of uncritical acceptance, degenerating often into blind credulity,
that we must refer the lack of progress in Spiritualistic literature, and the
encouragement which has often been bestowed upon manifest fraud,—so
often, indeed, as to create among scientific men a strong indisposition to the
study of phenomena recorded or advocated in a tone so alien from Science.
I know not how much of originality or importance may be attributed by
subsequent students of the subject to the step next in order in this series of
approximations. To those immediately concerned, the feeling of a new

departure was inevitably given by the very smallness of the support which
they for a long time received, and by the difficulty which they found in
making their point of view intelligible to the scientific, to the religious, or
even to the spiritualistic world. In about 1873—at the crest, as one may say,
of perhaps the highest wave of materialism which has ever swept over these
shores—it became the conviction of a small group of Cambridge friends
that the deep questions thus at issue must be fought out in a way more
thorough than the champions either of religion or of materialism had yet
suggested. Our attitudes of mind were in some ways different; but to
myself, at least, it seemed that no adequate attempt had yet been made even
to determine whether anything could be learnt as to an unseen world or no;
for that if anything were knowable about such a world in such fashion that
Science could adopt and maintain that knowledge, it must be discovered by
no analysis of tradition, and by no manipulation of metaphysics, but simply
by experiment and observation;—simply by the application to phenomena
within us and around us of precisely the same methods of deliberate,
dispassionate, exact inquiry which have built up our actual knowledge of
the world which we can touch and see. I can hardly even now guess to how
many of my readers this will seem a truism, and to how many a paradox.
Truism or paradox, such a thought suggested a kind of effort, which, so far
as we could discover, had never yet been made. For what seemed needful
was an inquiry of quite other scope than the mere analysis of historical
documents, or of the origines of any alleged revelation in the past. It must
be an inquiry resting primarily, as all scientific inquiries in the stricter sense
now must rest, upon objective facts actually observable, upon experiments
which we can repeat to-day, and which we may hope to carry further to-
morrow. It must be an inquiry based, to use an old term, on the
uniformitarian hypothesis; on the presumption, that is to say, that if a
spiritual world exists, and if that world has at any epoch been manifest or
even discoverable, then it ought to be manifest or discoverable now.
It was from this side, and from these general considerations, that the group
with which I have worked approached the subject. Our methods, our
canons, were all to make. In those early days we were more devoid of
precedents, of guidance, even of criticism that went beyond mere
expressions of contempt, than is now readily conceived. Seeking evidence
as best we could—collecting round us a small group of persons willing to
help in that quest for residual phenomena in the nature and experience of

man—we were at last fortunate enough to discover a convergence of
experimental and of spontaneous evidence upon one definite and important
point. We were led to believe that there was truth in a thesis which at least
since Swedenborg and the early mesmerists had been repeatedly, but
cursorily and ineffectually, presented to mankind—the thesis that a
communication can take place from mind to mind without the agency of the
recognised organs of sense. We found that this agency, discernible even on
trivial occasions by suitable experiment, seemed to connect itself with an
agency more intense, or at any rate more recognisable, which operated at
moments of crisis or at the hour of death. Edmund Gurney—the invaluable
collaborator and friend whose loss in 1888 was our heaviest
discouragement—set forth this evidence in a large work, Phantasms of the
Living, in whose preparation Mr. Podmore and I took a minor part. The
fifteen years which have elapsed since the publication of this book in 1886
have added to the evidence on which Gurney relied, and have shown (I
venture to say) the general soundness of the canons of evidence and the
lines of argument which it was his task to shape and to employ.[4]
Of fundamental importance, indeed, is this doctrine of telepathy—the first
law, may one not say?—laid open to man's discovery, which, in my view at
least, while operating in the material, is itself a law of the spiritual or
metetherial world. In the course of this work it will be my task to show in
many connections how far-reaching are the implications of this direct and
supersensory communion of mind with mind. Among those implications
none can be more momentous than the light thrown by this discovery upon
man's intimate nature and possible survival of death.
We gradually discovered that the accounts of apparitions at the moment of
death—testifying to a supersensory communication between the dying man
and the friend who sees him—led on without perceptible break to
apparitions occurring after the death of the person seen, but while that death
was yet unknown to the percipient, and thus apparently due, not to mere
brooding memory, but to a continued action of that departed spirit. The task
next incumbent on us therefore seemed plainly to be the collection and
analysis of evidence of this and other types, pointing directly to the survival
of man's spirit. But after pursuing this task for some years I felt that in
reality the step from the action of embodied to the action of disembodied
spirits would still seem too sudden if taken in this direct way. So far, indeed,
as the evidence from apparitions went, the series seemed continuous from

phantasms of the living to phantasms of the dead. But the whole mass of
evidence primâ facie pointing to man's survival was of a much more
complex kind. It consisted largely, for example, in written or spoken
utterances, coming through the hand or voice of living men, but claiming to
proceed from a disembodied source. To these utterances, as a whole, no
satisfactory criterion had ever been applied.
In considering cases of this kind, then, it became gradually plain to me
that before we could safely mark off any group of manifestations as
definitely implying an influence from beyond the grave, there was need of a
more searching review of the capacities of man's incarnate personality than
psychologists unfamiliar with this new evidence had thought it worth their
while to undertake.
It was only slowly, and as it were of necessity, that I embarked on a task
which needed for its proper accomplishment a knowledge and training far
beyond what I could claim. The very inadequate sketch which has resulted
from my efforts is even in its author's view no more than preparatory and
precursive to the fuller and sounder treatment of the same subject which I
doubt not that the new century will receive from more competent hands.
The truest success of this book will lie in its rapid supersession by a better.
For this will show that at least I have not erred in supposing that a serious
treatise on these topics is nothing else than the inevitable complement and
conclusion of the slow process by which man has brought under the domain
of science every group of attainable phenomena in turn—every group save
this.
Let me then without further preamble embark upon that somewhat
detailed survey of human faculty, as manifested during various phases of
human personality, which is needful in order to throw fresh light on these
unfamiliar themes. My discussion, I may say at once, will avoid
metaphysics as carefully as it will avoid theology. I avoid theology, as
already explained, because I consider that in arguments founded upon
experiment and observation I have no right to appeal for support to
traditional or subjective considerations, however important. For somewhat
similar reasons I do not desire to introduce the idea of personality with any
historical résumé of the philosophical opinions which have been held by
various thinkers in the past, nor myself to speculate on matters lying beyond
the possible field of objective proof. I shall merely for the sake of clearness
begin by the briefest possible statement of two views of human personality

which cannot be ignored, namely, the old-fashioned or common-sense view
thereof, which is still held by the mass of mankind, and the newer view of
experimental psychology, bringing out that composite or "colonial"
character which on a close examination every personality of men or animals
is seen to wear.
The following passage, taken from a work once of much note, Reid's
"Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man," expresses the simple primâ facie
view with care and precision, yet with no marked impress of any one
philosophical school:
The conviction which every man has of his identity, as far back as his memory reaches, needs no
aid of philosophy to strengthen it; and no philosophy can weaken it without first producing some
degree of insanity.... My personal identity, therefore, implies the continued existence of that
indivisible thing which I call myself. Whatever this self may be, it is something which thinks, and
deliberates, and resolves, and acts, and suffers. I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I
am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers. My thoughts and actions and feelings change every
moment; they have no continued, but a successive existence; but that self or I, to which they belong,
is permanent, and has the same relation to all succeeding thoughts, actions, and feelings which I call
mine.... The identity of a person is a perfect identity; wherever it is real it admits of no degrees; and it
is impossible that a person should be in part the same and in part different, because a person is a
monad, and is not divisible into parts. Identity, when applied to persons, has no ambiguity, and
admits not of degrees, or of more and less. It is the foundation of all rights and obligations, and of all
accountableness; and the notion of it is fixed and precise.

Contrast with this the passage with which M. Ribot concludes his essay on
"Les Maladies de la Personnalité."
It is the organism, with the brain, its supreme representative, which constitutes the real personality;
comprising in itself the remains of all that we have been and the possibilities of all that we shall be.
The whole individual character is there inscribed, with its active and passive aptitudes, its sympathies
and antipathies, its genius, its talent or its stupidity, its virtues and its vices, its torpor or its activity.
The part thereof which emerges into consciousness is little compared with what remains buried, but
operative nevertheless. The conscious personality is never more than a small fraction of the psychical
personality. The unity of the Ego is not therefore the unity of a single entity diffusing itself among
multiple phenomena; it is the co-ordination of a certain number of states perpetually renascent, and
having for their sole common basis the vague feeling of our body. This unity does not diffuse itself
downwards, but is aggregated by ascent from below; it is not an initial but a terminal point.
Does then this perfect unity really exist? In the rigorous, the mathematical sense, assuredly it does
not. In a relative sense it is met with,—rarely and for a moment. When a good marksman takes aim,
or a skilful surgeon operates, his whole body and mind converge towards a single act. But note the
result; under those conditions the sentiment of real personality disappears, for the conscious
individual is simplified into a single idea, and the personal sentiment is excluded by the complete
unification of consciousness. We thus return by another route to the same conclusion; the Self is a co-
ordination. It oscillates between two extremes at each of which it ceases to exist;—absolute unity and
absolute incoherence.
The last word of all this is that since the consensus of consciousness is subordinated to the
consensus of the organism, the problem of the unity of the Ego is in its ultimate form a problem of

Biology. Let Biology explain, if it can, the genesis of organisms and the solidarity of their constituent
parts. The psychological explanation must needs follow on the same track.

Here, then, we have two clear and definite views,—supported, the one by
our inmost consciousness, the other by unanswerable observation and
inference,—yet apparently incompatible the one with the other. And in fact
by most writers they have been felt and acknowledged to be even
hopelessly incompatible. The supporters of the view that "The Self is a co-
ordination,"—and this, I need hardly say, is now the view prevalent among
experimental psychologists,—have frankly given up any notion of an
underlying unity,—of a life independent of the organism,—in a word, of a
human soul. The supporters of the unity of the Ego, on the other hand, if
they have not been able to be equally explicit in denying the opposite view,
have made up for this by the thorough-going way in which they have
ignored it. I know of no source from which valid help has been offered
towards the reconcilement of the two opposing systems in a profounder
synthesis. If I believe—as I do believe—that in the present work some help
in this direction is actually given, this certainly does not mean that I
suppose myself capable of stitching the threadbare metaphysical arguments
into a more stable fabric. It simply means that certain fresh evidence can
now be adduced, which has the effect of showing the case on each side in a
novel light;—nay, even of closing the immediate controversy by a judgment
more decisively in favour of both parties than either could have expected.
On the one side, and in favour of the co-ordinators,—all their analysis of
the Self into its constituent elements, all that they urge of positive
observation, of objective experiment, must—as I shall maintain on the
strength of the new facts which I shall adduce—be unreservedly conceded.
Let them push their analysis as far as they like,—let them get down, if they
can, to those ultimate infinitesimal psychical elements from which is
upbuilt the complex, the composite, the "colonial" structure and constitution
of man. All this may well be valid and important work. It is only on their
negative side that the conclusions of this school need a complete
overhauling. Deeper, bolder inquiry along their own line shows that they
have erred when they asserted that analysis showed no trace of faculty
beyond such as the life of earth—as they conceive it—could foster, or the
environment of earth employ. For in reality analysis shows traces of faculty
which this material or planetary life could not have called into being, and

whose exercise even here and now involves and necessitates the existence
of a spiritual world.
On the other side, and in favour of the partisans of the unity of the Ego,
the effect of the new evidence is to raise their claim to a far higher ground,
and to substantiate it for the first time with the strongest presumptive proof
which can be imagined for it;—a proof, namely, that the Ego can and does
survive—not only the minor disintegrations which affect it during earth-life
—but the crowning disintegration of bodily death. In view of this unhoped-
for ratification of their highest dream, they may be more than content to
surrender as untenable the far narrower conception of the unitary Self which
was all that "common-sense philosophies" had ventured to claim. The
"conscious Self" of each of us, as we call it,—the empirical, the
supraliminal Self, as I should prefer to say,—does not comprise the whole
of the consciousness or of the faculty within us. There exists a more
comprehensive consciousness, a profounder faculty, which for the most part
remains potential only so far as regards the life of earth, but from which the
consciousness and the faculty of earth-life are mere selections, and which
reasserts itself in its plenitude after the liberating change of death.
Towards this conclusion, which assumed for me something like its present
shape some fourteen years since,[5] a long series of tentative speculations,
based on gradually accruing evidence, has slowly conducted me. The
conception is one which has hitherto been regarded as purely mystical; and
if I endeavour to plant it upon a scientific basis I certainly shall not succeed
in stating it in its final terms or in supporting it with the best arguments
which longer experience will suggest. Its validity, indeed, will be impressed
—if at all—upon the reader only by the successive study of the various
kinds of evidence to which this book will refer him.
Yet so far as the initial possibility or plausibility of such a widened
conception of human consciousness is concerned;—and this is all which
can be dealt with at this moment of its first introduction;—I have not seen
in such criticism as has hitherto been bestowed upon my theory any very
weighty demurrer.[6]
"Normally at least," says one critic, summarising in a few words the
ordinary view, "all the consciousness we have at any moment corresponds
to all the activity which is going on at that moment in the brain. There is
one unitary conscious state accompanying all the simultaneous brain

excitations together, and each single part of the brain-process contributes
something to its nature. None of the brain-processes split themselves off
from the rest and have a separate consciousness of their own." This is, no
doubt, the apparent dictum of consciousness, but it is nothing more. And the
dicta of consciousness have already been shown to need correction in so
many ways which the ordinary observer could never have anticipated that
we have surely no right to trust consciousness, so to say, a step further than
we can feel it,—to hold that anything whatever—even a separate
consciousness in our own organisms—can be proved not to exist by the
mere fact that we—as we know ourselves—are not aware of it.
But indeed this claim to a unitary consciousness tends to become less
forcible as it is more scientifically expressed. It rests on the plain man's
conviction that there is only one of him; and this conviction the
experimental psychologist is always tending to weaken or narrow by the
admission of coexistent localised degrees of consciousness in the brain,
which are at any rate not obviously reducible to a single state. Even those
who would stop far short of my own position find it needful to resort to
metaphors of their own to express the different streams of "awareness"
which we all feel to be habitually coexistent within us. They speak of
"fringes" of ordinary consciousness; of "marginal" associations; of the
occasional perception of "currents of low intensity." These metaphors may
all of them be of use, in a region where metaphor is our only mode of
expression; but none of them covers all the facts now collected. And on the
other side, I need not say, are plenty of phrases which beg the question of
soul and body, or of the man's own spirit and external spirits, in no
scientific fashion. There seems to be need of a term of wider application,
which shall make as few assumptions as possible. Nor is such a term
difficult to find.
The idea of a threshold (limen, Schwelle), of consciousness;—of a level
above which sensation or thought must rise before it can enter into our
conscious life;—is a simple and familiar one. The word subliminal,—
meaning "beneath that threshold,"—has already been used to define those
sensations which are too feeble to be individually recognised. I propose to
extend the meaning of the term, so as to make it cover all that takes place
beneath the ordinary threshold, or say, if preferred, outside the ordinary
margin of consciousness;—not only those faint stimulations whose very
faintness keeps them submerged, but much else which psychology as yet

scarcely recognises; sensations, thoughts, emotions, which may be strong,
definite, and independent, but which, by the original constitution of our
being, seldom emerge into that supraliminal current of consciousness which
we habitually identify with ourselves. Perceiving (as this book will try to
show) that these submerged thoughts and emotions possess the
characteristics which we associate with conscious life, I feel bound to speak
of a subliminal or ultra-marginal consciousness,—a consciousness which
we shall see, for instance, uttering or writing sentences quite as complex
and coherent as the supraliminal consciousness could make them.
Perceiving further that this conscious life beneath the threshhold or beyond
the margin seems to be no discontinuous or intermittent thing; that not only
are these isolated subliminal processes comparable with isolated
supraliminal processes (as when a problem is solved by some unknown
procedure in a dream), but that there also is a continuous subliminal chain
of memory (or more chains than one) involving just that kind of individual
and persistent revival of old impressions, and response to new ones, which
we commonly call a Self,—I find it permissible and convenient to speak of
subliminal Selves, or more briefly of a subliminal Self. I do not indeed by
using this term assume that there are two correlative and parallel selves
existing always within each of us. Rather I mean by the subliminal Self that
part of the Self which is commonly subliminal; and I conceive that there
may be,—not only co-operations between these quasi-independent trains of
thought,—but also upheavals and alternations of personality of many kinds,
so that what was once below the surface may for a time, or permanently,
rise above it. And I conceive also that no Self of which we can here have
cognisance is in reality more than a fragment of a larger Self,—revealed in
a fashion at once shifting and limited through an organism not so framed as
to afford it full manifestation.
Now this hypothesis is exposed manifestly to two main forms of attack,
which to a certain extent neutralise each other. On the one hand it has been
attacked, as has already been indicated, as being too elaborate for the facts,
—as endowing transitory moments of subconscious intelligence with more
continuity and independence than they really possess. These ripples over
the threshold, it may be said, can be explained by the wind of circumstance,
without assuming springs or currents in the personality deep below.
But soon we shall come upon a group of phenomena which this view will
by no means meet. For we shall find that the subliminal uprushes,—the

impulses or communications which reach our emergent from our
submerged selves,—are (in spite of their miscellaneousness) often
characteristically different in quality from any element known to our
ordinary supraliminal life. They are different in a way which implies faculty
of which we have had no previous knowledge, operating in an environment
of which hitherto we have been wholly unaware. This broad statement it is
of course the purpose of my whole work to justify. Assuming its truth here
for argument's sake, we see at once that the problem of the hidden self
entirely changes its aspect. Telepathy and telæsthesia—the perception of
distant thoughts and of distant scenes without the agency of the recognised
organs of sense;—those faculties suggest either incalculable extension of
our own mental powers, or else the influence upon us of minds freer and
less trammelled than our own. And this second hypothesis,—which would
explain by the agency of discarnate minds, or spirits, all these supernormal
phenomena,—does at first sight simplify the problem, and has by Mr. A. R.
Wallace and others been pushed so far as to remove all need of what he
deems the gratuitous and cumbrous hypothesis of a subliminal self.
I believe, indeed, that it will become plain as we proceed that some such
hypothesis as this,—of almost continuous spirit-intervention and spirit-
guidance,—is at once rendered necessary if the subliminal faculties for
which I argue are denied to man. And my conception of a subliminal self
will thus appear, not as an extravagant and needless, but as a limiting and
rationalising hypothesis, when it is applied to phenomena which at first
sight suggest Mr. Wallace's extremer view, but which I explain by the action
of man's own spirit, without invoking spirits external to himself. I do not
indeed say that the explanation here suggested is applicable in all cases, or
to the complete exclusion of the spirit-hypothesis. On the contrary, the one
view gives support to the other. For these faculties of distant
communication exist none the less, even though we should refer them to our
own subliminal selves. We can, in that case, affect each other at a distance,
telepathically;—and if our incarnate spirits can act thus in at least apparent
independence of the fleshly body, the presumption is strong that other
spirits may exist independently of the body, and may affect us in similar
manner.
The much-debated hypothesis of spirit-intervention, in short, still looms
behind the hypothesis of the subliminal Self; but that intermediate
hypothesis should, I think, in this early stage of what must be a long

inquiry, prove useful to the partisans of either side. For those who are
altogether unwilling to admit the action of agencies other than the spirits of
living men, it will be needful to form as high an estimate as possible of the
faculties held in reserve by these spirits while still in the flesh. For those, on
the other hand, who believe in the influence of discarnate spirits, this
scheme affords a path of transition, and as it were a provisional
intelligibility.
These far-reaching speculations make the element of keenest interest in
the inquiry which follows. But even apart from its possible bearing on a
future life, the further study of our submerged mentation,—of the processes
within us of which we catch only indirect, and as it were, refracted
glimpses,—seems at this time especially called for by the trend of modern
research. For of late years we have realised more and more fully upon how
shifting and complex a foundation of ancestral experience each individual
life is based. In recapitulation, in summary, in symbol, we retraverse, from
the embryo to the corpse, the history of life on earth for millions of years.
During our self-adaptation to continually wider environments, there may
probably have been a continual displacement of the threshold of
consciousness;—involving the lapse and submergence of much that once
floated in the main stream of our being. Our consciousness at any given
stage of our evolution is but the phosphorescent ripple on an unsounded sea.
And, like the ripple, it is not only superficial but manifold. Our psychical
unity is federative and unstable; it has arisen from irregular accretions in the
remote past; it consists even now only in the limited collaboration of
multiple groups. These discontinuities and incoherences in the Ego the elder
psychologists managed to ignore. Yet infancy, idiocy, sleep, insanity, decay;
—these breaks and stagnancies in the conscious stream were always present
to show us, even more forcibly than more delicate analyses show us now,
that the first obvious conception of man's continuous and unitary
personality was wholly insecure; and that if indeed a soul inspired the body,
that soul must be sought for far beneath these bodily conditions by which its
self-manifestation was clouded and obscured.
The difference between older and newer conceptions of the unifying
principle or soul (if soul there be) in man, considered as manifesting
through corporeal limitations, will thus resemble the difference between the
older and newer conceptions of the way in which the sun reveals himself to
our senses. Night and storm-cloud and eclipse men have known from the

earliest ages; but now they know that even at noonday the sunbeam which
reaches them, when fanned out into a spectrum, is barred with belts and
lines of varying darkness;—while they have learnt also that where at either
end the spectrum fades out into what for us is blackness, there stretches
onwards in reality an undiscovered illimitable ray.
It will be convenient for future reference if I draw out this parallel
somewhat more fully. I compare, then, man's gradual progress in self-
knowledge to his gradual decipherment of the nature and meaning of the
sunshine which reaches him as light and heat indiscernibly intermingled. So
also Life and Consciousness—the sense of a world within him and a world
without—come to the child indiscernibly intermingled in a pervading glow.
Optical analysis splits up the white ray into the various coloured rays which
compose it. Philosophical analysis in like manner splits up the vague
consciousness of the child into many faculties;—into the various external
senses, the various modes of thought within. This has been the task of
descriptive and introspective psychology. Experimental psychology is
adding a further refinement. In the sun's spectrum, and in stellar spectra, are
many dark lines or bands, due to the absorption of certain rays by certain
vapours in the atmosphere of sun or stars or earth. And similarly in the
range of spectrum of our own sensation and faculty there are many
inequalities—permanent and temporary—of brightness and definition. Our
mental atmosphere is clouded by vapours and illumined by fires, and is
clouded and illumined differently at different times. The psychologist who
observes, say, how his reaction-times are modified by alcohol is like the
physicist who observes what lines are darkened by the interposition of a
special gas. Our knowledge of our conscious spectrum is thus becoming
continually more accurate and detailed.
But turning back once more to the physical side of our simile, we observe
that our knowledge of the visible solar spectrum, however minute, is but an
introduction to the knowledge which we hope ultimately to attain of the
sun's rays. The limits of our spectrum do not inhere in the sun that shines,
but in the eye that marks his shining. Beyond each end of that prismatic
ribbon are ether-waves of which our retina takes no cognisance. Beyond the
red end come waves whose potency we still recognise, but as heat and not
as light. Beyond the violet end are waves still more mysterious; whose very
existence man for ages never suspected, and whose ultimate potencies are
still but obscurely known. Even thus, I venture to affirm, beyond each end

of our conscious spectrum extends a range of faculty and perception,
exceeding the known range, but as yet indistinctly guessed. The artifices of
the modern physicist have extended far in each direction the visible
spectrum known to Newton. It is for the modern psychologist to discover
artifices which may extend in each direction the conscious spectrum as
known to Plato or to Kant. The phenomena cited in this work carry us, one
may say, as far onwards as fluorescence carries us beyond the violet end.
The "X rays" of the psychical spectrum remain for a later age to discover.
Our simile, indeed—be it once for all noted—is a most imperfect one. The
range of human faculty cannot be truly expressed in any linear form. Even a
three-dimensional scheme,—a radiation of faculties from a centre of life,—
would ill render its complexity. Yet something of clearness will be gained
by even this rudimentary mental picture;—representing conscious human
faculty as a linear spectrum whose red rays begin where voluntary muscular
control and organic sensation begin, and whose violet rays fade away at the
point at which man's highest strain of thought or imagination merges into
reverie or ecstasy.
At both ends of this spectrum I believe that our evidence indicates a
momentous prolongation. Beyond the red end, of course, we already know
that vital faculty of some kind must needs extend. We know that organic
processes are constantly taking place within us which are not subject to our
control, but which make the very foundation of our physical being. We
know that the habitual limits of our voluntary action can be far extended
under the influence of strong excitement. It need not surprise us to find that
appropriate artifices—hypnotism or self-suggestion—can carry the power
of our will over our organism to a yet further point.
The faculties that lie beyond the violet end of our psychological spectrum
will need more delicate exhibition and will command a less ready belief.
The actinic energy which lies beyond the violet end of the solar spectrum is
less obviously influential in our material world than is the dark heat which
lies beyond the red end. Even so, one may say, the influence of the ultra-
intellectual or supernormal faculties upon our welfare as terrene organisms
is less marked in common life than the influence of the organic or
subnormal faculties. Yet it is that prolongation of our spectrum upon which
our gaze will need to be most strenuously fixed. It is there that we shall find
our inquiry opening upon a cosmic prospect, and inciting us upon an
endless way.

Even the first stages of this progress are long and labyrinthine; and it may
be useful to conclude this introductory chapter by a brief summary of the
main tracts across which our winding road must lie. It will be my object to
lead by transitions as varied and as gradual as possible from phenomena
held as normal to phenomena held as supernormal, but which like the rest
are simply and solely the inevitable results and manifestations of universal
Law.
Following then on this first or introductory chapter is one containing a
discussion of the ways in which human personality disintegrates and
decays. Alternations of personality and hysterical phenomena generally are
in this connection the most instructive to us.
In the third chapter we utilize the insight thus gained and discuss the line
of evolution which enables man to maintain and intensify his true
normality. What type of man is he to whom the epithet of normal,—an
epithet often obscure and misleading,—may be most fitly applied? I claim
that that man shall be regarded as normal who has the fullest grasp of
faculties which inhere in the whole race. Among these faculties I count
subliminal as well as supraliminal powers;—the mental processes which
take place below the conscious threshold as well as those which take place
above it; and I attempt to show that those who reap most advantage from
this submerged mentation are men of genius.
The fourth chapter deals with the alternating phase through which man's
personality is constructed habitually to pass. I speak of sleep; which I
regard as a phase of personality, adapted to maintain our existence in the
spiritual environment, and to draw from thence the vitality of our physical
organisms. In this chapter I also discuss certain supernormal phenomena
which sometimes occur in the state of sleep.
The fifth chapter treats of hypnotism, considered as an empirical
development of sleep. It will be seen that hypnotic suggestion intensifies the
physical recuperation of sleep, and aids the emergence of those supernormal
phenomena which ordinary sleep and spontaneous somnambulism
sometimes exhibit.
From hypnotism we pass on in the sixth chapter to experiments, less
familiar to the public than those classed as hypnotic, but which give a still
further insight into our subliminal faculty. With these experiments are
intermingled many spontaneous phenomena; and the chapter will take up

and continue the spontaneous phenomena of Chapters III. and IV. as well as
the experiments of Chapter V. Its theme will be the messages which the
subliminal self sends up to the supraliminal in the form of sensory
hallucinations:—the visions fashioned internally, but manifested not to the
inward eye alone; the voices which repeat as though in audible tones the
utterance of the self within.
These sensory automatisms, as I have termed them, are very often
telepathic—involve, that is to say, the transmission of ideas and sensations
from one mind to another without the agency of the recognised organs of
sense. Nor would it seem that such transmission need necessarily cease with
the bodily death of the transmitting agent. In the seventh chapter evidence is
brought forward to show that those who communicated with us
telepathically in this world may communicate with us telepathically from
the other. Thus phantasms of the dead receive a new meaning from
observations of the phenomena occurring between living men.
But besides the hallucinatory hearing or picture-seeing which we have
classed as sensory automatisms, there is another method by which the
subliminal may communicate with the supraliminal self.
In Chapter VIII., we consider in what ways motor automatism—the
unwilled activity of hand or voice—may be used as a means of such
communication. Unwilled writings and utterances furnish the opportunity
for experiment more prolonged and continuous than the phantasms or
pictures of sensory automatism can often give, and, like them, may
sometimes originate in telepathic impressions received by the subliminal
self from another mind. These motor automatisms, moreover, as the ninth
chapter shows, are apt to become more complete, more controlling, than
sensory automatisms. They may lead on, in some cases, to the apparent
possession of the sensitive by some extraneous spirit, who seems to write
and talk through the sensitive's organism, giving evidence of his own
surviving identity.
The reader who may feel disposed to give his adhesion to this culminating
group of the long series of evidences which have pointed with more and
more clearness to the survival of human personality, and to the possibility
for men on earth of actual commerce with a world beyond, may feel
perhaps that the desiderium orbis catholici, the intimate and universal hope
of every generation of men, has never till this day approached so near to

fulfilment. There has never been so fair a prospect for Life and Love. But
the goal to which we tend is not an ideal of personal happiness alone. The
anticipation of our own future is but one element in the prospect which
opens to us now. Our inquiry has broadened into a wider scope. The point
from which we started was an analysis of the latent faculties of man. The
point towards which our argument has carried us is the existence of a
spiritual environment in which those faculties operate, and of unseen
neighbours who speak to us thence with slowly gathering power. Deep in
this spiritual environment the cosmic secret lies. It is our business to collect
the smallest indications; to carry out from this treasury of Rhampsinitus so
much as our bare hands can steal away. We have won our scraps of spiritual
experience, our messages from behind the veil; we can try them in their
connection with certain enigmas which philosophy hardly hoped to be able
to put to proof. Can we, for instance, learn anything,—to begin with
fundamental problems,—of the relation of spiritual phenomena to Space, to
Time, to the material world?
As to the idea of Space, the evidence which will have been presented will
enable us to speak with perhaps more clearness than could have been hoped
for in such a matter. Spiritual life, we infer, is not bound and confined by
space-considerations in the same way as the life of earth. But in what way is
that greater freedom attained? It appears to be attained by the mere
extension of certain licenses (so to call them) permitted to ourselves. We on
earth submit to two familiar laws of the ordinary material universe. A body
can only act where it is. Only one body can occupy the same part of space
at the same moment. Applied to common affairs these rules are of plain
construction. But once get beyond ponderable matter,—once bring life and
ether into play, and definitions become difficult indeed. The orator, the poet,
we say, can only act where he is;—but where is he? He has transformed the
sheet of paper into a spiritual agency;—nay, the mere memory of him
persists as a source of energy in other minds. Again, we may say that no
other body can be in the same place as this writing-table; but what of the
ether? What we have thus far learnt of spiritual operation seems merely to
extend these two possibilities. Telepathy indefinitely extends the range of
an unembodied spirit's potential presence. The interpenetration of the
spiritual with the material environment leaves this ponderable planet unable
to check or to hamper spiritual presence or operation. Strange and new
though our evidence may be, it needs at present in its relation to space

nothing more than an immense extension of conceptions which the
disappearance of earthly limitations was certain immensely to extend.
How, then, does the matter stand with regard to our relation to Time? Do
we find that our new phenomena point to any mode of understanding or of
transcending Time fundamentally different from those modes which we
have at our command?
In dealing with Time Past we have memory and written record; in dealing
with Time Future we have forethought, drawing inferences from the past.
Can, then, the spiritual knowledge of Past and Future which our evidence
shows be explained by assuming that these existing means of knowledge
are raised to a higher power? Or are we driven to postulate something in the
nature of Time which is to us inconceivable;—some co-existence of Past
and Future in an eternal Now? It is plainly with Time Past that we must
begin the inquiry.
The knowledge of the past which automatic communications manifest is
in most cases apparently referable to the actual memory of persons still
existing beyond the tomb. It reaches us telepathically, as from a mind in
which remote scenes are still imprinted. But there are certain scenes which
are not easily assigned to the individual memory of any given spirit. And if
it be possible for us to learn of present facts by telæsthesia as well as by
telepathy;—by some direct supernormal percipience without the
intervention of any other mind to which the facts are already known,—may
there not be also a retrocognitive telæsthesia by which we may attain a
direct knowledge of facts in the past?
Some conception of this kind may possibly come nearest to the truth. It
may even be that some World-Soul is perennially conscious of all its past;
and that individual souls, as they enter into deeper consciousness, enter into
something which is at once reminiscence and actuality. But nevertheless a
narrower hypothesis will cover the actual cases with which we have to deal.
Past facts are known to men on earth not from memory only, but by written
record; and there may be records, of what kind we know not, which persist
in the spiritual world. Our retrocognitions seem often a recovery of isolated
fragments of thought and feeling, pebbles still hard and rounded amid the
indecipherable sands over which the mighty waters are "rolling evermore."
When we look from Time Past to Time Future we are confronted with
essentially the same problems, though in a still more perplexing form, and

with the world-old mystery of Free Will versus Necessity looming in the
background. Again we find that, just as individual memory would serve to
explain a large proportion of Retrocognition, so individual forethought—a
subliminal forethought, based often on profound organic facts not normally
known to us—will explain a large proportion of Precognition. But here
again we find also precognitions which transcend what seems explicable by
the foresight of any mind such as we know; and we are tempted to dream of
a World-Soul whose Future is as present to it as its Past. But in this
speculation also, so vast and vague an explanation seems for the present
beyond our needs; and it is safer—if aught be safe in this region which only
actual evidence could have emboldened us to approach—to take refuge in
the conception of intelligences not infinite, yet gifted with a foresight which
strangely transcends our own.
Closely allied to speculations such as these is another speculation, more
capable of subjection to experimental test, yet which remains still
inconclusively tested, and which has become for many reasons a stumbling-
block rather than a corroboration in the spiritual inquiry. I refer to the
question whether any influence is exercised by spirits upon the gross
material world otherwise than through ordinary organic structures. We
know that the spirit of a living man controls his own organism, and we shall
see reason to conclude that discarnate spirits may also control, by some
form of "possession," the organisms of living persons,—may affect directly,
that is to say, some portions of matter which we call living, namely, the
brain of the entranced sensitive. There seems to me, then, no paradox in the
supposition that some effect should be produced by spiritual agency—
possibly through the mediation of some kind of energy derived from living
human beings—upon inanimate matter as well. And I believe that as a fact
such effects have been observed and recorded in a trustworthy manner by
Sir W. Crookes, the late Dr. Speer, and others, in the cases especially of D.
D. Home and of W. Stainton Moses. If, indeed, I call these and certain other
records still inconclusive, it is mainly on account of the mass of worthless
narratives with which they have been in some sense smothered; the long
history of so-called investigations which have consisted merely in an
interchange of credulity and fraud. For the present the evidence of this kind
which has real value is better presented, I think, in separate records than
collected or discussed in any generalised form. All that I purpose in this
work, therefore, is briefly to indicate the relation which these "physical

phenomena" hold to the psychical phenomena with which my book is
concerned. Alongside of the faculty or achievement of man's ordinary or
supraliminal self I shall demarcate the faculty or achievement which I
ascribe to his subliminal self; and alongside of this again I shall arrange
such few well-attested phenomena as seem primâ facie to demand the
physical intervention of discarnate intelligences.
I have traced the utmost limits to which any claim to a scientific basis for
these inquiries can at present be pushed. Yet the subject-matter has not yet
been exhausted of half its significance. The conclusions to which our
evidence points are not such as can be discussed or dismissed as a mere
matter of speculative curiosity. They affect every belief, every faculty, every
hope and aim of man; and they affect him the more intimately as his
interests grow more profound. Whatever meaning be applied to ethics, to
philosophy, to religion, the concern of all these is here.
It would have been inconsistent with my main purpose had I interpolated
considerations of this kind into the body of this work. For that purpose was
above all to show that realms left thus far to philosophy or to religion,—too
often to mere superstition and idle dream,—might in the end be brought
under steady scientific rule. I contend that Religion and Science are no
separable or independent provinces of thought or action; but rather that each
name implies a different aspect of the same ideal;—that ideal being the
completely normal reaction of the individual spirit to the whole of cosmic
law.
Assuredly this deepening response of man's spirit to the Cosmos
deepening round him must be affected by all the signals which now are
glimmering out of night to tell him of his inmost nature and his endless fate.
Who can think that either Science or Revelation has spoken as yet more
than a first half-comprehended word? But if in truth souls departed call to
us, it is to them that we shall listen most of all. We shall weigh their
undesigned concordances, we shall analyse the congruity of their message
with the facts which such a message should explain. To some thoughts
which may thus be generated I shall try to give expression in an Epilogue to
the present work.

CHAPTER II

DISINTEGRATIONS OF PERSONALITY

θἁντὁς ἑστιν ὁκὁσα ἑγερθἑντες ὁρἑομεν, ὁκὁσα δε εὑδοντες, ὑπνος.
—HERACLITUS.
OF the race of man we know for certain that it has been evolved through
many ages and through countless forms of change. We know for certain that
its changes continue still; nay, that more causes of change act upon us in
"fifty years of Europe" than in "a cycle of Cathay." We may reasonably
conjecture that the race will continue to change with increasing rapidity, and
through a period in comparison with which our range of recorded history
shrinks into a moment.
The actual nature of these coming changes, indeed, lies beyond our
imagination. Many of them are probably as inconceivable to us now as
eyesight would have been to our eyeless ancestors. All that we can do is to
note so far as possible the structural laws of our personality as deduced
from its changes thus far; inferring that for some time to come, at any rate,
its further changes will proceed upon similar lines.
I have already (Chapter I) indicated the general view as to the nature of
human personality which is maintained in this work. I regard each man as at
once profoundly unitary and almost infinitely composite, as inheriting from
earthly ancestors a multiplex and "colonial" organism—polyzoic and
perhaps polypsychic in an extreme degree; but also as ruling and unifying
that organism by a soul or spirit absolutely beyond our present analysis—a
soul which has originated in a spiritual or metetherial environment; which
even while embodied subsists in that environment; and which will still
subsist therein after the body's decay.
It is, of course, impossible for us to picture to ourselves the way in which
the individual life of each cell of the body is reconciled with the unity of the
central life which controls the body as a whole. But this difficulty is not
created or intensified by the hypothesis of a separate and persistent soul. On
no hypothesis can we really understand the collaboration and subordination

of the cell-lives of any multicellular animal. It is as mysterious in the
starfish as it is in Plato; and the "eight brains of Aurelia," with their
individual and their common life, are as inconceivable as the life of the
phagocytes in the philosopher's veins, in their relation to his central thought.
[7]

I claim, in fact, that the ancient hypothesis of an indwelling soul,
possessing and using the body as a whole, yet bearing a real, though
obscure relation to the various more or less apparently disparate conscious
groupings manifested in connection with the organism and in connection
with more or less localised groups of nerve-matter, is a hypothesis not more
perplexing, not more cumbrous, than any other hypothesis yet suggested. I
claim also that it is conceivably provable,—I myself hold it as actually
proved,—by direct observation. I hold that certain manifestations of central
individualities, associated now or formerly with certain definite organisms,
have been observed in operation apart from those organisms, both while the
organisms were still living, and after they had decayed. Whether or no this
thesis be as yet sufficiently proved, it is at least at variance with no
scientific principle nor established fact whatever; and it is of a nature which
continued observation may conceivably establish to the satisfaction of all.
The negative thesis, on the other hand, is a thesis in unstable equilibrium. It
cannot be absolutely proved by any number of negative instances; and it
may be absolutely disproved by a single positive instance. It may have at
present a greater scientific currency, but it can have no real scientific
authority as against the view defended in these pages.
Leaving these questions, however, aside for the present, we may agree that
in the organism as we can observe it in common life we have no complete
or unchanging unity, but rather a complex hierarchy of groups of cells
exercising vaguely limited functions, and working together with rough
precision, tolerable harmony, fair success. That these powers ever work
perfectly together we have no evidence. Our feeling of health is but a rough
haphazard register of what is passing within us. Nor would it ever be
possible to define a permanently ideal status in an organism in moving
equilibrium,—an organism which lives by exploding unstable compounds,
and which is constantly aiming at new ends at the expense of the old.
Many disturbances and disintegrations of the personality must presently
fall to be discussed. But the reader who may follow me must remember the
point of view from which I am writing. The aim of my analysis is not to

destroy but to fulfil;—or say, rather, my hope is that observation of the
ways in which the personality tends to disintegrate may suggest methods
which may tend on the other hand to its more complete integration.
Such improvements upon the natural conditions of the organism are not
unknown. Just as the study of hysteria deals mainly with instabilities in the
threshold of consciousness, so does the study of zymotic disease deal
mainly with instabilities in the constitution of the blood. The ordinary
object of the physician is to check these instabilities when they occur; to
restore healthy blood in the place of vitiated. The experimental biologist has
a further aim. He wishes to provide men with better blood than nature has
bestowed; to elicit from virus and decay some element whose infusion into
the veins may give immunity against microbic invasion. As the adult is
safer against such attacks than the child by dint of his more advanced
development, so is the immunised adult safer than the common man. The
change of his blood which healthy maturity has induced has made him safe
against whooping-cough. The change in his blood which we effect by
injecting antitoxin makes him temporarily safe against diphtheria. We have
improved upon nature;—and our artifice has been prophylactic by virtue of
being in a certain sense developmental.
Even such, I trust, may be the achievement of experimental psychology in
a later day. I shall be well content if in this chapter I can give hints for some
future colligation of such evolutive phenomena as may lurk amid a mass of
phenomena mainly dissolutive—phenomena whose records are scattered
and imperfect, and have as yet only in some few directions, and by quite
recent writers, been collated or systematised on any definite plan.
The discussion of these disintegrations of personality needs, I think, some
little clearing of the ground beforehand, if it is to avoid confusion. It will be
needful to speak of concurrent and alternating streams of consciousness,—
of subliminal and supraliminal strata of personality and the like;—phrases
which save much trouble when used with care, but which need some words
of preliminary explanation. It is not easy to realise that anything which
deserves the name of consciousness can be going on within us, apart from
that central stream of thought and feeling with which we identify ourselves
in common life. Something of definition is needed;—not indeed of any
formal or dogmatic kind;—but enough to make clear the sense given to
such words as consciousness, memory, personality, in the ensuing pages.

I begin, then, with the obvious remark that when we conceive any act
other than our own as a conscious act, we do so either because we regard it
as complex, and therefore purposive, or because we perceive that it has been
remembered. Thus we call the fencer or the chess-player fully conscious; or,
again, we say, "The man who seemed stunned after that blow on the head
must really have been conscious all the time; for he afterwards recalled
every incident." The memorability of an act is, in fact, a better proof of
consciousness than its complexity. Thus consciousness has been denied
both to hypnotised subjects and to dogs; but it is easier to prove that the
hypnotised subject is conscious than that the dog is conscious. For the
hypnotised subject, though he may forget the incidents of the trance when
he awakes, will remember them in the next trance; or he may be trained to
remember them in the waking state also; while with regard to the dog we
cannot decide from the mere complexity of his actions how far he is
conscious of their performance. With him, too, the best line of proof lies in
his obvious memory of past acts. And yet, although all agree that our own
memory, broadly speaking, proves our past consciousness, some persons
would not admit that a dog's memory does so too. The dog's organism, they
would say, responds, no doubt, in a new manner to a second repetition of a
previous stimulus; but this is more or less true of all living organisms, or
parts of organisms, even far below what we generally regard as a conscious
level.
Reflections of this kind naturally lead to a wider conception of
consciousness. It is gradually seen that the earlier inquiries which men have
made about consciousness have been of a merely ethical or legal character;
—have simply aimed at deciding whether at a given moment a man was
responsible for his acts, either to a human or to a divine tribunal.
Commonsense has seemed to encourage this method of definite
demarcation; we judge practically either that a man is conscious or that he
is not; in the experience of life intermediate states are of little importance.
As soon, however, as the problem is regarded as a psychological one, to
be decided by observation and experiment, these hard and fast lines grow
fainter and fainter. We come to regard consciousness as an attribute which
may possibly be present in all kinds of varying degrees in connection with
the animal and vegetable worlds; as the psychical counterpart of life; as
conceivably the psychical counterpart of all phenomenal existence. Or,
rather, we may say this of mind, to which, in its more elementary forms,

consciousness bears somewhat the same relation as self-consciousness
bears to consciousness, or some higher evolution may bear to self-
consciousness.
This being so, I cannot see how we can phrase our definition more simply
than by saying that any act or condition must be regarded as conscious if it
is potentially memorable;—if it can be recollected, under any
circumstances, by the subject concerned. It does not seem needful that the
circumstances under which such recollection may occur should arise while
the subject is still incarnated on this planet. We shall never on this planet
remember the great majority of our dreams; but those dreams were
presumably no less conscious than the dreams which a sudden awakening
allowed us to keep in memory. Certain hypnotic subjects, indeed, who can
be made to remember their dreams by suggestion, apparently remember
dreams previously latent just as easily as dreams previously remembered.
And we shall have various other examples of the unexpected recollection of
experiences supposed to have been entirely devoid of consciousness.
We are bound, I think, to draw at least this negative conclusion: that we
must not take for granted that our apparently central consciousness is
something wholly different in kind from the minor consciousnesses out of
which it is in some sense elaborated. I do indeed believe it to be in an
important sense different; but this difference must not be assumed on the
basis of our subjective sensations alone. We must approach the whole
subject of split or duplicated personalities with no prepossession against the
possibility of any given arrangement or division of the total mass of
consciousness which exists within us.
Before we can picture to ourselves how that mass of consciousness may
disintegrate, we ought, were it possible, to picture to ourselves how it is in
the first instance integrated. That, however, is a difficulty which does not
begin with the constitution of man. It begins when unicellular develop into
multicellular organisms. It is, of course, a mystery how a single cell can
hold together, and what kind of unity it can possess. But it is a fresh
mystery when several cells cohere in a conjoint and independent life. In the
collective unity of certain "colonial animals" we have a kind of sketch or
parody of our own complex being. Higher intelligences may possibly see us
as we see the hydrozoon—a creature split up into different "persons," a
"hydriform person" who feeds, a "medusiform person" who propagates, and
so on—elements of the animal differentiated for different ends—

interconnected from one point of view as closely as our stomach and brain,
yet from another point of view separable existences, capable of detachment
and of independent regeneration in all kinds of different ways. Still more
composite, though less conspicuously composite, is every animal that we
meet as we rise through the scale; and in man we reach the summit both of
colonial complexity and of centralised control.
I need hardly say that as regards the inner nature of this close co-
ordination, this central government, science can at present tell us little or
nothing. The growth of the nervous mechanism may be to some extent
deciphered; but how this mechanism is centrally governed; what is the
tendency which makes for unity; where precisely this unity resides, and
what is its exact relation to the various parts of the multicellular organism—
all these are problems in the nature of life, to which as yet no solution is
known.
The needed clue, as I believe, can be afforded only by the discovery of
laws affecting primarily that unseen or spiritual plane of being where I
imagine the origin of life to lie. If we can suppose telepathy to be a first
indication of a law of this type, and to occupy in the spiritual world some
such place as gravitation occupies in the material world, we might imagine
something analogous to the force of cohesion as operating in the psychical
contexture of a human personality. Such a personality, at any rate, as the
development of higher from lower organisms shows, involves the
aggregation of countless minor psychical entities, whose characteristics still
persist, although in a manner consistent with the possibility that one larger
psychical entity, whether pre-existent or otherwise, is the unifying
continuum of which those smaller entities are fragments, and exercises over
them a pervading, though an incomplete, control.
It is plainly impossible to say beforehand what will be the relation to the
ordinary stream of consciousness of a personality thus composed. We have
no right to assume that all our psychical operations will fall at the same
time, or at any time, into the same central current of perception, or rise
above what we have called the ordinary conscious threshold. We can be
sure, in fact, that there will be much which will not so rise; can we predict
what will rise?
We can only reply that the perception of stimuli by the supraliminal
consciousness is a kind of exercise of function; and that here, as in other

cases where a function is exercised, part of its range will consist of such
operation as the primary structure of the organism obliges it to perform, and
part will consist of such operation as natural selection (after the structure
has come into being) has trained it to perform. There will be something
which is structurally inevitable, and something which was not structurally
inevitable, but which has proved itself practically advantageous.
Thus it may be inevitable—a necessary result of nervous structure—that
consciousness should accompany unfamiliar cerebral combinations;—that
the "fraying of fresh channels" should carry with it a perceptible tingle of
novelty. Or it is possible, again, that this vivid consciousness of new
cerebral combinations may be a later acquisition, and merely due to the
obvious advantage of preventing new achievements from stereotyping
themselves before they have been thoroughly practised;—as a musician will
keep his attention fixed on a difficult novelty, lest his execution should
become automatic before he has learnt to render the piece as he desires. It
seems likely, at any rate, that the greater part of the contents of our
supraliminal consciousness may be determined in some such fashion as this,
by natural selection so operating as to keep ready to hand those perceptions
which are most needed for the conduct of life.
The notion of the upbuilding of the personality here briefly given is of
use, I think, in suggesting its practical tendencies to dissolution. Subjected
continually to both internal and external stress and strain, its ways of
yielding indicate the grain of its texture.
It is possible that if we could discern the minute psychology of this long
series of changes, ranging from modifications too minute to be noted as
abnormal to absolute revolutions of the whole character and intelligence,
we might find no definite break in all the series; but rather a slow,
continuous detachment of one psychical unit or element of consciousness
after another from the primary synthesis. It is possible, on the other hand,
that there may be a real break at a point where there appears to our external
observation to be a break, namely, where the personality passes into its new
phase through an interval of sleep or trance. And I believe that there is
another break, at a point much further advanced, and not to be reached in
this chapter, where some external intelligence begins in some way to
possess the organism and to replace for a time the ordinary intellectual
activity by an activity of its own. Setting, however, this last possibility for
the present aside, we must adopt some arrangement on which to hang our

cases. For this purpose the appearance of sleep or trance will make a useful,
although not a definite, line of demarcation.
We may begin with localised psychical hypertrophies and isolations,—
terms which I shall explain as we proceed; and then pass on through
hysterical instabilities (where intermediate periods of trance may or may
not be present) to those more advanced sleep-wakings and dimorphisms
which a barrier of trance seems always to separate from the primary stream
of conscious life. All such changes, of course, are generally noxious to the
psychical organism; and it will be simpler to begin by dwelling on their
noxious aspect, and regarding them as steps on the road—on one of the
many roads—to mental overthrow.
The process begins, then, with something which is to the psychical
organism no more than a boil or a corn is to the physical. In consequence of
some suggestion from without, or of some inherited tendency, a small group
of psychical units set up a process of exaggerated growth which shuts them
off from free and healthy interchange with the rest of the personality.
The first symptom of disaggregation is thus the idée fixe, that is to say, the
persistence of an uncontrolled and unmodifiable group of thoughts or
emotions, which from their brooding isolation,—from the very fact of
deficient interchange with the general current of thought,—become alien
and intrusive, so that some special idea or image presses into consciousness
with undue and painful frequency.
The fixed idea, thus originating, may develop in different ways. It may
become a centre of explosion, or a nucleus of separation, or a beginning of
death. It may induce an access of hysterical convulsions, thus acting like a
material foreign body which presses on a sensitive part of the organism. Or
it may draw to its new parasitic centre so many psychical elements that it
forms a kind of secondary personality, co-existing secretly with the primary
one, or even able at times (as in some well-known cases) to carry the whole
organism by a coup-de-main. (Such changes, it may be noted in passing, are
not always for the worse.) Or, again, the new quasi-independent centres
may be merely anarchical; the revolt may spread to every cell; and the
forces of the environment, ever making war upon the organism, may thus
effect its total decay.
Let us dwell for a few moments on the nature of these fixed or insistent
ideas. They are not generally or at the first outset extravagant fancies,—as

that one is made of glass or the like. Rather will "fixed ideas" come to seem
a mere expression for something in a minor degree common to most of us.
Hardly any mind, I suppose, is wholly free from tendencies to certain types
of thought or emotion for which we cannot summon any adequate check—
useless recurrent broodings over the past or anxieties for the future, perhaps
traces of old childish experience which have become too firmly fixed
wholly to disappear. Nay, it may well be that we must look even further
back than our own childhood for the origin of many haunting troubles.
Inherited tendencies to terror, especially, seem to reach far back into a
prehistoric past. In a recent "Study of Fears," which Professor Stanley Hall
has based on a wide statistical collection,[8] it would seem that the fears of
childhood often correspond to no existing cause for uneasiness, but rather to
the vanished perils of primitive man. The fear of darkness, for instance, the
fear of solitude, the fear of thunder-storms, the fear of the loss of
orientation, speak of primitive helplessness, just as the fear of animals, the
fear of strangers, suggest the fierce and hazardous life of early man. To all
such instinctive feelings as these a morbid development is easily given.
Of what nature must we suppose this morbid development to be? Does it
fall properly within our present discussion? or is it not simply a beginning
of brain-disease, which concerns the physician rather than the psychologist?
The psychologist's best answer to this question will be to show cases of
fixed ideas cured by psychological means.[9] And indeed there are few cases
to show which have been cured by any methods except the psychological; if
hypnotic suggestion does not succeed with an idée fixe, it is seldom that any
other treatment will cure it. We may, of course, say that the brain troubles
thus cured were functional, and that those which went on inevitably into
insanity were organic, although the distinction between functional and
organic is not easily demonstrable in this ultra-microscopic realm.
At any rate, we have actually on record,—and that is what our argument
needs,—a great series of idées fixes, of various degrees of intensity, cured
by suggestion;—cured, that is to say, by a subliminal setting in action of
minute nervous movements which our supraliminal consciousness cannot in
even the blindest manner manage to set to work. Some such difference as
exists on a gross scale between striped and unstriped muscle seems to exist
on a minute scale among these smallest involved cells and fibres, or
whatever they be. Some of them obey our conscious will, but most of them
are capable of being governed only by subliminal strata of the self.

If, however, it be the subliminal self which can reduce these elements to
order, it is often probably the subliminal self to which their disorder is
originally due. If a fixed idea, say agoraphobia, grows up in me, this may
probably be because the proper controlling co-ordinations of thought, which
I ought to be able to summon up at will, have sunk below the level at which
will can reach them. I am no longer able, that is to say, to convince myself
by reasoning that there is no danger in crossing the open square. And this
may be the fault of my subliminal self, whose business it is to keep the
ideas which I need for common life easily within my reach, and which has
failed to do this, owing to some enfeeblement of its grasp of my organism.
If we imagine these obscure operations under some such form as this, we
get the advantage of being able to connect these insistent ideas in a coherent
sequence with the more advanced phenomena of hysteria. We have seen
that the presence of insistent ideas implies an instability of the conscious
threshold; and this, in its turn, indicates a disorderly or diseased condition
of the hypnotic stratum,—of that region of the personality which, as we
shall see, is best known to us through the fact that it is reached by hypnotic
suggestion.
Now we shall find, I think, that all the phenomena of hysteria are
reducible to the same general conception. To understand their many puzzles
we have to keep our eyes fixed upon just these psychological notions—
upon a threshold of ordinary consciousness above which certain perceptions
and faculties ought to be, but are not always, maintained, and upon a
"hypnotic stratum" or region of the personality to which hypnotic
suggestion appeals; and which includes faculty and perception which
surpass the supraliminal, but whose operation is capricious and dreamlike,
inasmuch as they lie, so to say, in a debateable region between two rules—
the known rule of the supraliminal self, adapted to this life's experience and
uses, and the conjectured rule of a fuller and profounder self, rarely reached
by any artifice which our present skill suggests. Some of these conscious
groupings have got separated from the ordinary stream of consciousness.
These may still be unified in the subliminal, but they need to be unified in
the supraliminal also. The normal relation between the supraliminal and the
subliminal may be disturbed by the action of either.
Let us now see how far this view, which I suggested in the S.P.R.
Proceedings as far back as 1892,[10] fits in with those modern observations
of hysteria, in Paris and Vienna especially, which are transforming all that

group of troubles from the mere opprobrium of medicine into one of the
most fertile sources of new knowledge of body and mind.
First, then, let us briefly consider what is the general type of hysterical
troubles. Speaking broadly, we may say that the symptoms of hysteria form,
in the first place, a series of phantom copies of real maladies of the nervous
system; and, in the second place, a series of fantasies played upon that
system—of unreal, dreamlike ailments, often such as no physiological
mechanism can be shown to have determined. These latter cases are often
due, as we shall see, not to purely physiological, but rather to intellectual
causes; they represent, not a particular pattern in which the nervous system
tends of itself to disintegrate, but a particular pattern which has been
imposed upon it by some intellectual process;—in short, by some form of
self-suggestion.
Let us briefly review some common types of hysterical disability,—taking
as our first guide Dr. Pierre Janet's admirable work, L'Etat Mental des
Hystériques (Paris, 1893).
What, then, to begin with, is Dr. Janet's general conception of the
psychological states of the advanced hysteric? "In the expression I feel," he
says (L'Etat Mental, p. 39), "we have two elements: a small new
psychological fact, 'feel,' and an enormous mass of thoughts already formed
into a system 'I.' These two things mix and combine, and to say I feel is to
say that the personality, already enormous, has seized and absorbed this
small new sensation; ... as though the I were an amœba which sent out a
prolongation to suck in this little sensation which has come into existence
beside it." Now it is in the assimilation of these elementary sensations or
affective states with the perception personnelle, as Janet terms it, that the
advanced hysteric fails. His field of consciousness is so far narrowed that it
can only take in the minimum of sensations necessary for the support of
life. "One must needs have consciousness of what one sees and hears, and
so the patient neglects to perceive the tactile and muscular sensations with
which he thinks that he can manage to dispense. At first he could perhaps
turn his attention to them, and recover them at least momentarily within the
field of personal perception. But the occasion does not present itself, and
the psychological bad habit is formed.... One day the patient—for he is now
veritably a patient—is examined by the doctor. His left arm is pinched, and
he is asked whether he feels the pinch. To his surprise the patient realises
that he can no longer feel consciously, can no longer bring back into his

personal perception sensations which he has neglected too long—he has
become anæsthetic.... Hysterical anæsthesia is thus a fixed and perpetual
distraction, which renders its subjects incapable of attaching certain
sensations to their personality; it is a restriction of the conscious field."
The proof of these assertions depends on a number of observations, all of
which point in the same direction, and show that hysterical anæsthesia does
not descend so deep into the personality, so to say, as true anæsthesia
caused by nervous decay, or by the section of a nerve.
Thus the hysteric is often unconscious of the anæsthesia, which is only
discovered by the physician. There is none of the distress caused by true
anæsthesia, as, for instance, by the "tabetic mask," or insensibility of part of
the face, which sometimes occurs in tabes dorsalis.
An incident reported by Dr. Jules Janet illustrates this peculiarity. A young
woman cut her right hand severely with broken glass, and complained of
insensibility in the palm. The physician who examined her found that the
sensibility of the right palm was, in fact, diminished by the section of
certain nerves. But he discovered at the same time that the girl was
hysterically anæsthetic over the whole left side of her body. She had never
even found out this disability, and the doctor twitted her with complaining
of the small patch of anæsthesia, while she said nothing of that which
covered half her body. But, as Dr. Pierre Janet remarks, she might well have
retorted that these were the facts, and that it was for the man of science to
say why the small patch annoyed her while the large one gave her no
trouble at all.
Of similar import is the ingenious observation that hysterical anæsthesia
rarely leads to any accident to the limb;—differing in this respect, for
instance, from the true and profound anæsthesia of syringomyelitis, in
which burns and bruises frequently result from the patient's forgetfulness of
the part affected. There is usually, in fact, a supervision—a subliminal
supervision—exercised over the hysteric's limbs. Part of her personality is
still alive to the danger, and modifies her movements, unknown to her
supraliminal self.
This curious point, I may remark in passing, well illustrates the kind of
action which I attribute to the subliminal self in many phases of life. Thus it
is that the hypnotised subject is prevented (as I hold) from committing a
real as opposed to a fictitious crime; thus it is that fresh ideas are suggested

to the man of genius; thus it is—I will even say—that in some cases
monitory hallucinations are generated, which save the supraliminal self
from some sudden danger.
I pass on to another peculiarity of hysterical anæsthesiæ;—also in my eyes
of deep significance. The anæsthetic belts or patches do not always, or even
generally, correspond with true anatomical areas, such as would be affected
by the actual lesion of any given nerve. They follow arbitrary arrangements;
—sometimes corresponding to rough popular notions of divisions of the
body,—sometimes seeming to reflect a merely childish caprice.
In these cases what is only a silly fancy seems to produce an effect which
is not merely fanciful;—which is objective, measurable, and capable of
causing long and serious disablement. This result, however, is quite
accordant with my view of what I have termed the hypnotic stratum of the
personality. I hold, as our coming discussion of hypnotism will more fully
explain, that the region into which the hypnotic suggestion gives us access
is one of strangely mingled strength and weakness;—of a faculty at once
more potent and less coherent than that of waking hours. I think that in
these cases we get at the subliminal self only somewhat in the same sense
as we get at the supraliminal self when the "highest-level centres" are for
the time inoperative (as in a dream) and only "middle-level centres" are left
to follow their own devices without inhibition or co-ordination. I hold that
this is the explanation of the strange contrasts which hypnosis makes
familiar to us—the combination of profound power over the organism with
childish readiness to obey the merest whims of the hypnotiser. The
intelligence which thus responds is in my view only a fragmentary
intelligence; it is a dreamlike scrap of the subliminal self, functioning apart
from that self's central and profounder control.
What happens in hypnotism in obedience to the hypnotiser's caprice
happens in hysteria in obedience to the caprice of the hypnotic stratum
itself. Some middle-level centre of the subliminal self (to express a difficult
idea by the nearest phrase I can find) gets the notion that there is an
"anæsthetic bracelet," say, round the left wrist;—and lo, this straight-way is
so; and the hysteric loses supraliminal sensation in this fantastic belt. That
the notion does not originate in the hysteric's supraliminal self is proved by
the fact that the patient is generally unaware of the existence of the bracelet
until the physician discovers it. Nor is it a chance combination;—even were
there such a thing as chance. It is a dream of the hypnotic stratum;—an

incoherent self-suggestion starting from and affecting a region below the
reach of conscious will. Such cases are most instructive; for they begin to
show us divisions of the human body based not upon local innervation but
upon ideation (however incoherent);—upon intellectual conceptions like "a
bracelet," "a cross,"—applied though these conceptions may be with
dreamlike futility.
In this view, then, we regard the fragments of perceptive power over
which the hysteric has lost control as being by no means really
extinguished, but rather as existing immediately beneath the threshold, in
the custody, so to say, of a dreamlike or hypnotic stratum of the subliminal
self, which has selected them for reasons sometimes explicable as the result
of past suggestions, sometimes to us inexplicable. If this be so, we may
expect that the same kind of suggestions which originally cut off these
perceptions from the main body of perception may stimulate them again to
action either below or above the conscious threshold.
We have already, indeed, seen reason to suppose that the submerged
perceptions are still at work, when Dr. Janet pointed out how rare a thing it
was that any accident or injury followed upon hysterical loss of feeling in
the limbs. A still more curious illustration is afforded by the condition of the
field of vision in a hysteric. It often happens that the field of vision is much
reduced, so that the hysteric, when tested with the perimeter, can discern
only objects almost directly in front of the eye. But if an object which
happens to be particularly exciting to the hypnotic stratum—for instance the
hypnotiser's finger, used often as a signal for trance—is advanced into that
part of the hysteric's normal visual field of which she has apparently lost all
consciousness, there will often be an instant subliminal perception,—shown
by the fact that the subject promptly falls into trance.
In such cases the action of the submerged perceptions, while provoked by
very shallow artifices, continues definitely subliminal. The patient herself,
as we say, does not know why she does not burn her anæsthetic limbs, or
why she suddenly falls into a trance while being subjected to optical tests.
But it is equally easy to devise experiments which shall call these
submerged sensations up again into supraliminal consciousness. A hysteric
has lost sensation in one arm: Dr. Janet tells her that there is a caterpillar on
that arm, and the reinforcement of attention thus generated brings back the
sensibility.

These hysterical anæsthesiæ, it may be added here, may be not only very
definite but very profound. Just as the reality,—though also the
impermanence,—of the hysterical retrenchment of field of vision of which I
have been speaking can be shown by optical experiments beyond the
patient's comprehension, so the reality of some profound organic hysterical
insensibilities is sometimes shown by the progress of independent disease.
A certain patient feels no hunger or thirst: this indifference might be
simulated for a time, but her ignorance of severe inflammation of the
bladder is easily recognisable as real. Throw her into hypnosis and her
sensibilities return. The disease is for the first time felt, and the patient
screams with pain. This result well illustrates one main effect of hypnosis,
viz., to bring the organism into a more normal state. The deep organic
anæsthesia of this patient was dangerously abnormal; the missing sensibility
had first to be restored, although it might be desirable afterwards to remove
the painful elements in that sensibility again, under, so to say, a wiser and
deeper control.
What has been said of hysterical defects of sensation might be repeated
for motor defects. There, too, the powers of which the supraliminal self has
lost control continue to act in obedience to subliminal promptings. The
hysteric who squeezes the dynamometer like a weak child can exert great
muscular force under the influence of emotion.
Very numerous are the cases which might be cited to give a notion of
dissolutive hysterical processes, as now observed with closer insight than
formerly, in certain great hospitals. But, nevertheless, these hospital
observations do not exhaust what has recently been learnt of hysteria.
Dealing almost exclusively with a certain class of patients, they leave
almost untouched another group, smaller, indeed, but equally instructive for
our study.
Hysteria is no doubt a disease, but it is by no means on that account an
indication of initial weakness of mind, any more than an Arctic explorer's
frost-bite is an indication of bad circulation. Disease is a function of two
variables: power of resistance and strength of injurious stimulus. In the case
of hysteria, as in the case of frost-bite, the inborn power of resistance may
be unusually great, and yet the stimulus may be so excessive that that power
may be overcome. Arctic explorers have generally, of course, been among
the most robust of men. And with some hysterics there is an even closer
connection between initial strength and destructive malady. For it has often

happened that the very feelings which we regard as characteristically
civilised, characteristically honourable, have reached a pitch of vividness
and delicacy which exposes their owners to shocks such as the selfish
clown can never know. It would be a great mistake to suppose that all
psychical upsets are due to vanity, to anger, to terror, to sexual passion. The
instincts of personal cleanliness and of feminine modesty are responsible
for many a breakdown of a sensitive, but not a relatively feeble
organisation. The love of one's fellow-creatures and the love of God are
responsible for many more. And why should it not be so? There exist for
many men and women stimuli far stronger than self-esteem or bodily
desires. Human life rests more and more upon ideas and emotions whose
relation to the conservation of the race or of the individual is indirect and
obscure. Feelings which may once have been utilitarian have developed
wholly out of proportion to any advantage which they can gain for their
possessor in the struggle for life. The dangers which are now most
shudderingly felt are often no real risks to life or fortune. The aims most
ardently pursued are often worse than useless for man regarded as a mere
over-runner of the earth.
There is thus real psychological danger in fixing our conception of human
character too low. Some essential lessons of a complex perturbation of
personality are apt to be missed if we begin with the conviction that there is
nothing before us but a study of decay. As I have more than once found
need to maintain, it is his steady advance, and not his occasional regression,
which makes the chief concern of man.
To this side of the study of hysteria Drs. Breuer and Freud have made
valuable contribution. Drawing their patients not from hospital wards, but
from private practice, they have had the good fortune to encounter, and the
penetration to understand, some remarkable cases where unselfish but
powerful passions have proved too much for the equilibrium of minds
previously well-fortified both by principle and by education.[11]
"Wax to receive and marble to retain"; such, as we all have felt, is the
human mind in moments of excitement which transcend its resistant
powers. This may be for good or for evil, may tend to that radical change in
ethical standpoint which is called conversion, or to the mere setting-up of
some hysterical disability. Who shall say how far we desire to be
susceptible to stimulus? Most rash would it be to assign any fixed limit, or
to class as inferior those whose main difference from ourselves may be that

they feel sincerely and passionately what we feel torpidly, or perhaps only
affect to feel. "The term degenerate," says Dr. Milne Bramwell, "is applied
so freely and widely by some modern authors that one cannot help
concluding that they rank as such all who do not conform to some
primitive, savage type, possessing an imperfectly developed nervous
system." Our "degenerates" may sometimes be in truth progenerate; and
their perturbation may mask an evolution which we or our children needs
must traverse when they have shown the way.
Let us pause for a moment and consider what is here implied. We are
getting here among the hystériques qui mènent le monde. We have
advanced, that is to say, from the region of idées fixes of a paltry or morbid
type to the region of idées fixes which in themselves are reasonable and
honourable, and which become morbid only on account of their relative
intensity. Here is the debateable ground between hysteria and genius. The
kind of genius which we approach here is not, indeed, the purely
intellectual form. Rather it is the "moral genius," the "genius of sanctity," or
that "possession" by some altruistic idea which lies at the root of so many
heroic lives.
The hagiology of all religions offers endless examples of this type. That
man would hardly be regarded as a great saint whose conduct seemed
completely reasonable to the mass of mankind. The saint in consequence is
apt to be set unduly apart, whether for veneration or for ridicule. He is
regarded either as inspired or as morbid; when in reality all that his mode of
life shows is that certain idées fixes, in themselves of no unworthy kind,
have obtained such dominance that their impulsive action may take and
retake, as accident wills, the step between the sublime and the ridiculous.
Martyrs, missionaries, crusaders, nihilists,—enthusiasts of any kind who
are swayed by impulses largely below the threshold of ordinary
consciousness,—these men bring to bear on human affairs a force more
concentrated and at higher tension than deliberate reason can generate.
They are virtually carrying out self-suggestions which have acquired the
permanence of idées fixes. Their fixed ideas, however, are not so isolated,
so encysted as those of true hysterics. Although more deeply and immutably
rooted than their ideas on other matters, these subliminal convictions are
worked in with the products of supraliminal reason, and of course can only
thus be made effective over other minds. A deep subliminal horror,
generated, say, by the sight of some loathsome cruelty, must not only

prompt hallucinations,—as it might do in the hysteric and has often done in
the reformer as well,—it must also, if it is to work out its mission of reform,
be held clearly before the supraliminal reason, and must learn to express
itself in writing or speech adapted to influence ordinary minds.

We may now pass from the first to the second of the categories of
disintegration of personality suggested at the beginning of this chapter. The
cases which I have thus far discussed have been mainly cases of isolation of
elements of personality. We have not dealt as yet with secondary
personalities as such. There is, however, a close connection between these
two classes. There are cases, for example, where a kind of secondary state
at times intervenes—a sort of bewilderment arising from confluent idées
fixes and overrunning the whole personality. This new state is often
preceded or accompanied by something of somnambulic change. It is this
new feature of which we have here a first hint which seems to me of
sufficient importance for the diagnosis of my second class of psychical
disintegrations. This second class starts from sleep-wakings of all kinds,
and includes all stages of alternation of personality, from brief
somnambulisms up to those permanent and thorough changes which
deserve the name of dimorphisms.
We are making here a transition somewhat resembling the transition from
isolated bodily injuries to those subtler changes of diathesis which change
of climate or of nutrition may induce. Something has happened which
makes the organism react to all stimuli in a new way. Our best starting-point
for the study of these secondary states lies among the phenomena of dream.
We shall in a later chapter discuss certain rare characteristics of dreams;
occasional manifestations in sleep of waking faculty heightened, or of
faculty altogether new. We have now to consider ordinary dreams in their
aspect as indications of the structure of our personality, and as agencies
which tend to its modification.
In the first place, it should be borne in mind that the dreaming state,
though I will not call it the normal form of mentation, is nevertheless the
form which our mentation most readily and habitually assumes. Dreams of
a kind are probably going on within us both by night and by day, unchecked
by any degree of tension of waking thought. This view—theoretically
probable—seems to me to be supported by one's own actual experience in

momentary dozes or even momentary lapses of attention. The condition of
which one then becomes conscious is that of swarming fragments of
thought or imagery, which have apparently been going on continuously,
though one may become aware of them and then unaware at momentary
intervals;—while one tries, for instance, to listen to a speech or to read a
book aloud between sleep and waking.
This, then, is the kind of mentation from which our clearer and more
coherent states may be supposed to develop. Waking life implies a fixation
of attention on one thread of thought running through a tangled skein. In
hysterical patients we see some cases where no such fixation is possible,
and other cases where the fixation is involuntary, or follows a thread which
it is not desirable to pursue.
There is, moreover, another peculiarity of dreams which has hardly
attracted sufficient notice from psychologists, but which it is essential to
review when we are dealing with fractionations of personality.[12] I allude to
their dramatic character. In dream, to begin with, we have an environment,
a surrounding scene which we have not wittingly invented, but which we
find, as it were, awaiting our entry. And in many cases our dream contains a
conversation in which we await with eagerness and hear with surprise the
remarks of our interlocutor, who must, of course, all the time represent only
another segment or stratum of ourselves. This duplication may become
either painful or pleasant. A feverish dream may simulate the confusions of
insanity—cases where the patient believes himself to be two persons at
once, and the like. [See R. L. Stevenson's dream, given in Appendix II. A]
These complications rarely cause the dreamer any surprise. One may even
say that with the first touch of sleep the superficial unity of consciousness
disappears, and that the dream world gives a truer representation than the
waking world of the real fractionation or multiplicity existing beneath that
delusive simplicity which the glare of waking consciousness imposes upon
the mental field of view.
Bearing these analogies in mind, we shall see that the development of
somnambulism out of ordinary dream is no isolated oddity. It is parallel to
the development of a secondary state from idées fixes when these have
passed a certain pitch of intensity. The sleep-waking states which develop
from sleep have the characteristics which we should expect from their
largely subliminal origin. They are less coherent than waking secondary
personalities, but richer in supernormal faculty. It is in connection with

displays of such faculty—hyperæsthesia or telæsthesia—that they have
been mainly observed, and that I shall, in a future chapter, have most need
to deal with them. But there is also great interest simply in observing what
fraction of the sleep-waker's personality is able to hold intercourse with
other minds. A trivial instance of such intercourse reduced to its lowest
point has often recurred to me. When I was a boy another boy sleeping in
the same room began to talk in his sleep. To some slight extent he could
answer me; and the names and other words uttered—Harry, the boat, etc.—
were appropriate to the day's incidents, and would have been enough to
prove to me, had I not otherwise known, who the boy was. But his few
coherent remarks represented not facts but dreaming fancies—the boat is
waiting, and so forth. This trivial jumble, I say, has since recurred to me as
precisely parallel to many communications professing to come from
disembodied spirits. There are other explanations, no doubt, but one
explanation of such incoherent utterances would be that the spirit was
speaking under conditions resembling those in which this sleeping boy
spoke.
There are, of course, many stages above this. Spontaneous
somnambulistic states become longer in duration, more coherent in content,
and may gradually merge, as in the well-known case of Félida X. (see
Appendix II. C) into a continuous or dimorphic new personality.
The transition which has now to be made is a very decided one. We have
been dealing with a class of secondary personalities consisting of elements
emotionally selected from the total or primary personality. We have seen
some special group of feelings grow to morbid intensity, until at last it
dominates the sufferer's mental being, either fitfully or continuously, but to
such an extent that he is "a changed person," not precisely insane, but quite
other than he was when in normal mental health. In such cases the new
personality is of course dyed in the morbid emotion. It is a kind of dramatic
impersonation, say, of jealousy, or of fear, like the case of "demoniacal
possession," quoted from Dr. Janet in Appendix II. B. In other respects the
severance between the new and the old self is not very profound.
Dissociations of memory, for instance, are seldom beyond the reach of
hypnotic suggestion. The cleavage has not gone down to the depths of the
psychical being.
We must now go on to cases where the origin of the cleavage seems to us
quite arbitrary, but where the cleavage itself seems even for that very reason

to be more profound. It is no longer a question of some one morbidly
exaggerated emotion, but rather of a scrap of the personality taken at
random and developing apart from the rest.
The commonest mode of origin for such secondary personalities is from
some access of sleep-waking, which, instead of merging into sleep again,
repeats and consolidates itself, until it acquires a chain of memories of its
own, alternating with the primary chain.[13]
And now, as an illustration of a secondary condition purely degenerative, I
may first mention post-epileptic states, although they belong too definitely
to pathology for full discussion here. Post-epileptic conditions may run
parallel to almost all the secondary phases which we have described. They
may to all outward semblance closely resemble normality,—differing
mainly by a lack of rational purpose, and perhaps by a recurrence to the
habits and ideas of some earlier moment in the patient's history. Such a
condition resembles some hypnotic trances, and some factitious
personalities as developed by automatic writing. Or, again, the post-
epileptic state may resemble a suddenly developed idée fixe triumphing
over all restraint, and may prompt to serious crime, abhorrent to the normal,
but premeditated in the morbid state. There could not, in fact, be a better
example of the unchecked rule of middle-level centres;—no longer secretly
controlled, as in hypnotic trance, by the higher-level centres,—which
centres in the epileptic are in a state not merely of psychological abeyance,
but of physiological exhaustion.[14]
The case of Ansel Bourne is interesting in this connection.[15] Subject
from childhood to fits of deep depression, and presenting in later life
symptoms suggestive of epilepsy, Ansel Bourne was struck down in his
thirty-first year by what was supposed to be a severe sunstroke. Connected
with this event were circumstances which led to a profound religious
conversion. At sixty-one years of age, being at that time an itinerant
preacher, and living in the small town of Greene, in the State of Rhode
Island, Ansel Bourne disappeared one morning, whilst apparently in his
usual state of health, and remained undiscovered for a period of two
months. At the end of this time he turned up at Norristown, Pennsylvania,
where for the previous six weeks he had been keeping a small variety store
under the name of A. J. Brown, appearing to his neighbours and customers
as an ordinary normal person, but being, as it would seem, in a
somnambulistic condition all the while. When he regained his ordinary

waking consciousness, Ansel Bourne lost all memory of his actions while in
his secondary state. In the year 1890, however, having been hypnotised by
Professor James, he was able while in the trance state to give an account of
his doings during the eight weeks that the Brown personality lasted.
In this case it is perhaps safest to regard the change of personality as post-
epileptic, although I know of no recorded parallel to the length of time
during which the influence of the attack must have continued. The effect on
mind and character would suit well enough with this hypothesis. The
"Brown" personality showed the narrowness of interests and the
uninquiring indifference which is common in such states. But on this theory
the case shows one striking novelty, namely, the recall by the aid of
hypnotism of the memory of the post-epileptic state. It is doubtful, I think,
whether any definite post-epileptic memory had ever previously been
recovered. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether serious recourse had
ever been had at such times to hypnotic methods, whose increasing
employment certainly differentiates the latter from the earlier cases of split
personality in a very favourable way. And this application of hypnotism to
post-epileptic states affords us possibly our best chance—I do not say of
directly checking epilepsy, but of getting down to the obscure conditions
which predispose to each attack.
Next we may mention two cases reported by Dr. Proust and M. Boeteau.
Dr. Proust's patient,[16] Emile X., aged thirty-three, was a barrister in Paris.
Although of good ability and education in classical studies, both as a boy
and at the university he was always nervous and over sensitive, showing
signs, in fact, of la grande hystérie. During his attacks he apparently
underwent no loss of consciousness, but would lose the memory of all his
past life during a few minutes or a few days, and in this condition of
secondary consciousness would lead an active and apparently normal life.
From such a state he woke suddenly, and was entirely without memory of
what had happened to him in this secondary state. This memory was,
however, restored by hypnotism.
M. Boeteau's patient, Marie M.,[17] had been subject to hysterical attacks
since she was twelve years old. She became an out-patient at the Hôpital
Andral for these attacks: and on April 24, 1891, being then twenty-two
years old, the house physician there advised her to enter the surgical ward at
the Hôtel-Dieu, as she would probably need an operation for an internal
trouble. Greatly shocked by this news, she left the hospital at ten A.M., and

lost consciousness. When she recovered consciousness she found herself in
quite another hospital—that of Ste. Anne—at six A.M. on April 27. She had
been found wandering in the streets of Paris, in the evening of the day on
which she left the Hôpital Andral. On returning to herself, she could
recollect absolutely nothing of what had passed in the interval. While she
was thus perplexed at her unexplained fatigue and footsoreness, and at the
gap in her memory, M. Boeteau hypnotised her. She passed with ease into
the hypnotic state, and at once remembered the events which filled at least
the earlier part of the gap in her primary consciousness.
These two cases belong to the same general type as Ansel Bourne's. There
does not seem, however, to be any definite evidence that the secondary state
was connected with epileptic attacks. It was referred rather by the
physicians who witnessed it to a functional derangement analogous to
hysteria, though it must be remembered that there are various forms of
epilepsy which are not completely understood, and some of which may be
overlooked by persons who are not familiar with the symptoms.
Another remarkable case is that of the Rev. Thomas C. Hanna,[18] in
whom complete amnesia followed an accident. By means of a method
which Dr. Sidis (who studied the case) calls "hypnoidisation," he was able
to prove that the patient had all his lost memories stored in his subliminal
consciousness, and could temporarily recall them to the supraliminal. By
degrees the two personalities which had developed since the accident were
thus fused into one and the patient was completely cured.
For another case of the ambulatory type, like Ansel Bourne's, but
remarkable in that it was associated with a definite physical lesion—an
abscess in the ear—the cure of which was followed by the rapid return of
the patient to his normal condition, see Dr. Drewry's article in the Medico-
Legal Journal for June 1896 [228 A].
Again, in a case reported by Dr. David Skae,[19] the secondary state seems
to owe its origin to a kind of tidal exhaustion of vitality, as though the
repose of sleep were not enough to sustain the weakened personality, which
lapsed on alternate days into exhaustion and incoherence.
The secondary personalities thus far dealt with have been the spontaneous
results of some form of misère psychologique, of defective integration of
the psychical being. But there are also cases where, the cohesion being thus
released, a slight touch from without can effect dissociations which,

however shallow and almost playful in their first inception, may stiffen by
repetition into phases as marked and definite as those secondary states
which spring up of themselves, that is to say, from self-suggestions which
we cannot trace. In Professor Janet's L'Automatisme Psychologique the
reader will find some instructive examples of these fictitious secondary
personalities [230 A and B].
Up to this point the secondary states which we have considered; however
startling to old-fashioned ideas of personality, may, at any rate, be regarded
as forms of mental derangement or decay—varieties on a theme already
known. Now, however, we approach a group of cases to which it is difficult
to make any such definition apply. They are cases where the secondary state
is not obviously a degeneration;—where it may even appear to be in some
ways an improvement on the primary; so that one is left wondering how it
came about that the man either originally was what he was, or—being what
he was—suddenly became something so very different. There has been a
shake given to the kaleidoscope, and no one can say why either
arrangement of the component pieces should have had the priority.
In the classical case of Félida X. the second state is, as regards health and
happiness, markedly superior to the first. (See Appendix II. C.)
The old case of Mary Reynolds[20] is again remarkable in respect of the
change of character involved. The deliverance from gloomy preoccupations
—the childish insouciance of the secondary state—again illustrates the
difference between these allotropic changes or reconstructions of
personality and that mere predominance of a morbid factor which marked
the cases of idée fixe and hysteria. Observe, also, in Mary Reynolds's case
the tendency of the two states gradually to coalesce apparently in a third
phase likely to be preferable to either of the two already known.
We now come to spontaneous cases of multiple personality, of which
Louis Vivé's is one of the best known. Louis Vivé exhibited an
extraordinary number and variety of phases of personality, affording an
extreme example of dissociations dependent on time-relations, on the
special epoch of life in which the subject was ordered to find himself.[21]
Among various conditions of his organism—all but one of them implying,
or at least simulating, some grave central lesion—any given condition could
be revived in a moment, and the whole gamut of changes rung on his
nervous system as easily as if one were setting back or forward a

continuous cinematograph. It is hard to frame a theory of memory which
shall admit of these sudden reversions,—of playing fast and loose in this
manner with the accumulated impressions of years.
Yet if Louis Vivé's case thus strangely intensifies the already puzzling
notion of ecmnesia—as though the whole organism could be tricked into
forgetting the events which had most deeply stamped it—what are we to say
to Dr. Morton Prince's case of "Sally Beauchamp,"[22] with its grotesque
exaggeration of a subliminal self—a kind of hostile bedfellow which knows
everything and remembers everything—which mocks the emotions and
thwarts the projects of the ordinary reasonable self which can be seen and
known? The case must be studied in full as it stands; its later developments
may help to unravel the mysteries which its earlier stages have already
woven.[23]
I quote in full in the text the next case, reported by Dr. R. Osgood Mason
(in a paper entitled "Duplex Personality: its Relation to Hypnotism and to
Lucidity," in the Journal of the American Medical Association, November
30th, 1895). Dr. Mason writes:—

Alma Z. was an unusually healthy and intellectual girl, a strong and attractive character, a leading
spirit in whatever she undertook, whether in study, sport, or society. From overwork in school, and
overtaxed strength in a case of sickness at home, her health was completely broken down, and after
two years of great suffering suddenly a second personality appeared. In a peculiar child-like and
Indian-like dialect she announced herself as "Twoey," and that she had come to help "Number One"
in her suffering. The condition of "Number One" was at this time most deplorable; there was great
pain, extreme debility, frequent attacks of syncope, insomnia, and a mercurial stomatitis which had
been kept up for months by way of medical treatment and which rendered it nearly impossible to take
nourishment in any form. "Twoey" was vivacious and cheerful, full of quaint and witty talk, never
lost consciousness, and could take abundant nourishment, which she declared she must do for the
sake of "Number One." Her talk was most quaint and fascinating, but without a trace of the acquired
knowledge of the primary personality. She gave frequent evidence of supranormal intelligence
regarding events transpiring in the neighbourhood. It was at this time that the case came under my
observation, and has remained so for the past ten years. Four years later, under depressing
circumstances, a third personality made its appearance and announced itself as "The Boy." This
personality was entirely distinct and different from either of the others. It remained the chief
alternating personality for four years, when "Twoey" again returned.
All these personalities, though absolutely different and characteristic, were delightful each in its
own way, and "Twoey" especially was, and still is, the delight of the friends who are permitted to
know her, whenever she makes her appearance; and this is always at times of unusual fatigue, mental
excitement, or prostration; then she comes and remains days at a time. The original self retains her
superiority when she is present, and the others are always perfectly devoted to her interest and
comfort. "Number One" has no personal knowledge of either of the other personalities, but she
knows them well, and especially "Twoey," from the report of others and from characteristic letters
which are often received from her; and "Number One" greatly enjoys the spicy, witty, and often
useful messages which come to her through these letters and the report of friends.

Dr. Mason goes on to say:—
Here are three cases [the one just given, that of another patient of his own, and that of Félida X.] in
which a second personality—perfectly sane, thoroughly practical, and perfectly in touch and
harmony with its surroundings—came to the surface, so to speak, and assumed absolute control of
the physical organisation for long periods of time together. During the stay of the second personality
the primary or original self was entirely blotted out, and the time so occupied was a blank. In neither
of the cases described had the primary self any knowledge of the second personality, except from the
report of others or letters from the second self, left where they could be found on the return of the
primary self to consciousness. The second personality, on the other hand, in each case, knew of the
primary self, but only as another person—never as forming a part of, or in any way belonging to their
own personalities. In the case of both Félida X. and Alma Z., there was always immediate and
marked improvement in the physical condition when the second personality made its appearance.

The case of Mollie Fancher,[24] which, had it been observed and recorded
with scientific accuracy, might have been one of the most instructive of all,
seems to stand midway between the transformations of Louis Vivé—each of
them frankly himself at a different epoch of life—and the "pseudo-
possessions" of imaginary spirits with which we shall in a later chapter have
to deal.

The case of Anna Winsor[25] goes so far further in its suggestion of
interference from without that it presents to us, at any rate, a contrast and
even conflict between positive insanity on the part of the organism
generally with wise and watchful sanity on the part of a single limb, with
which that organism professes to have no longer any concern.
The last case[26] that I shall mention is that of Miss Mary Lurancy
Vennum, the "Watseka Wonder."
The case briefly is one of alleged "possession," or "spirit-control." The
subject of the account, a girl nearly fourteen years old, living at Watseka,
Illinois, became apparently controlled by the spirit of Mary Roff, a
neighbour's daughter, who had died at the age of eighteen years and nine
months, when Lurancy Vennum was a child of about fifteen months old.
The most extraordinary feature in the case was that the control by Mary
Roff lasted almost continuously for a period of four months.
For the present we must consider this case as a duplication of personality
—a pseudo-possession, if you will—determined in a hysterical child by the
suggestion of friends, but at a later stage, and when some other wonders
have become more familiar than now, we may find that this singular
narrative has further lessons to teach us.
We have now briefly surveyed a series of disintegrations of personality
ranging from the most trifling idée fixe to actual alternations or permanent
changes of the whole type of character. All these form a kind of continuous
series, and illustrate the structure of the personality in concordant ways.
There do exist, it must be added, other forms of modified personality with
which I shall not at present deal. Those are cases where some telepathic
influence from outside has been at work, so that there is not merely
dissociation of existing elements, but apparent introduction of a novel
element. Such cases also pass through a long series, from small phenomena
of motor automatism up to trance and so-called possession. But all this
group I mention here merely in order to defer their discussion to later
chapters.
The brief review already made will suffice to indicate the complex and
separable nature of the elements of human personality. Of course a far fuller
list might have been given; many phenomena of actual insanity would need
to be cited in any complete conspectus. But hysteria is in some ways a
better dissecting agent than any other where delicate psychical dissociations

are concerned. Just as the microscopist stains a particular tissue for
observation, so does hysteria stain with definiteness, as it were, particular
synergies—definite complexes of thought and action—more manifestly
than any grosser lesion, any more profound or persistent injury could do.
Hysterical mutism, for instance (the observation is Charcot's[27]), supplies
almost the only cases where the faculty of vocal utterance is attacked in a
quite isolated way. In aphasia dependent upon organic injury we generally
find other word-memories attacked also,—elements of agraphy, of word-
blindness, of word-deafness appear. In the hysteric the incapacity to speak
may be the single symptom. So with anæsthesiæ; we find in hysteria a
separation of sensibility to heat and to pain, possibly even a separate
subsistence of electrical sensibility. It is worth remarking here that it was
during the hypnotic trance, which in delicacy of discriminating power
resembles hysteria, that (so far as I can make out) the distinctness of the
temperature-sense from the pain-sense was first observed. Esdaile, when
removing tumours under mesmerism in Calcutta, noticed that patients, who
were actually undergoing capital operations without a murmur, complained
if a draught blew in upon them from an open window.
Nor is it only as a dissecting agent that hysteria can aid our research.
There are in hysteria frequent acquisitions as well as losses of faculty. It is
not unusual to find great hyperæsthesia in certain special directions—of
touch, hearing, perception of light, etc.—combined with hysterical loss of
sensation of other kinds. This subject will be more conveniently treated
along with the hyperæsthesia of the hypnotic trance. But I may note here
that just such occasional quickenings of faculty were, in my view, almost
certain to accompany that instability of psychical threshold which is the
distinguishing characteristic of hysteria, since I hold that subliminal faculty
habitually overpasses supraliminal. These also are a kind of capricious idées
fixes; only the caprice in such cases raises what was previously submerged
instead of exaggerating what was previously emergent.
And from this point it is that our inquiries must now take their fresh
departure. We in this work are concerned with changes which are the
converse of hysterical changes. We are looking for integrations in lieu of
disintegrations; for intensifications of control, widenings of faculty, instead
of relaxation, scattering, or decay.
Suppose, then, that in a case of instability of the psychical threshold,—
ready permeability, if you will, of the psychical diaphragm separating the

supraliminal from the subliminal self,—the elements of emergence tend to
increase and the elements of submergence to diminish. Suppose that the
permeability depends upon the force of the uprushes from below the
diaphragm rather than on the tendency to sink downwards from above it.
We shall then reach the point where the vague name of hysteria must give
place to the vague name of genius. The uprushes from the subliminal self
will now be the important feature; the down-draught from the supraliminal,
if it still exists, will be trivial in comparison. The content of the uprush will
be congruous with the train of voluntary thought; and the man of genius
will be a man more capable than others of utilising for his waking purposes
the subliminal region of his being.
Next in order to the uprushes of genius will come the uprushes of dream.
All men pass normally and healthily into a second phase of personality,
alternating with the first. That is sleep, and sleep is characterised by those
incoherent forms of subliminal uprush which we know as dreams. It is here
that our evidence for telepathy and telæsthesia will first present itself for
discussion. Sleep will indicate the existence of submerged faculty of a rarer
type than even that to which genius has already testified.
There are, moreover, other states, both spontaneous and induced,
analogous to sleep, and these will form the subject of the fifth chapter, that
on Hypnotism. Hypnotism, however, does not mean trance or
somnambulism only. It is a name, if not for the whole ensemble, yet for a
large group of those artifices which we have as yet discovered for the
purpose of eliciting and utilising subliminal faculty. The results of hypnotic
suggestion will be found to imitate sometimes the subliminal uprushes of
genius, and sometimes the visions of spontaneous somnambulism; while
they also open to us fresh and characteristic accesses into subliminal
knowledge and power.
Further than this point our immediate forecast need not go. But when we
have completed the survey here indicated, we shall see, I think, how
significant are the phenomena of hysteria in any psychological scheme
which aims at including the hidden powers of man. For much as the
hysteric stands in comparison to us ordinary men, so perhaps do we
ordinary men stand in comparison with a not impossible ideal of faculty and
of self-control.

But apart from these broader speculations, it has become evident that
disturbances of personality are not mere empty marvels, but psycho-
pathological problems of the utmost interest:—no one of them exactly like
another, and no one of them without some possible aperçu into the intimate
structure of man.
The purpose of this book, of course, is not primarily practical. It aims
rather at the satisfaction of scientific curiosity as to man's psychical
structure; esteeming that as a form of experimental research which the more
urgent needs of therapeutics have kept in the background too long. Yet it
may not have been amiss to realise thus, on the threshold of our discussion,
that already even the most delicate speculations in this line have found their
justification in helpful act; that strange bewilderments, paralysing
perturbations, which no treatment could alleviate, no drug control, have
been soothed and stablished into sanity by some appropriate and sagacious
mode of appeal to a natura medicatrix deep-hidden in the labouring breast.

CHAPTER III

GENIUS

Igneus est ollis vigor et cœlestis origo
Seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant
Terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra.
—Virgil.
IN my second chapter I made no formal attempt to define that human
personality which is to form the main subject of this book. I was content to
take the conception roughly for granted, and to enter at once on the study of
the lapses of personality into abnormal conditions,—short of the lowest
depths of idiocy or madness. From that survey it appeared that these
degenerations could be traced to some defect in that central control which
ought to clasp and integrate into steady manhood the hierarchies of living
cells which compose the human organism. This insight into the Self's decay
was the needed prerequisite to our present task—that of apprehending its
true normality, and thereafter of analysing certain obscurer faculties which
indicate the line of its evolution during and after the life of earth.
Strength and concentration of the inward unifying control—that must be
the true normality which we seek; and in seeking it we must remember how
much of psychical operation goes on below the conscious threshold,
imperfectly obedient to any supraliminal appeal. What advance can we
make in inward mastery? how far extend our grasp over the whole range of
faculty with which we are obscurely endowed?
"Human perfectibility" has been the theme of many enthusiasts; and many
utopian schemes of society have been and still are suggested, which
postulate in the men and women of the future an increase in moral and
physical health and vigour. And it is plain that in a broad and general way
natural selection, sexual selection, and the advance of science are working
together towards improvements of these kinds. But it is plain also that these
onward tendencies, at least in comparison with our desires and ideals, are
slow and uncertain; and it is possible to argue that the apparent advance in

our race is due merely to the improvement which science has affected in its
material environment, and not to any real development, during the historical
period, in the character or faculties of man himself. Nay, since we have no
means of knowing to what extent any genus has an inward potentiality of
improvement, it is possible for the pessimist to argue that the genus homo
has reached its fore-ordained evolutionary limit; so that it cannot be pushed
further in any direction without risk of nervous instability, sterility, and
ultimate extinction. Some dim apprehension of this kind lends plausibility
to many popular diatribes. Dr. Max Nordau's works afford a well-known
example of this line of protest against the present age as an age of overwork
and of nervous exhaustion. And narrowing the vague discussion to a
somewhat more definite test, Professor Lombroso and other anthropologists
have discussed the characteristics of the "man of genius"; with the result of
showing (as they believe) that this apparently highest product of the race is
in reality not a culminant but an aberrant manifestation; and that men of
genius must be classed with criminals and lunatics, as persons in whom a
want of balance or completeness of organisation has led on to an over-
development of one side of the nature;—helpful or injurious to other men as
accident may decide.
On this point I shall join issue; and I shall suggest, on the other hand, that
Genius—if that vaguely used word is to receive anything like a
psychological definition—should rather be regarded as a power of utilising
a wider range than other men can utilise of faculties in some degree innate
in all;—a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to
subserve the supraliminal stream of thought;—so that an "inspiration of
Genius" will be in truth a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current
of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he
has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond
his will, in profounder regions of his being. I shall urge that there is here no
real departure from normality; no abnormality, at least in the sense of
degeneration; but rather a fulfilment of the true norm of man, with
suggestions, it may be, of something supernormal;—of something which
transcends existing normality as an advanced stage of evolutionary progress
transcends an earlier stage.
But before proceeding further I wish to guard against a possible
misapprehension. I shall be obliged in this chapter to dwell on valuable aid
rendered by subliminal mentation; but I do not mean to imply that such

mentation is ipso facto superior to supraliminal, or even that it covers a
large proportion of practically useful human achievement. When I say "The
differentia of genius lies in an increased control over subliminal mentation,"
I express, I think, a well-evidenced thesis, and I suggest an important
inference,—namely, that the man of genius is for us the best type of the
normal man, in so far as he effects a successful co-operation of an unusually
large number of elements of his personality—reaching a stage of integration
slightly in advance of our own. Thus much I wish to say: but my thesis is
not to be pushed further:—as though I claimed that all our best thought was
subliminal, or that all that was subliminal was potentially "inspiration."
It is true, however, that the range of our subliminal mentation is more
extended than the range of our supraliminal. At one end of the scale we find
dreams,—a normal subliminal product, but of less practical value than any
form of sane supraliminal thought. At the other end of the scale we find that
the rarest, most precious knowledge comes to us from outside the ordinary
field,—through the eminently subliminal processes of telepathy,
telæsthesia, ecstasy. And between these two extremes lie many subliminal
products, varying in value according to the dignity and trustworthiness of
the subliminal mentation concerned.
This last phrase—inevitably obscure—may be illustrated by reference to
that hierarchical arrangement of supraliminal action and perception which
Dr. Hughlings Jackson has so used as to clear up much previous confusion
of thought. Following him, we now speak of highest-level nerve-centres,
governing our highest, most complex thought and will; of middle-level
centres, governing movements of voluntary muscles, and the like; and of
lowest-level centres (which from my point of view are purely subliminal),
governing those automatic processes, as respiration and circulation, which
are independent of conscious rule, but necessary to the maintenance of life.
We can roughly judge from the nature of any observed action whether the
highest-level centres are directing it, or whether they are for the time
inhibited, so that middle-level centres operate uncontrolled.
Thus ordinary speech and writing are ruled by highest-level centres. But
when an epileptic discharge of nervous energy has exhausted the highest-
level centres, we see the middle-level centres operating unchecked, and
producing the convulsive movements of arms and legs in the "fit." As these
centres in their turn become exhausted, the patient is left to the guidance of

lowest-level centres alone;—that is to say, he becomes comatose, though he
continues to breathe as regularly as usual.
Now this series of phenomena,—descending in coherence and
coordination from an active consensus of the whole organism to a mere
automatic maintenance of its most stably organised processes,—may be
pretty closely paralleled by the series of subliminal phenomena also.
Sometimes we seem to see our subliminal perceptions and faculties acting
truly in unity, truly as a Self;—co-ordinated into some harmonious
"inspiration of genius," or some profound and reasonable hypnotic self-
reformation, or some far-reaching supernormal achievement of clairvoyant
vision or of self-projection into a spiritual world. Whatever of subliminal
personality is thus acting corresponds with the highest-level centres of
supraliminal life. At such moments the subliminal represents (as I believe)
most nearly what will become the surviving Self.
But it seems that this degree of clarity, of integration, cannot be long
preserved. Much oftener we find the subliminal perceptions and faculties
acting in less co-ordinated, less coherent ways. We have products which,
while containing traces of some faculty beyond our common scope,
involve, nevertheless, something as random and meaningless as the
discharge of the uncontrolled middle-level centres of arms and legs in the
epileptic fit. We get, in short, a series of phenomena which the term dream-
like seems best to describe.
In the realm of genius,—of uprushes of thought and feeling fused beneath
the conscious threshold into artistic shape,—we get no longer masterpieces
but half-insanities,—not the Sistine Madonna, but Wiertz's Vision of the
Guillotined Head; not Kubla Khan, but the disordered opium dream.
Throughout all the work of William Blake (I should say) we see the
subliminal self flashing for moments into unity, then smouldering again in a
lurid and scattered glow.
In the realm of hypnotism, again, we sink from the reasonable self-
suggestion to the "platform experiments,"—the smelling of ammonia, the
eating of tallow candles;—all the tricks which show a profound control, but
not a wise control, over the arcana of organic life. I speak, of course, of the
subject's own control over his organism; for in the last resort it is he and not
his hypnotiser who really exercises that directive power. And I compare
these tricks of middle-level subliminal centres to the powerful yet irrational

control which the middle-level centres ruling the epileptic's arms and legs
exercise over his muscles in the violence of the epileptic attack.
And so again with the automatisms which are, one may say, the subliminal
self's peculiar province. Automatic script, for instance, may represent
highest-level subliminal centres, even when no extraneous spirit, but the
automatist's own mind alone, is concerned. It will then give us true
telepathic messages, or perhaps messages of high moral import, surpassing
the automatist's conscious powers. But much oftener the automatic script is
regulated by what I have called middle-level subliminal centres only;—and
then, though we may have scraps of supernormal intelligence, we have
confusion and incoherence as well. We have the falsity which the disgusted
automatist is sometimes fain to ascribe to a devil; though it is in reality not
a devil, but a dream.
And hence again, just as the epileptic sinks lower and lower in the fit,—
from the incoordinated movements of the limbs down to the mere stertorous
breathing of coma,—so do these incoherent automatisms sink down at last,
through the utterances and drawings of the degenerate and the paranoiac,—
through mere fragmentary dreams, or vague impersonal bewilderment,—
into the minimum psychical concomitant, whatever that be, which must
coexist with brain-circulation.
Such is the apparent parallelism; but of course no knowledge of a
hierarchy of the familiar forms of nervous action can really explain to us the
mysterious fluctuations of subliminal power.
When we speak of the highest-level and other centres which govern our
supraliminal being, and which are fitted to direct this planetary life in a
material world, we can to some extent point out actual brain-centres whose
action enables us to meet those needs. What are the needs of our cosmic life
we do not know; nor can we indicate any point in our organism (as in the
"solar plexus," or the like), which is adapted to meet them. We cannot even
either affirm or deny that such spiritual life as we maintain while incarnated
in this material envelope involves any physical concomitants at all.
For my part, I feel forced to fall back upon the old-world conception of a
soul which exercises an imperfect and fluctuating control over the
organism; and exercises that control, I would add, along two main channels,
only partly coincident—that of ordinary consciousness, adapted to the
maintenance and guidance of earth-life; and that of subliminal

consciousness, adapted to the maintenance of our larger spiritual life during
our confinement in the flesh.
We men, therefore, clausi tenebris et carcere cæco, can sometimes widen,
as we must sometimes narrow, our outlook on the reality of things. In mania
or epilepsy we lose control even of those highest-level supraliminal centres
on which our rational earth-life depends. But through automatism and in
trance and allied states we draw into supraliminal life some rivulet from the
undercurrent stream. If the subliminal centres which we thus impress into
our waking service correspond to the middle-level only, they may bring to
us merely error and confusion; if they correspond to the highest-level, they
may introduce us to previously unimagined truth.
It is to work done by the aid of some such subliminal uprush, I say once
more, that the word "genius" may be most fitly applied. "A work of genius,"
indeed, in common parlance, means a work which satisfies two quite
distinct requirements. It must involve something original, spontaneous,
unteachable, unexpected; and it must also in some way win for itself the
admiration of mankind. Now, psychologically speaking, the first of these
requirements corresponds to a real class, the second to a purely accidental
one. What the poet feels while he writes his poem is the psychological fact
in his history; what his friends feel while they read it may be a
psychological fact in their history, but does not alter the poet's creative
effort, which was what it was, whether any one but himself ever reads his
poem or no.
And popular phraseology justifies our insistence upon this subjective side
of genius. Thus it is common to say that "Hartley Coleridge" (for example)
"was a genius, although he never produced anything worth speaking of."
Men recognise, that is to say, from descriptions of Hartley Coleridge, and
from the fragments which he has left, that ideas came to him with what I
have termed a sense of subliminal uprush,—with an authentic, although not
to us an instructive, inspiration.
As psychologists, I maintain, we are bound to base our definition of
genius upon some criterion of this strictly psychological kind, rather than
on the external tests which as artists or men of letters we should employ;—
and which consider mainly the degree of delight which any given
achievement can bestow upon other men. The artist will speak of the
pictorial genius of Raphael, but not of Haydon; of the dramatic genius of

Corneille, but not of Voltaire. Yet Haydon's Autobiography—a record of
tragic intensity, and closing in suicide—shows that the tame yet contorted
figures of his "Raising of Lazarus" flashed upon him with an overmastering
sense of direct inspiration. Voltaire, again, writes to the president Hénault of
his unreadable tragedy Catilina: "Five acts in a week! I know that this
sounds ridiculous; but if men could guess what enthusiasm can do,—how a
poet in spite of himself, idolising his subject, devoured by his genius, can
accomplish in a few days a task for which without that genius a year would
not suffice;—in a word, si scirent donum Dei,—if they knew the gift of God,
—their astonishment might be less than it must be now." I do not shrink
from these extreme instances. It would be absurd, of course, to place
Haydon's "Raising of Lazarus" in the same artistic class as Raphael's
"Madonna di San Sisto." But in the same psychological class I maintain that
both works must be placed. For each painter, after his several kind, there
was the same inward process,—the same sense of subliminal uprush;—that
extension, in other words, of mental concentration which draws into
immediate cognisance some workings or elements of the hidden self.
Let me illustrate this conception by a return to the metaphor of the
"conscious spectrum" to which I introduced my reader in the first chapter. I
there described our conscious spectrum as representing but a small fraction
of the aurai simplicis ignis, or individual psychical ray;—just as our visible
solar spectrum represents but a small fraction of the solar ray. And even as
many waves of ether lie beyond the red end, and many beyond the violet
end, of that visible spectrum, so have I urged that much of unrecognised or
subliminal faculty lies beyond the red (or organic) end, and much beyond
the violet (or intellectual) end of my imaginary spectrum. My main task in
this book will be to prolong the psychical spectrum beyond either limit, by
collecting traces of latent faculties, organic or transcendental:—just as by
the bolometer, by fluorescence, by other artifices, physicists have prolonged
the solar spectrum far beyond either limit of ordinary visibility.
But at present, and before entering on that task of rendering manifest
supernormal faculty, I am considering what we ought to regard as the
normal range of faculty from which we start;—what, in relation to man, the
words norm and normal should most reasonably mean.
The word normal in common speech is used almost indifferently to imply
either of two things, which may be very different from each other—
conformity to a standard and position as an average between extremes.

Often indeed the average constitutes the standard—as when a gas is of
normal density; or is practically equivalent to the standard—as when a
sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come to living organisms a
new factor is introduced. Life is change; each living organism changes;
each generation differs from its predecessor. To assign a fixed norm to a
changing species is to shoot point-blank at a flying bird. The actual average
at any given moment is no ideal standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary
stage now reached is tending, given stability in the environment, to become
the average of the future. Human evolution is not so simple or so
conspicuous a thing as the evolution of the pouter pigeon. But it would be
rash to affirm that it is not even swifter than any variation among
domesticated animals. Not a hundred generations separate us from the dawn
of history;—about as many generations as some microbes can traverse in a
month;—about as many as separate the modern Derby-winner from the
war-horse of Gustavus Adolphus. Man's change has been less than the
horse's change in physical contour,—probably only because man has not
been specially bred with that view;—but taking as a test the power of self-
adaptation to environment, man has traversed in these thirty centuries a
wider arc of evolution than separates the racehorse from the eohippus. Or if
we go back further, and to the primal germ, we see that man's ancestors
must have varied faster than any animal's, since they have travelled farthest
in the same time. They have varied also in the greatest number of
directions; they have evoked in greatest multiplicity the unnumbered
faculties latent in the irritability of a speck of slime. Of all creatures man
has gone furthest both in differentiation and in integration; he has called
into activity the greatest number of those faculties which lay potential in the
primal germ,—and he has established over those faculties the strongest
central control. The process still continues. Civilisation adds to the
complexity of his faculties; education helps him to their concentration. It is
in the direction of a still wider range, a still firmer hold, that his evolution
now must lie. I shall maintain that this ideal is best attained by the man of
genius.
Let us consider the way in which the maximum of faculty is habitually
manifested; the circumstances in which a man does what he has never
supposed himself able to do before. We may take an instance where the
faculty drawn upon lies only a little way beneath the surface. A man, we
say, outdoes himself in a great emergency. If his house is on fire, let us

suppose, he carries his children out over the roof with a strength and agility
which seem beyond his own. That effective impulse seems more akin to
instinct than to calculation. We hardly know whether to call the act reflex or
voluntary. It is performed with almost no conscious intervention of thought
or judgment, but it involves a new and complex adaptation of voluntary
muscles such as would need habitually the man's most careful thought to
plan and execute. From the point of view here taken the action will appear
to have been neither reflex nor voluntary in the ordinary sense, but
subliminal;—a subliminal uprush, an emergence of hidden faculty,—of
nerve co-ordinations potential in his organism but till now unused,—which
takes command of the man and guides his action at the moment when his
being is deeply stirred.
This stock instance of a man's possible behaviour in moments of great
physical risk does but illustrate in a gross and obvious manner, and in the
motor region, a phenomenon which, as I hold, is constantly occurring on a
smaller scale in the inner life of most of us. We identify ourselves for the
most part with a stream of voluntary, fully conscious ideas,—cerebral
movements connected and purposive as the movement of the hand which
records them. Meantime we are aware also of a substratum of fragmentary
automatic, liminal ideas, of which we take small account. These are bubbles
that break on the surface; but every now and then there is a stir among
them. There is a rush upwards as of a subaqueous spring; an inspiration
flashes into the mind for which our conscious effort has not prepared us.
This so-called inspiration may in itself be trivial or worthless; but it is the
initial stage of a phenomenon to which, when certain rare attributes are also
present, the name of genius will be naturally given.
I am urging, then, that where life is concerned, and where, therefore,
change is normality, we ought to place our norm somewhat ahead of the
average man, though on the evolutionary track which our race is pursuing. I
have suggested that that evolutionary track is at present leading him in the
direction of greater complexity in the perceptions which he forms of things
without, and of greater concentration in his own will and thought,—in that
response to perceptions which he makes from within. Lastly I have argued
that men of genius, whose perceptions are presumably more vivid and
complex than those of average men, are also the men who carry the power
of concentration furthest;—reaching downwards, by some self-suggestion

which they no more than we can explain, to treasures of latent faculty in the
hidden Self.
I am not indeed here assuming that the faculty which is at the service of
the man of genius is of a kind different from that of common men, in such a
sense that it would need to be represented by a prolongation of either end of
the conscious spectrum. Rather it will be represented by such a brightening
of the familiar spectrum as may follow upon an intensification of the central
light. For the spectrum of man's conscious faculty, like the solar spectrum,
is not continuous but banded. There are groups of the dark lines of
obstruction and incapacity, and even in the best of us a dim unequal glow.
It will, then, be the special characteristic of genius that its uprushes of
subliminal faculty will make the bright parts of the habitual spectrum more
brilliant, will kindle the dim absorption-bands to fuller brightness, and will
even raise quite dark lines into an occasional glimmer.
But, if, as I believe, we can best give to the idea of genius some useful
distinctness by regarding it in some such way as this, we shall find also that
genius will fall into line with many other sensory and motor automatisms to
which the word could not naturally be applied. Genius represents a narrow
selection among a great many cognate phenomena;—among a great many
uprushes or emergences of subliminal faculty both within and beyond the
limits of the ordinary conscious spectrum.
It will be more convenient to study all these together, under the heading of
sensory or of motor automatism. It will then be seen that there is no kind of
perception which may not emerge from beneath the threshold in an
indefinitely heightened form, with just that convincing suddenness of
impression which is described by men of genius as characteristic of their
highest flights. Even with so simple a range of sensation as that which
records the lapse of time there are subliminal uprushes of this type, and we
shall see that a man may have a sudden and accurate inspiration of what
o'clock it is, in just the same way as Virgil might have an inspiration of the
second half of a difficult hexameter.
For the purpose of present illustration of the workings of genius it seems
well to choose a kind of ability which is quite indisputable, and which also
admits of some degree of quantitative measurement. I would choose the
higher mathematical processes, were data available; and I may say in
passing how grateful I should be to receive from mathematicians any

account of the mental processes of which they are conscious during the
attainment of their highest results. Meantime there is a lower class of
mathematical gift which by its very specialisation and isolation seems likely
to throw light on our present inquiry.
During the course of the present century,—and alas! the scientific
observation of unusual specimens of humanity hardly runs back further, or
so far,—the public of great cities has been from time to time surprised and
diverted by some so-called "calculating boy," or "arithmetical prodigy,"
generally of tender years, and capable of performing "in his head," and
almost instantaneously, problems for which ordinary workers would require
pencil and paper and a much longer time. In some few cases, indeed, the
ordinary student would have no means whatever of solving the problem
which the calculating boy unriddled with ease and exactness.
The especial advantage of the study of arithmetical prodigies is that in
their case the subjective impression coincides closely with the objective
result. The subliminal computator feels that the sum is right, and it is right.
Forms of real or supposed genius which are more interesting are apt to be
less undeniable.
An American and a French psychologist[28] have collected such hints and
explanations as these prodigies have given of their methods of working;
methods which one might naturally hope to find useful in ordinary
education. The result, however, has been very meagre, and the records left
to us, imperfect as they are, are enough to show that the main and primary
achievement has in fact been subliminal, while conscious or supraliminal
effort has sometimes been wholly absent, sometimes has supervened only
after the gift has been so long exercised that the accesses between different
strata have become easy by frequent traversing. The prodigy grown to
manhood, who now recognises the arithmetical artifices which he used
unconsciously as a boy, resembles the hypnotic subject trained by
suggestion to remember in waking hours the events of the trance.
In almost every point, indeed, where comparison is possible, we shall find
this computative gift resembling other manifestations of subliminal faculty,
—such as the power of seeing hallucinatory figures,—rather than the results
of steady supraliminal effort, such as the power of logical analysis. In the
first place, this faculty, in spite of its obvious connection with general
mathematical grasp and insight, is found almost at random,—among non-

mathematical and even quite stupid persons, as well as among
mathematicians of mark. In the second place, it shows itself mostly in early
childhood, and tends to disappear in later life;—in this resembling
visualising power in general, and the power of seeing hallucinatory figures
in particular; which powers, as both Mr. Galton's inquiries and our own tend
to show, are habitually stronger in childhood and youth than in later years.
Again, it is noticeable that when the power disappears early in life it is apt
to leave behind it no memory whatever of the processes involved. And even
when, by long persistence in a reflective mind, the power has become, so to
say, adopted into the supraliminal consciousness, there nevertheless may
still be flashes of pure "inspiration," when the answer "comes into the
mind" with absolutely no perception of intermediate steps.
I subjoin a table, compiled by the help of Dr. Scripture's collection, which
will broadly illustrate the main points above mentioned. Some more
detailed remarks may then follow.
TABLE OF PRINCIPAL ARITHMETICAL PRODIGIES.

Age when gift
Name (alphabetically). Duration of gift. Intelligence.
was observed.
Ampère 4 ? eminent
Bidder 10 through life good
Buxton ? ? low
Colburn 6 few years average
Dase [or Dahse] boyhood through life very low
Fuller boyhood ? low
Gauss 3 ? eminent
Mangiamele 10 few years average?
Mondeux 10 few years low
Prolongeau 6 few years low
Safford 6 few years good
"Mr. Van R., of Utica" 6 few years average?
Whately 3 few years good
Now among these thirteen names we have two men of transcendent, and
three of high ability. What accounts have they given us of their methods?

Of the gift of Gauss and Ampère we know nothing except a few striking
anecdotes. After manifesting itself at an age when there is usually no
continuous supraliminal mental effort worth speaking of, it appears to have
been soon merged in the general blaze of their genius. With Bidder the gift
persisted through life, but grew weaker as he grew older. His paper in Vol.
XV. of the Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers, while furnishing
a number of practical hints to the calculator, indicates also a singular
readiness of communication between different mental strata. "Whenever,"
he says (p. 255) "I feel called upon to make use of the stores of my mind,
they seem to rise with the rapidity of lightning." And in Vol. CIII. of the
same Proceedings, Mr. W. Pole, F.R.S., in describing how Mr. Bidder could
determine mentally the logarithm of any number to 7 or 8 places, says (p.
252): "He had an almost miraculous power of seeing, as it were, intuitively
what factors would divide any large number, not a prime. Thus, if he were
given the number 17,861, he would instantly remark it was 337×53.... He
could not, he said, explain how he did this; it seemed a natural instinct to
him."
Passing on to the two other men of high ability known to have possessed
this gift, Professor Safford and Archbishop Whately, we are struck with the
evanescence of the power after early youth,—or even before the end of
childhood. I quote from Dr. Scripture Archbishop Whately's account of his
powers.
There was certainly something peculiar in my calculating faculty. It began to show itself at between
five and six, and lasted about three years.... I soon got to do the most difficult sums, always in my
head, for I knew nothing of figures beyond numeration. I did these sums much quicker than any one
could upon paper, and I never remember committing the smallest error. When I went to school, at
which time the passion wore off, I was a perfect dunce at ciphering, and have continued so ever
since.

Still more remarkable, perhaps, was Professor Safford's loss of power.
Professor Safford's whole bent was mathematical; his boyish gift of
calculation raised him into notice; and he is now a Professor of Astronomy.
He had therefore every motive and every opportunity to retain the gift, if
thought and practice could have retained it. But whereas at ten years old he
worked correctly in his head, in one minute, a multiplication sum whose
answer consisted of 36 figures, he is now, I believe, neither more nor less
capable of such calculation than his neighbours.

Similar was the fate of a personage who never rises above initials, and of
whose general capacity we know nothing.
"Mr. Van R., of Utica," says Dr. Scripture on the authority of Gall, "at the
age of six years distinguished himself by a singular faculty for calculating
in his head. At eight he entirely lost this faculty, and after that time he could
calculate neither better nor faster than any other person. He did not retain
the slightest idea of the manner in which he performed his calculations in
childhood."
Turning now to the stupid or uneducated prodigies, Dase alone seems to
have retained his power through life. Colburn and Mondeux, and apparently
Prolongeau and Mangiamele, lost their gift after childhood.
On the whole the ignorant prodigies seldom appear to have been
conscious of any continuous logical process, while in some cases the
separation of the supraliminal and subliminal trains of thought must have
been very complete. "Buxton would talk freely whilst doing his questions,
that being no molestation or hindrance to him."[29] Fixity and clearness of
inward visualisation seems to have been the leading necessity in all these
achievements; and it apparently mattered little whether the mental
blackboard (so to say) on which the steps of the calculation were recorded
were or were not visible to the mind's eye of the supraliminal self.
I have been speaking only of visualisation; but it would be interesting if
we could discover how much actual mathematical insight or inventiveness
can be subliminally exercised. Here, however, our materials are very
imperfect. From Gauss and Ampère we have, so far as I know, no record. At
the other end of the scale, we know that Dase (perhaps the most successful
of all these prodigies) was singularly devoid of mathematical grasp. "On
one occasion Petersen tried in vain for six weeks to get the first elements of
mathematics into his head." "He could not be made to have the least idea of
a proposition in Euclid. Of any language but his own he could never master
a word." Yet Dase received a grant from the Academy of Sciences at
Hamburg, on the recommendation of Gauss, for mathematical work; and
actually in twelve years made tables of factors and prime numbers for the
seventh and nearly the whole of the eighth million,—a task which probably
few men could have accomplished, without mechanical aid, in an ordinary
lifetime. He may thus be ranked as the only man who has ever done

valuable service to Mathematics without being able to cross the Ass's
Bridge.
No support is given by what we know of this group to the theory which
regards subliminal mentation as necessarily a sign of some morbid
dissociation of physical elements. Is there, on the other hand, anything to
confirm a suggestion which will occur in some similar cases, namely, that,
—inasmuch as the addition of subliminal to supraliminal mentation may
often be a completion and integration rather than a fractionation or
disintegration of the total individuality,—we are likely sometimes to find
traces of a more than common activity of the right or less used cerebral
hemisphere? Finding no mention of ambidexterity in the meagre notices
which have come down to us of the greater "prodigies," I begged the late
Mr. Bidder, Q.C., and Mr. Blyth, of Edinburgh (the well-known civil
engineer and perhaps the best living English representative of what we may
call the calculating diathesis), to tell me whether their left hands possessed
more than usual power. And I find that in these—the only two cases in
which I have been able to make inquiry—there is somewhat more of
dextro-cerebral capacity than in the mass of mankind.
We may now pass on to review some further instances of subliminal co-
operation with conscious thought;—first looking about us for any cases
comparable in definiteness with the preceding; and then extending our view
over the wider and vaguer realm of creative and artistic work.
But before we proceed to the highly-specialised senses of hearing and
sight, we must note the fact that there are cases of subliminal intensification
of those perceptions of a less specialised kind which underlie our more
elaborate modes of cognising the world around us. The sense of the efflux of
time, and the sense of weight, or of muscular resistance, are amongst the
profoundest elements in our organic being. And the sense of time is
indicated in several ways as a largely subliminal faculty. There is much
evidence to show that it is often more exact in men sleeping than in men
awake, and in men hypnotised than in men sleeping. The records of
spontaneous somnambulism are full of predictions made by the subject as to
his own case, and accomplished, presumably by self-suggestion, but
without help from clocks, at the precise minute foretold. Or this hidden
knowledge may take shape in the imagery of dream, as in a case published
by Professor Royce, of Harvard,[30] where his correspondent describes "a
dream in which I saw an enormous flaming clock-dial with the hands

standing at 2.20. Awaking immediately, I struck a match, and upon looking
at my watch found it was a few seconds past 2.20."
Similarly we find cases where the uprush of subliminal faculty is
concerned with the deep organic sensation of muscular resistance. We need
not postulate any direct or supernormal knowledge,—but merely a
subliminal calculation, such as we see in the case of "arithmetical
prodigies," expressing itself supraliminally, sometimes in a phantasmal
picture, sometimes as a mere "conviction," without sensory clothing.[31]
Passing on here to subliminal products of visual type, I am glad to be able
to quote the following passage which seems to me to give in germ the very
theory for which I am now contending on the authority of one of the most
lucid thinkers of the last generation.
The passage occurs in an article by Sir John Herschel on "Sensorial
Vision," in his Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 1816. Sir John
describes some experiences of his own, "which consist in the involuntary
production of visual impressions, into which geometrical regularity of form
enters as the leading character, and that, under circumstances which
altogether preclude any explanation drawn from a possible regularity of
structure in the retina or the optic nerve."[32] Twice these patterns appeared
in waking daylight hours,—with no illness or discomfort at the time or
afterwards. More frequently they appeared in darkness; but still while Sir
John was fully awake. They appeared also twice when he was placed under
chloroform; "and I should observe that I never lost my consciousness of
being awake and in full possession of my mind, though quite insensible to
what was going on.... Now the question at once presents itself—What are
these Geometrical Spectres? and how, and in what department of the bodily
or mental economy do they originate? They are evidently not dreams. The
mind is not dormant, but active and conscious of the direction of its
thoughts; while these things obtrude themselves on notice, and by calling
attention to them, direct the train of thought into a channel it would not
have taken of itself.... If it be true that the conception of a regular
geometrical pattern implies the exercise of thought and intelligence, it
would almost seem that in such cases as those above adduced we have
evidence of a thought, an intelligence, working within our own organisation
distinct from that of our own personality." And Sir John further suggests
that these complex figures, entering the mind in this apparently arbitrary
fashion, throw light upon "the suggestive principle" to which "we must look

for much that is determinant and decisive of our volition when carried into
action." "It strikes me as not by any means devoid of interest to contemplate
cases where, in a matter so entirely abstract, so completely devoid of any
moral or emotional bearing, as the production of a geometrical figure, we,
as it were, seize upon that principle in the very act, and in the performance
of its office."
From my point of view, of course, I can but admire the acumen which
enabled this great thinker to pierce to the root of the matter by the aid of so
few observations. He does not seem to have perceived the connection
between these "schematic phantasms," to borrow a phrase from Professor
Ladd,[33] and the hallucinatory figures of men or animals seen in health or
in disease. But even from his scanty data his inference seems to me
irresistible;—"we have evidence of a thought, an intelligence, working
within our own organisation, distinct from that of our own personality." I
shall venture to claim him as the first originator of the theory to which the
far fuller evidence now accessible had independently led myself.
Cases observed as definitely as those just quoted are few in number; and I
must pass on into a much trodden—even a confusedly trampled—field;—
the records, namely, left by eminent men as to the element of subconscious
mentation, which was involved in their best work. Most of these stories
have been again and again repeated;—and they have been collected on a
large scale in a celebrated work,—to me especially distasteful, as containing
what seems to me the loose and extravagant parody of important truth. It is
not my business here to criticise Dr. Von Hartmann's Philosophy of the
Unconscious in detail; but I prefer to direct my readers' attention to a much
more modest volume, in which a young physician has put together the
results of a direct inquiry addressed to some Frenchmen of distinction as to
their methods especially of imaginative work.[34] I quote a few of the
replies addressed to him, beginning with some words from M. Sully
Prudhomme,—at once psychologist and poet,—who is here speaking of the
subconscious clarification of a chain of abstract reasoning. "I have
sometimes suddenly understood a geometrical demonstration made to me a
year previously without having in any way directed thereto my attention or
will. It seemed that the mere spontaneous ripening of the conceptions which
the lectures had implanted in my brain had brought about within me this
novel grasp of the proof."

With this we may compare a statement of Arago's—"Instead of obstinately
endeavouring to understand a proposition at once, I would admit its truth
provisionally;—and next day I would be astonished at understanding
thoroughly that which seemed all dark before."
Condillac similarly speaks of finding an incomplete piece of work
finished next day in his head.
Somewhat similarly, though in another field, M. Retté, a poet, tells Dr.
Chabaneix that he falls asleep in the middle of an unfinished stanza, and
when thinking of it again in the morning finds it completed. And M.
Vincent d'Indy, a musical composer, says that he often has on waking a
fugitive glimpse of a musical effect which (like the memory of a dream)
needs a strong immediate concentration of mind to keep it from vanishing.
De Musset writes, "On ne travaille pas, on écoute, c'est comme un
inconnu qui vous parle à l'oreille."
Lamartine says, "Ce n'est pas moi qui pense; ce sont mes idées qui pensent
pour moi."
Rémy de Gourmont: "My conceptions rise into the field of consciousness
like a flash of lightning or like the flight of a bird."
M. S. writes: "In writing these dramas I seemed to be a spectator at the
play; I gazed at what was passing on the scene in an eager, wondering
expectation of what was to follow. And yet I felt that all this came from the
depth of my own being."
Saint-Saens had only to listen, as Socrates to his Dæmon; and M. Ribot,
summing up a number of similar cases, says: "It is the unconscious which
produces what is vulgarly called inspiration. This condition is a positive
fact, accompanied with physical and psychical characteristics peculiar to
itself. Above all, it is impersonal and involuntary, it acts like an instinct,
when and how it chooses; it may be wooed, but cannot be compelled.
Neither reflection nor will can supply its place in original creation.... The
bizarre habits of artists when composing tend to create a special
physiological condition,—to augment the cerebral circulation in order to
provoke or to maintain the unconscious activity."
In what precise way the cerebral circulation is altered we can hardly at
present hope to know. Meantime a few psychological remarks fall more
easily within our reach.

In the first place, we note that a very brief and shallow submergence
beneath the conscious level is enough to infuse fresh vigour into
supraliminal trains of thought. Ideas left to mature unnoticed for a few days,
or for a single night, seem to pass but a very little way beneath the
threshold. They represent, one may say, the first stage of a process which,
although often inconspicuous, is not likely to be discontinuous,—the
sustenance, namely, of the supraliminal life by impulse or guidance from
below.
In the second place, we see in some of these cases of deep and fruitful
abstraction a slight approach to duplication of personality. John Stuart Mill,
intent on his Principles of Logic, as he threaded the crowds of Leadenhall
Street, recalls certain morbid cases of hysterical distraction;—only that
with Mill the process was an integrative one and not a dissolutive one—a
gain and not a loss of power over the organism.
And thirdly, in some of these instances we see the man of genius
achieving spontaneously, and unawares, much the same result as that which
is achieved for the hypnotic subject by deliberate artifice. For he is in fact
co-ordinating the waking and the sleeping phases of his existence. He is
carrying into sleep the knowledge and the purpose of waking hours;—and
he is carrying back into waking hours again the benefit of those profound
assimilations which are the privilege of sleep. Hypnotic suggestion aims at
co-operations of just this kind between the waking state in which the
suggestion, say, of some functional change, is planned and the sleeping
state in which that change is carried out,—with benefit persisting anew into
waking life. The hypnotic trance, which is a developed sleep, thus
accomplishes for the ordinary man what ordinary sleep accomplishes for
the man of genius.
The coming chapters on Sleep and Hypnotism will illustrate this point
more fully. But I may here anticipate my discussion of dreams by quoting
one instance where dreams, self-suggested by waking will, formed, as one
may say, an integral element in distinguished genius.
The late Robert Louis Stevenson, being in many ways a typical man of
genius, was in no way more markedly gifted with that integrating faculty—
that increased power over all strata of the personality—which I have
ascribed to genius, than in his relation to his dreams (see "A Chapter on
Dreams" in his volume Across the Plains). Seldom has the essential analogy

between dreams and inspiration been exhibited in such a striking way. His
dreams had always (he tells us) been of great vividness, and often of
markedly recurrent type. But the point of interest is that, when he began to
write stories for publication, the "little people who managed man's internal
theatre" understood the change as well as he.
When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought
amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off in
his box-seat, his little people continued their evolutions with the same
mercantile designs.... For the most part, whether awake or asleep, he is
simply occupied—he or his little people—in consciously making stories for
the market....
The more I think of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world my
question: "Who are the Little People?" They are near connections of the
dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye
to the bank book; they share plainly in his training; ... they have plainly
learned like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange
emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one
thing is beyond doubt,—they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a
serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim....
That part [of my work] which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies'
part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is
by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a
hand in it even then.
Slight and imperfect as the above statistics and observations admittedly
are, they seem to me to point in a more useful direction than do some of the
facts collected by that modern group of anthropologists who hold that
genius is in itself a kind of nervous malady, a disturbance of mental
balance, akin to criminality or even to madness.
It is certainly not true, as I hold, either that the human race in general is
nervously degenerating, or that nervous degeneration tends to a maximum
in its most eminent members. But it can be plausibly maintained that the
proportion of nervous to other disorders tends to increase. And it is certain
that not nervous degeneration but nervous change or development is now
proceeding among civilised peoples more rapidly than ever before, and that
this self-adaptation to wider environments must inevitably be accompanied

in the more marked cases by something of nervous instability. And it is true
also that from one point of view these changes might form matter for regret;
and that in order to discern what I take to be their true meaning we have to
regard the problem of human evolution from a somewhat unfamiliar
standpoint.
The nervous system is probably tending in each generation to become
more complex and more delicately ramified. As is usual when any part of
an organism is undergoing rapid evolutive changes, this nervous progress is
accompanied with some instability. Those individuals in whom the
hereditary or the acquired change is the most rapid are likely also to suffer
most from a perturbation which masks evolution—an occasional
appearance of what may be termed "nervous sports" of a useless or even
injurious type. Such are the fancies and fanaticisms, the bizarre likes and
dislikes, the excessive or aberrant sensibilities, which have been observed
in some of the eminent men whom Lombroso discusses in his book on the
Man of Genius. Their truest analogue, as we shall presently see more fully,
lies in the oddities or morbidities of sentiment or sensation which so often
accompany the development of the human organism into its full potencies,
or precede the crowning effort by which a fresh organism is introduced into
the world.
Such at least is my view; but the full acceptance of this view must depend
upon some very remote and very speculative considerations bearing upon
the nature and purport of the whole existence and evolution of man. Yet
however remote and speculative the thesis which I defend may be, it is not
one whit remoter or more speculative than the view which, faute de mieux,
is often tacitly assumed by scientific writers.
In our absolute ignorance of the source from whence life came, we have
no ground for assuming that it was a purely planetary product, or that its
unknown potentialities are concerned with purely planetary ends. It would
be as rash for the biologist to assume that life on earth can only point to
generations of further life on earth as it would have been for some cosmic
geologist to assume—before the appearance of life on earth—that
geological forces must needs constitute all the activity which could take
place on this planet.
Since the germ of life appeared on earth, its history has been a history not
only of gradual self-adaptation to a known environment, but of gradual

discovery of an environment, always there, but unknown. What we call its
primitive simple irritability was in fact a dim panæsthesia; a potential
faculty, as yet unconscious of all the stimuli to which it had not yet learnt to
respond. As these powers of sensation and of response have developed, they
have gradually revealed to the living germ environments of which at first it
could have no conception.
It is probable, to begin with, that the only environment which the vast
majority of our ancestors knew was simply hot water. For the greater part of
the time during which life has existed on earth it would have been thought
chimerical to suggest that we could live in anything else. It was a great day
for us when an ancestor crawled up out of the slowly-cooling sea;—or say
rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for directly breathing air
gradually revealed the fact that we had for long been breathing air in the
water;—and that we were living in the midst of a vastly extended
environment,—the atmosphere of the earth. It was a great day again when
another ancestor felt on his pigment-spot the solar ray;—or say rather when
a previously unsuspected capacity for perceiving light revealed the fact that
we had for long been acted upon by light as well as by heat; and that we
were living in the midst of a vastly extended environment,—namely, the
illumined Universe that stretches to the Milky Way. It was a great day when
the first skate (if skate he were) felt an unknown virtue go out from him
towards some worm or mudfish;—or say rather when a previously
unsuspected capacity for electrical excitation demonstrated the fact that we
had long been acted upon by electricity as well as by heat and by light; and
that we were living in an inconceivable and limitless environment,—
namely, an ether charged with infinite energy, overpassing and
interpenetrating alike the last gulf of darkness and the extremest star. All
this,—phrased perhaps in some other fashion,—all men admit as true. May
we not then suppose that there are yet other environments, other
interpretations, which a further awakening of faculty still subliminal is yet
fated by its own nascent response to discover? Will it be alien to the past
history of evolution if I add: It was a great day when the first thought or
feeling flashed into some mind of beast or man from a mind distant from
his own?—when a previously unsuspected capacity of telepathic
percipience revealed the fact that we had long been acted upon by telepathic
as well as by sensory stimuli; and that we were living in an inconceivable
and limitless environment,—a thought-world or spiritual universe charged

with infinite life, and interpenetrating and overpassing all human spirits,—
up to what some have called World-Soul, and some God?
And now it will be easily understood that one of the corollaries from the
conception of a constantly widening and deepening perception of an
environment infinite in infinite ways, will be that the faculties which befit
the material environment have absolutely no primacy, unless it be of the
merely chronological kind, over those faculties which science has often
called by-products, because they have no manifest tendency to aid their
possessor in the struggle for existence in a material world. The higher gifts
of genius—poetry, the plastic arts, music, philosophy, pure mathematics—
all of these are precisely as much in the central stream of evolution—are
perceptions of new truth and powers of new action just as decisively
predestined for the race of man—as the aboriginal Australian's faculty for
throwing a boomerang or for swarming up a tree for grubs. There is, then,
about those loftier interests nothing exotic, nothing accidental; they are an
intrinsic part of that ever-evolving response to our surroundings which
forms not only the planetary but the cosmic history of all our race.
What inconsistencies, what absurdities, underlie that assumption that
evolution means nothing more than the survival of animals fittest to
conquer enemies and to overrun the earth. On that bare hypothesis the
genus homo is impossible to explain. No one really attempts to explain him
except on the tacit supposition that Nature somehow tended to evolve
intelligence—somehow needed to evolve joy; was not satisfied with such
an earth-over-runner as the rabbit, or such an invincible conqueror as the
influenza microbe. But how much intelligence, what kind of joy Nature
aimed at—is this to be left to be settled by the instinct of l'homme sensuel
moyen? or ought we not rather to ask of the best specimens of our race what
it is that they live for?—whether they labour for the meat that perisheth, or
for Love and Wisdom? To more and more among mankind the need of food
is supplied with as little conscious effort as the need of air; yet these are
often the very men through whom evolution is going on most unmistakably
—who are becoming the typical figures of the swiftly-changing race.
Once more. If this point of view be steadily maintained, we shall gain
further light on some of those strangenesses and irregularities of genius
which have led to its paradoxical juxtaposition with insanity as a divergence
from the accepted human type. The distinctive characteristic of genius is the
large infusion of the subliminal in its mental output; and one characteristic

of the subliminal in my view is that it is in closer relation than the
supraliminal to the spiritual world, and is thus nearer to the primitive source
and extra-terrene initiation of life. And earthly Life itself—embodied as it is
in psycho-physically individualised forms—is, on the theory advanced in
these pages, a product or characteristic of the etherial or metetherial and not
of the gross material world. Thence in some unknown fashion it came; there
in some unknown fashion it subsists even throughout its earthly
manifestation; thither in some unknown fashion it must after earthly death
return. If indeed the inspirations of genius spring from a source one step
nearer to primitive reality than is that specialised consensus of faculties
which natural selection has lifted above the threshold for the purposes of
working-day existence, then surely we need not wonder if the mind and
frame of man should not always suffice for smooth and complete
amalgamation; if some prefiguration of faculties adapted to a later stage of
being should mar the symmetry of the life of earth.
And thus there may really be something at times incommensurable
between the inspirations of genius and the results of conscious logical
thought. Just as the calculating boy solves his problems by methods which
differ from the methods of the trained mathematician, so in artistic matters
also that "something of strangeness" which is in "all excellent beauty," may
be the expression of a real difference between subliminal and supraliminal
modes of perception. I cannot help thinking that such a difference is
perceptible in subliminal relations to speech; that the subliminal self will
sometimes surpass conscious effort, if it is treating speech as a branch of
Art, in Poetry;—or else in some sense will fall short of conscious effort,
when it is merely using words as an unavoidable medium to express ideas
which common speech was hardly designed to convey.
Thus, on the one hand, when in presence of one of the great verbal
achievements of the race—say the Agamemnon of Æschylus—it is hard to
resist the obscure impression that some form of intelligence other than
supraliminal reason or conscious selection has been at work. The result less
resembles the perfection of rational choice among known data than the
imperfect presentation of some scheme based on perceptions which we
cannot entirely follow.
But, on the other hand, even though words may thus be used by genius
with something of the mysterious remoteness of music itself, it seems to me
that our subliminal mentation is less closely bound to the faculty of speech

than is our supraliminal. There is a phrase in common use which involves
perhaps more of psychological significance than has yet been brought out.
Of all which we can call genius, or which we can ally with genius—of art,
of love, of religious emotion—it is common to hear men say that they
transcend the scope of speech. Nor have we any reason for regarding this as
a mere vague sentimental expression.
There is no a priori ground for supposing that language will have the
power to express all the thoughts and emotions of man. It may indeed be
maintained that the inevitable course of its development tends to exhibit
more and more clearly its inherent limitations. "Every language," it has
been said, "begins as poetry and ends as algebra." To use the terms
employed in this work, every language begins as a subliminal uprush and
ends as a supraliminal artifice. Organic instincts impel to primitive
ejaculation; unconscious laws of mind shape early grammar. But even in
our own day—and we are still in the earth's infancy—this naïveté of
language is fast disappearing. The needs of science and of commerce have
become dominant, and although our vocabulary, based as it is on concrete
objects and direct sensations, is refined for the expression of philosophic
thought, still we cannot wonder if our supraliminal manipulation leaves us
with an instrument less and less capable of expressing the growing
complexity of our whole psychical being.
What then, we may ask, is the attitude and habit of the subliminal self
likely to be with regard to language? Is it not probable that other forms of
symbolism may retain a greater proportional importance among those
submerged mental operations which have not been systematised for the
convenience of communication with other men?
I think that an intelligent study of visual and motor automatism will afford
us sufficient proof that symbolism, at any rate pictorial symbolism,
becomes increasingly important as we get at the contents of those hidden
strata. Telepathic messages, especially, which form, as we shall see, the
special prerogative or characteristic of subliminal communication, seem to
be conveyed by vague impression or by inward or externalised picture
oftener than by articulate speech. And I may so far anticipate later
discussion of automatic writings (whether self-inspired or telepathic) as to
point out a curious linguistic quality which almost all such writings share.
The "messages" of a number of automatists, taken at random, will be sure to
resemble each other much more closely than do the supraliminal writings of

the same persons. Quite apart from their general correspondence in ideas—
which belongs to another branch of our subject—there is among the
automatic writings of quite independent automatists a remarkable
correspondence of literary style. There is a certain quality which reminds
one of a translation, or of the compositions of a person writing in a
language which he is not accustomed to talk. These characteristics appear at
once in automatic script, even of the incoherent kind; they persist when
there is no longer any dream-like incoherence; they are equally marked,
even when, as often happens, the automatic script surpasses in intelligence,
and even in its own kind of eloquence, the products of the waking or
supraliminal mind.
And side by side and intercurrent with these written messages come those
strange meaningless arabesques which have been baptized as "spirit-
drawings"—though they rarely show any clear trace of the operation of an
external intelligence.[35] These complex and fanciful compositions—often
absolutely automatic—appear to me like a stammering or rudimentary
symbolism; as though the subliminal intelligence were striving to express
itself through a vehicle perhaps more congenial to its habits than articulate
language.
Returning, then, from these illustrations drawn from actual automatism to
our proper subject of genius,—that happy mixture of subliminal with
supraliminal faculty,—we may ask ourselves in what kind of subliminal
uprush this hidden habit of wider symbolism, of self-communion beyond
the limits of speech, will be likely to manifest itself above the conscious
threshold.
The obvious answer to this question lies in the one word Art. The
inspiration of Art of all kinds consists in the invention of precisely such a
wider symbolism as has been above adumbrated. I am not speaking, of
course, of symbolism of a forced and mechanical kind—symbolism
designed and elaborated as such—but rather of that pre-existent but hidden
concordance between visible and invisible things, between matter and
thought, between thought and emotion, which the plastic arts, and music,
and poetry, do each in their own special field discover and manifest for
human wisdom and joy.
In using these words, I must repeat, I am far from adopting the formulæ of
any special school. The symbolism of which I speak implies nothing of

mysticism. Nor indeed, in my view, can there be any real gulf or deep
division between so-called realistic and idealistic schools. All that exists is
continuous; nor can Art symbolise any one aspect of the universe without
also implicitly symbolising aspects which lie beyond.
And thus in the Arts we have symbolism at every stage of transparency
and obscurity; from symbolisms which merely summarise speech to
symbolisms which transcend it. Sometimes, as with Music, it is worse than
useless to press for too close an interpretation. Music marches, and will
march for ever, through an ideal and unimaginable world. Her melody may
be a mighty symbolism, but it is a symbolism to which man has lost the key.
Poetry's material, on the other hand, is the very language which she would
fain transcend. But her utterance must be subliminal and symbolic, if it is to
be poetry indeed; it must rise (as has been already hinted) from a realm
profounder than deliberate speech; it must come charged, as Tennyson has
it, with that "charm in words, a charm no words can give."
Here, too, we must dwell for a moment upon another and higher kind of
internal visualisation. I have spoken of the arithmetical prodigy as
possessing a kind of internal blackboard, on which he inscribes with ease
and permanence his imaginary memoranda. But blackboards are not the
only surfaces on which inscriptions can be made. There are other men—
prodigies of a different order—whose internal tabula is not of blackened
wood, but of canvas or of marble; whose inscriptions are not rows of Arabic
numerals but living lines of colour, or curves of breathing stone. Even the
most realistic art is something more than transcript and calculation; and for
art's higher imaginative achievements there must needs be moments of
inward idealisation when visible beauty seems but the token and symbol of
beauty unrevealed; when Praxiteles must "draw from his own heart the
archetype of the Eros that he made;" when Tintoret must feel with
Heraclitus that "whatsoever we see waking is but deadness, and whatsoever
sleeping, is but dream."
But when we reach this point we have begun (as I say) to transcend the
special province to which, in Chapter I, I assigned the title of genius. I there
pointed out that the influence of the subliminal on the supraliminal might
conveniently be divided under three main heads. When the subliminal
mentation co-operates with and supplements the supraliminal, without
changing the apparent phase of personality, we have genius. When
subliminal operations change the apparent phase of personality from the

state of waking in the direction of trance, we have hypnotism. When the
subliminal mentation forces itself up through the supraliminal, without
amalgamation, as in crystal-vision, automatic writing, etc., we have sensory
or motor automatism. In accordance with this definition, the content of the
inspirations of genius is supposed to be of the same general type as the
content of ordinary thought. We have regarded genius as crystallising fluid
ideas; or, if you will, as concentrating and throwing upwards in its clear
fountain a maze of subterranean streams. But we have not regarded it as
modifying, in such operation, the ordinary alert wakefulness of the thinker,
nor as providing bun with any fresh knowledge, obtainable by supernormal
methods alone.
It is plain, however, that such distinctions as those which I have drawn
between genius, trance, automatism, cannot possibly be rigid or absolute.
They are distinctions made for convenience between different phases of
what must really be a continuous process—namely, the influence of the Self
below the threshold upon the Self above it. Between each of these definite
phases all kinds of connections and intermediate stages must surely exist.
Connections between trance and automatism, indeed, are obvious enough.
The difficulty has rather lain in their clear separation. Trance, when
habitual, is pretty sure to lead to automatic speech or writing. Automatism,
when prolonged, is similarly apt to induce a state of trance.
The links between Genius and these cognate states are of a less
conspicuous kind. They do, however, exist in such variety as to confirm in
marked fashion the analogies suggested above.
And first, as to the connection between genius and automatism, one may
say that just as anger is a brief madness, so the flash of Genius is essentially
a brief automatism.
Wordsworth's moments of inspiration, when, as he says,
"Some lovely image in the song rose up
Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea,"
were in effect moments of automatic utterance; albeit of utterance held fast
in immediate co-operation with the simultaneous workings of the
supraliminal self. Such a sudden poetic creation, like the calculating boy's
announcement of the product of two numbers, resembles the sudden rush of
planchette or pencil, in haste to scrawl some long-wished-for word.

Now extend this momentary automatism a little further. We come then to
what is called the faculty of improvisation. How much is meant by this
term? Is the extempore oration, "the unpremeditated lay," in truth a
subliminal product? or have we to do merely with the rapid exercise of
ordinary powers?
In the first place, it is clear that much of what is called improvisation is a
matter of memory. The so-called secondary automatism which enables the
pianist to play a known piece without conscious attention passes easily into
improvisations which the player himself may genuinely accept as original;
but which really consist of remembered fragments united by conventional
links of connection. Thus also the orator, "thinking on his legs," trusts
himself at first to the automatic repetition of a few stock phrases, but
gradually finds that long periods flow unforeseen and unremembered from
his tongue.
We thus get beyond the range of stereotyped synergies, of habituations of
particular groups of nerve-centres to common action. There is some
adaptability and invention; some new paths are traversed; adjustments are
made for which no mere recurrence to old precedents will suffice.
The problem here resembles that well-known difficulty of explaining what
goes on during the restoration or "substitution" of function after an injury to
the brain. In that case, the brain-elements which remain uninjured slowly
assume functions which they apparently never exercised before,—
rearranging paths of cerebral communication in order to get the old
efficiency out of the damaged and diminished brain-material. This recovery
is not rapid like an extemporisation, but gradual, like a healing or re-
growth, and it therefore does not suggest an intelligent control so much as a
physiological process, like the re-budding on a certain pre-ordained pattern
of the severed claw of a crab. Of course this restoration of brain-functions is
inexplicable, as all growth is at present inexplicable. We may call it indeed
with some reason the highest process of human growth. So viewed, it forms
a kind of middle term between ordinary growth of bone or muscle, always
on a predetermined plan, and that sudden creation of new cerebral
connections or pathways which is implied in an inspiration of genius. Such
a juxtaposition need not weaken my claim that the inspirations of genius
represent a co-operant stream of submerged mentation, fully as developed
in its own way as the mentation of which we are conscious above the
threshold. The nature and degree of subliminal faculty must of course be

judged by its highest manifestations. And this analogy between the hidden
operations of genius and of growth would rather support me in regarding
organic growth also as controlled by something of intelligence or memory,
which under fitting conditions—as in the hypnotic trance—may be induced
to co-operate with the waking will.
Moreover, the talent of improvisation, which suggested these analogies,
will sometimes act much more persistently than in the case of the orator or
the musician. There is reason to believe (both from internal style and from
actual statements) that it plays a large part in imaginative literature. Various
passages from George Sand's life-history, corroborated by the statements of
other persons familiar with her methods of working, reveal in her an
unusual vigour and fertility of literary outflow going on in an almost dream-
like condition; a condition midway between the actual inventive dreams of
R. L. Stevenson and the conscious labour of an ordinary man's composition.
What George Sand felt in the act of writing was a continuous and
effortless flow of ideas, sometimes with and sometimes without an apparent
externalisation of the characters who spoke in her romances. And turning to
another author, as sane and almost as potent as George Sand herself, we
find a phenomenon which would have suggested to us actual insanity if
observed in a mind less robust and efficient. If the allusions to the apparent
independence of Dickens's characters which are scattered through his letters
be read with our related facts in view, it will no longer be thought that they
are intended as a mystification. Mrs. Gamp, his greatest creation, spoke to
him, he tells us (generally in church) as with an inward monitory voice.
And note further that as scientific introspection develops we are likely to
receive fuller accounts of these concurrent mental processes, these partial
externalisations of the creatures of the romancer's brain. One such account,
both definite and elaborate, has been published by M. Binet in L'Année
Psychologique for 1894.[36]
This account,—contributed as serious evidence, as M. Binet's long article
shows,—is thoroughly concordant with several other cases already known
to us. It comes midway between Stevenson's dreams and the hysteric's idées
fixes.
I have thus far endeavoured to show that Genius represents not only the
crystallisation of ideas already existing in floating form in the supraliminal
intelligence, but also an independent, although concurrent, stream of

mentation, spreading often to wider range, although still concerned with
matters in themselves cognisable by the normal intelligence.
Let us proceed to push the inquiry a step further. It has been claimed in
this work for subliminal uprushes generally that they often contain
knowledge which no ordinary method of research could acquire. Is this
supernormal knowledge—we ought now to ask—ever represented in the
uprushes to which we give the name of Genius?
What is the relation, in short, of the man of Genius to the sensitive?
If the man of Genius be, as I have urged, on the whole the completest type
of humanity, and if the sensitive's special gift be in itself one of the most
advanced forms of human faculty, ought not the inspirations of genius to
bring with them flashes of supernormal knowledge as intimate as those
which the sensitive—perhaps in other respects a commonplace person—
from time to time is privileged to receive?
Some remarkable instances of this kind undoubtedly do exist. The most
conspicuous and most important of all cannot, from motives of reverence,
be here discussed. Nor will I dwell upon other founders of religions, or on
certain traditional saints or sages. But among historical characters of the
first mark the names of Socrates and of Joan of Arc are enough to cite. I
believe that the monitions of the Dæmon of Socrates—the subliminal self of
a man of transcendent genius—have in all probability been described to us
with literal truth: and did in fact convey to that great philosopher precisely
the kind of telæsthetic or precognitive information which forms the
sensitive's privilege to-day. We have thus in Socrates the ideal unification of
human powers.
It must, however, be admitted that such complete unification is not the
general rule for men of genius; that their inspirations generally stop short of
telepathy or of telæsthesia. I think we may explain this limitation somewhat
as follows. The man of genius is what he is by virtue of possessing a readier
communication than most men possess between his supraliminal and his
subliminal self. From his subliminal self, he can only draw what it already
possesses; and we must not assume as a matter of course that the subliminal
region of any one of us possesses that particular sensitivity—that specific
transparency—which can receive and register definite facts from the
unseen. That may be a gift which stands as much alone—in independence
of other gifts or faculties—in the subliminal region as, say, a perfect

musical ear in the supraliminal. The man of genius may draw much from
those hidden wells of being without seeing reflected therein any actual
physical scene in the universe beyond his ordinary ken.
And yet neither must we hastily assume that because the man of genius
gets no definite impression of a world beyond our senses he does not
therefore get any true impression, which is all his own.
I believe, on the contrary, that true, though vague, impressions of a world
beyond the range of sense are actually received—I do not say by all men of
genius, but by men of genius of certain types.[37]
A dim but genuine consciousness of the spiritual environment; that (it
seems) is the degree of revelation which artistic or philosophic genius is
capable of conferring. Subliminal uprushes, in other words, so far as they
are intellectual, tend to become telæsthetic. They bring with them indefinite
intimations of what I hold to be the great truth that the human spirit is
essentially capable of a deeper than sensorial perception, of a direct
knowledge of facts of the universe outside the range of any specialised
organ or of any planetary view.
But this conclusion points the way to a speculation more important still.
Telæsthesia is not the only spiritual law, nor are subliminal uprushes affairs
of the intellect alone. Beyond and above man's innate power of world-wide
perception, there exists also that universal link of spirit with spirit which in
its minor earthly manifestations we call telepathy. Our submerged faculty—
the subliminal uprushes of genius—can expand in that direction as well as
in the direction of telæsthesia. The emotional content, indeed, of those
uprushes is even profounder and more important than the intellectual;—in
proportion as Love and Religion are profounder and more important than
Science or Art.
That primary passion, I repeat, which binds life to life, which links us both
to life near and visible and to life imagined but unseen;—that is no mere
organic, no mere planetary impulse, but the inward aspect of the telepathic
law. Love and religion are thus continuous; they represent different phases
of one all-pervading mutual gravitation of souls. The flesh does not conjoin,
but dissever; although through its very severance it suggests a shadow of
the union which it cannot bestow. We have to do here neither with a
corporeal nor with a purely human emotion. Love is the energy of
integration which makes a Cosmos of the Sum of Things.

But here there is something of controversy to traverse before a revived
Platonic conception of love can hope to be treated by the physiologist as
more than a pedantic jest. And naturally so; since there is no emotion
subliminal over so wide a range of origin,—fed so obscurely by "all
thoughts, all passions, all delights,"—and consequently so mysterious even
to the percipient himself. At one end of its scale love is based upon an
instinct as primitive as the need of nutrition; even if at the other end it
becomes, as Plato has it, the ἑρμεὑον καἱ διαπορθμεὑον "the Interpreter and
Mediator between God and Man." The controversy as to the planetary or
cosmical scope of the passion of Love is in fact central to our whole
subject.
It will give clearness to the question in dispute if I quote here a strong
expression of each view in turn. For the physiological or materialist
conception of the passion of love,—where love's subliminal element is held
to be of the organic type,—set forth in no light or cynical spirit, but with the
moral earnestness of a modern Lucretius, I can turn to no better authority
than Professor Pierre Janet. The passage which follows is no mere boutade
or paradox; it is a kind of culminating expression of the theory which
regards the supraliminal man as the normal man, and distrusts all deep
disturbance of his accustomed psychical routine.
It is commonly said that love is a passion to which man is always liable,
and which may surprise him at any moment of his life from 15 to 75. This
does not seem to me accurate; and a man is not throughout all his life and at
every moment susceptible of falling in love (de devenir amoureux). When a
man is in good physical and moral health, when he has easy and complete
command of all his ideas, he may expose himself to circumstances the most
capable of giving rise to a passion, but he will not feel it. His desires will be
reasonable and obedient to his will, leading the man only so far as he
wishes to go, and disappearing when he wishes to be rid of them. On the
other hand, if a man is morally below the mark (malade au moral),—if in
consequence of physical fatigue or excessive intellectual work, or of violent
shocks and prolonged sorrow, he is exhausted, melancholy, distracted,
timid, incapable of controlling his ideas,—in a word, depressed,—then he
will fall in love, or receive the germ of some kind of passion, on the first
and most trivial occasion.... The least thing is then enough; the sight of
some face, a gesture, a word, which previously would have left us

altogether indifferent, strikes us, and becomes the starting point of a long
amorous malady. Or more than this, an object which had made no
impression on us, at a moment when our mind was healthier and not
capable of inoculation, may have left in us some insignificant memory
which reappears in a moment of morbid receptivity. That is enough; the
germ is sown in a favourable soil; it will develop itself and grow.
There is at first, as in every virulent malady, a period of incubation; the
new idea passes and repasses in the vague reveries of the enfeebled
consciousness; then seems for a few days to have disappeared and to leave
the mind to recover from its passing trouble. But the idea has done its work
below the surface; it has become strong enough to shake the body; and to
provoke movements whose origin lies outside the primary consciousness.
What is the surprise of a sensible man when he finds himself piteously
returning beneath the windows of his charmer, whither his wandering feet
have taken him without his knowledge;—or when in the midst of his daily
work he hears his lips murmuring perpetually the well-known name!... Such
is passion in its reality; not as idealised by fantastic description, but reduced
to its essential psychological characteristics. (L'Automatisme
Psychologique, p. 466.)
On the other side I will appeal to Plato himself, giving a brief sketch
merely of one of the leading passages (Symposium, 192-212) where the
Platonic conception of love is set forth.[38]
Plato begins by recognising, as fully as pessimist or cynic could do, the
absolute inadequacy of what is called on earth the satisfaction of this
profound desire. Lovers who love aright will feel that no physical nearness
can content them, but what will content them they cannot say. "Their soul,"
says Plato, "is manifestly desiring something else; and what it is she cannot
tell, only she darkly prophesies thereof and guesses it from afar. But if
Hephæstus with his forging fire were to stand beside that pair and say: 'Is
this what ye desire—to be wholly one? to be together by night and day?—
for I am ready to melt you together and to make you grow in one, so that
from two ye shall become one only, and in this life shall be undivided, and
dying shall die together, and in the underworld shall be a single soul';—
there is no lover who would not eagerly accept the offer, and acknowledge
it as the expression of the unknown yearning and the fulfilment of the
ancient need." And through the mouth of Diotima, Plato insists that it is an

unfailing sign of true love that its desires are for ever; nay, that love may be
even defined as the desire of the everlasting possession of the good. And in
all love's acts he finds the impress of man's craving for immortality,—for
immortality whose only visible image for us on earth is the birth of children
to us as we ourselves decay,—so that when the slow self-renewal of our
own everchanging bodies has worn out and ceased, we may be renewed in
brighter, younger bodies which we desire to be born to us from
whomsoever we find most fair. "And then," says Plato, rising, as ever, from
visible to invisible things, "if active bodies have so strong a yearning that an
endless series of lovely images of themselves may constitute, as it were, an
earthly immortality for them when they have worn away, how greatly must
creative souls desire that partnership and close communion with other souls
as fair as they may bring to birth a brood of lofty thoughts, poems, statues,
institutions, laws,—the fitting progeny of the soul?
"And he who in his youth hath the need of these things in him, and grows
to be a godlike man, wanders about in search of a noble and well-nurtured
soul; and finding it, and in presence of that beauty which he forgets not
night or day, brings forth the beautiful which he conceived long ago; and
the twain together tend that which he hath brought forth, and are bound by a
far closer bond than that of earthly children, since the children which are
born to them are fairer and more immortal far. Who would not choose to
have Homer's offspring rather than any sons or daughters of men? Who
would not choose the offspring which Lycurgus left behind him, to be the
very salvation of Lacedæmon and of Greece? or the children of Solon,
whom we call Father of our Laws? or of other men like these, whether
Greeks or barbarians, who by great deeds that they have done have become
the begetters of every kind of virtue?—ay, and to these men's children have
temples been set up, and never to any other progeny of man...."
"He, then, who to this end would strive aright, must begin in youth to seek
fair forms, and should learn first to love one fair form only, and therein to
engender noble thoughts. And then he will perceive that the beauty of one
fair form is to the beauty of another near akin; and that if it be Beauty's self
he seek, it were madness not to account the beauty of all forms as one same
thing; and considering this, he will be the lover of all lovely shapes, and
will abate his passion for one shape alone, despising and deeming it but a
little thing. And this will lead him on to see that the beauty of the soul is far
more precious than any beauty of outward form, so that if he find a fair

soul, though it be in a body which hath but little charm, he will be constant
thereunto, and bring to birth such thoughts as teach and strengthen, till he
lead that soul on to see the beauty of actions and of laws, and how all
beauty is in truth akin, and the body's beauty is but a little matter; and from
actions he will lead him on to sciences, that he may see how sciences are
fair; and looking on the abundance of beauty may no longer be as the slave
or bondman of one beauty or of one law; but setting sail into the ocean of
beauty, and creating and beholding many fair and glorious thoughts and
images in a philosophy without stint or stay, he may thus at last wax strong
and grow, and may perceive that there is one science only, the science of
infinite beauty.
"For he who hath thus far had intelligence of love, and hath beheld all fair
things in order and aright,—he drawing near to the end of things lovable
shall behold a BEING marvellously fair; for whose sake in truth it is that all
the previous labours have been undergone: One who is from everlasting,
and neither is born nor perisheth, nor can wax nor wane, nor hath change or
turning or alteration of foul and fair; nor can that beauty be imagined after
the fashion of face or hands or bodily parts and members, nor in any form
of speech or knowledge, nor as dwelling in aught but in itself; neither in
beast nor man nor earth nor heaven nor any other creature; but Beauty only
and alone and separate and eternal, which, albeit all other fair things partake
thereof and grow and perish, itself without change or increase or diminution
endures for everlasting. And whoso being led on and upward by human
loves begins to see that Beauty, he is not far, I say, from reaching the end of
all. And surely then, O Socrates (said that guest from Mantinea), man's life
is worth the living, when he beholds that Primal Fair; which when thou
seest it shall not seem to thee to be made after the fashion of gold or
raiment or those forms of earth,—whom now beholding thou art stricken
dumb, and fain, if it were possible, without thought of meat or drink,
wouldst look and love for ever. What would it be, then, were it granted to
any man to see Very Beauty clear;—incorruptible and undefiled, not
mingled with colour or flesh of man, or with aught that can consume away,
but single and divine? Could man's life, in that vision and beatitude, be poor
or low? or deemest thou not (said she), that then alone it will be possible for
this man, discerning spiritual beauty with those eyes by which it is
spiritually discerned, to beget no shadows of virtue, since that is no shadow
to which he clings, but virtue in very truth, since he hath the very Truth in

his embrace? and begetting and rearing Virtue as his child, he must needs
become the friend of God; and if there be any man who is immortal, that
man is he."
Between the aspects of love here expressed in extreme terms,—the
planetary aspect, if I may so term it, and the cosmical,—the choice is
momentous. I do not indeed say that in our estimate of love is involved our
estimate of Religion; for Religion should mean the sane response of the
spirit to all that is known of Cosmic Law. But Religion in the sense in
which it is often used,—our emotional and ethical attitude towards Life
Unseen;—this is in reality too closely parallel to Platonic Love to allow the
psychologist who denies reality in the one to assume reality in the other. For
the Platonic lover the image of the Beloved one—no longer a matter of
conscious summons and imagination—has become the indwelling and
instinctive impulse to noble thought and deed. Even such to a Francis or to
a Theresa is the image of the Divinity whom they adore; and if they claim
that sometimes in moments of crisis they feel a sway, a guidance, a
communicatio idiomatum with the Divine, we may point in reply to the
humbler, but more tangible, evidence which assures us that even between
souls still inhabiting and souls who have quitted the flesh there may exist a
telepathic intercommunication and an impalpable confluence from afar.
Brief as this survey has been, it has served to indicate that the psychical
type to which we have applied the name of genius may be recognized in
every region of thought and emotion, as in each direction a man's every-day
self may be more or less permeable to subliminal impulses. Coming, then,
to the question, "What is the origin of genius?" I cannot accept the ordinary
explanation that it is a mere "sport" or mental by-product, occurring as
physical "sports" do in the course of evolution. The view which I hold,—the
view which I am here suggesting, is in some sort a renewal of the old
Platonic "reminiscence," in the light of that fuller knowledge which is
common property to-day. I hold that in the protoplasm or primary basis of
all organic life there must have been an inherent adaptability to the
manifestation of all faculties which organic life has in fact manifested. I
hold, of course, that "sports" or variations occur, which are at present
unpredictable, and which reveal in occasional offspring faculties which
their parents showed no signs of possessing. But I differ from those who
hold that the faculty itself thus manifested is now for the first time initiated
in that stock by some chance combination of hereditary elements. I hold

that it is not initiated, but only revealed; that the "sport" has not called a
new faculty into being, but has merely raised an existing faculty above the
threshold of supraliminal consciousness.
This view, if pushed back far enough, is no doubt inconsistent with the
way in which evolution is generally conceived. For it denies that all human
faculties must have been evoked by terrene experience. It assumes a
subliminal self, with unknown faculties, originated in some unknown way,
and not merely by contact with the needs which the terrene organism has
had to meet. It thus seems at first sight to be introducing a new mystery, and
to be introducing it in a gratuitous way.
To this I reply in the first place that so far as the origin of man's known
powers is concerned, no fresh mystery is in fact introduced. All human
powers, to put the thing broadly, have somehow or other to be got into
protoplasm and then got out again. You have to explain first how they
became implicit in the earliest and lowest living thing, and then how they
have become thus far explicit in the latest and highest. All the faculties of
that highest being, I repeat, existed virtually in the lowest, and in so far as
the admitted faculties are concerned, the difference between my view and
the ordinary view may be said to be little more than a difference as to the
sense which that word virtually is here to assume.
The real difference between the two views appears when the faculties
which I have called unknown come to be considered. If they are held to be
real, my view is certainly the better able to embrace them. I hold that
telepathy and telæsthesia do in fact exist—telepathy, a communication
between incarnate mind and incarnate mind, and perhaps between incarnate
minds and minds unembodied; telæsthesia, a knowledge of things terrene
which overpasses the limits of ordinary perception, and which perhaps also
achieves an insight into some other than terrene world. And these faculties,
I say, cannot have been acquired by natural selection, for the preservation of
the race, during the process of terrene evolution; they were (as we may
phrase it) the products of extra-terrene evolution. And if they were so, man's
other powers may well have been so also. The specialised forms of terrene
perception were not real novelties in the universe, but imperfect adaptations
of protoplasm to the manifestation of the indwelling general perceptive
power. The mathematical faculty, for instance (we may, perhaps, say with
Plato), pre-existed. When Dase solved all those sums in his head, his power
of solving them was not a fresh development in his ancestral stock, but

depended on the accidental adaptation of his organism to the manifestation
of the indwelling computative power. I do not indeed venture to follow
Plato in his ontogenetic argument—his claim that the individual computator
has had already an individual training in computation. I do not say that
Dase himself learnt or divined the multiplication-table in some ideal world.
I only say that Dase and all the rest of us are the spawn or output of some
unseen world in which the multiplication-table is, so to speak, in the air.
Dase trailed it after him, as the poet says of the clouds of glory, when he
"descended into generation" in a humble position at Hamburg.
In him and in his ancestors were many faculties which were called out by
the struggle for existence, and became supraliminal. But there were many
faculties also which were not thus called out, and which consequently
remained subliminal. To these faculties, as a rule, his supraliminal self
could get no access. But by some chance of evolution—some sport—a
vent-hole was opened at this one point between the different strata of his
being, and a subliminal uprush carried his computative faculty into the open
day.
Two things, of course, are assumed in this argument for which Science
offers no guarantee. I assume in the man a soul which can draw strength
and grace from a spiritual Universe, and conversely I assume in the
Universe a Spirit accessible and responsive to the soul of man. These are
familiar postulates. Every religion has claimed them in turn; although every
religion in turn has so narrowed their application as grievously to narrow
the evidence available for their support. But that which religions have
claimed for their Founders or for their Saints—and what is sanctity but the
genius of the ethical realm?—Psychology must claim for every form of
spiritual indrawing, every form of spiritual response; for sleeping vision, for
hypnotic rejuvenation, for sensory and motor automatisms, for trance, for
ecstasy. The philosopher who has cried with Marcus Aurelius "Either
Providence or atoms!"—who has declared that without this basis in the
Unseen, "the moral Cosmos would be reduced to a Chaos";—should he not
welcome even the humblest line of research which fain would gather from
every unsolved problem some hint as to the spiritual law unknown which in
time may give the solution of all?
We know not in what directions—directions how definitely predetermined
—even physical organisms can vary from the common type. We know not
what amount of energy any given plant or animal can absorb and

incorporate from earth and air and sun. Still less can we predict or limit the
possible variations of the soul, the fulness which it may receive from the
World-Soul, its possible heritage of grace and truth. But in genius we can
watch at each stage the processes of this celestial nurture. We can imagine
the outlook of joyous trustfulness; we can almost seem, with Wordsworth,
to remember the child's soul entering into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Childhood is genius without capacity; it makes for most of us our best
memory of inspiration, and our truest outlook upon the real, which is the
ideal, world.
From a greater distance we can watch the inward stir of mighty thought,
the same for Æschylus, for Newton, for Virgil;—a stir independent of
worldly agitation; like the swing and libration of the tide-wave across the
ocean, which takes no note of billow or of storm.
Nay, we can see against the sun "the eagle soaring above the tomb of
Plato," and in Paul, as in Plotinus, we can catch that sense of self-fulfilment
in self-absorption, of rapture, of deliverance, which the highest minds have
bequeathed to us as the heritage of their highest hours.
These our spiritual ancestors are no eccentrics nor degenerates; they have
made for us the sanest and most fruitful experiment yet made by man; they
have endeavoured to exalt the human race in a way in which it can in truth
be exalted; they have drawn on forces which exist, and on a Soul which
answers; they have dwelt on those things "by dwelling on which it is," as
Plato has it, "that even God is divine."

CHAPTER IV

SLEEP

δλβἱα δ' ἑπαντες αἱσα λυσἱπονον μετανἱσσονται τελευτἁν.
καἱ σὡμα μἑν πἁντων ἑπεται θανἁτὡ περισθενεἱ,
ξὡὁν δ' ἑτι λεἱπεται αἱὡνος εἱδωλον' τὁ γἁρ ἑστι μὁνον
ἑκ θεὡν' εὑδει δἑ πρασσὁντων μελἑων, ἁτἁρ εὑδὁντεσσιν ἑν πολλοἱς
ὁνεἱροις
δεἱκνυσι τερπνὡν ἑφἑρποισαν χαλεπὡν τε κρἱσιν.
—PINDAR.
THE preceding chapters have carried us two steps upon our way. In
Chapter II. we gained some insight into the structure of human personality
by analysing some of the accidents to which it is subject; in the third
chapter we viewed this personality in its normal waking state, and
considered how that norm should be defined, and in what manner certain
fortunate persons had integrated the personality still further by utilising
uprushes of subliminal faculty to supplement or to crystallise the products
of supraliminal thought.
The review of these two chapters indicates clearly enough what my next
step must be. It is obvious that in my review of phases or alternations of
personality I have left out of sight the most constant, the most important
alternation of all. I have thus far said nothing of sleep. Yet that change of
personality, at least, has been borne in on every one's notice;—not,
certainly, as a morbid curiosity, but as an essential part of life.
Let us then consider the specific characteristics of sleep. The definition of
sleep is an acknowledged crux in physiology. And I would point out that the
increased experience of hypnotic sleep which recent years have afforded
has made this difficulty even more striking than before. A physiological
explanation must needs assume that some special bodily condition,—such,
for instance, as the clogging of the brain by waste-products,—is at least the
usual antecedent of sound sleep. But it is certain, on the other hand, that
with a large percentage of persons profound and prolonged sleep can be

induced, in any bodily condition, by simple suggestion. Hypnosis, indeed
(as Wetterstrand and others have shown) may be prolonged, with actual
benefit to the sleeper, far beyond the point which the spontaneous sleep of a
healthy subject ever reaches. A good subject can be awakened and thrown
into hypnosis again almost at pleasure, and independently of any state either
of nutrition or of fatigue. Such sleep belongs to those phenomena which we
may call nervous if we will, but which we can observe or influence from the
psychological side alone.
We can hardly hope, from the ordinary data, to arrive at a definition of
sleep more satisfactory than others have reached. We must defer that
attempt until we have collected something more than the ordinary evidence
as to what occurs or does not occur during the abeyance of waking life. One
point, however, is plain at once. We cannot treat sleep,—as it has generally
been treated,—in its purely negative aspect. We cannot be content merely to
dwell, with the common text-books, on the mere absence of waking
faculties;—on the diminution of external perception, the absence of
controlling intelligence. We must treat sleep positively, so far as we can, as
a definite phase of our personality, co-ordinate with the waking phase. Each
phase, as I believe, has been differentiated alike from a primitive
indifference;—from a condition of lowly organisms which merited the
name neither of sleep nor of waking. Nay, if there were to be a contest as to
which state should be deemed primary and which secondary, sleep might
put forward its claim to be regarded as the more primitive phase. It is sleep
rather than vigilance which prenatal and infantile life suggest; and even for
us adults, however much we may associate ourselves in thought with the
waking state alone, that state has at least thus much of secondary and
adventitious that it is maintained for short periods only, which we cannot
artificially lengthen, being plainly unable to sustain itself without frequent
recourse to that fuller influx of vitality which slumber brings.
Out of slumber proceeds each fresh arousal and initiation of waking
activities. What other activities may in slumber be aroused and initiated the
evidence to be set forth in this chapter should help us to say. To some extent
at least the abeyance of the supraliminal life must be the liberation of the
subliminal. To some extent the obscuration of the noonday glare of man's
waking consciousness must reveal the far-reaching faint corona of his
unsuspected and impalpable powers.

Entering, then, upon a review of sleeping faculty, thus inevitably
imperfect, we may best begin from the red end of our spectrum of
consciousness;—the red end which represents the deepest power which
waking effort can exert upon our physical organism.
Our survey of the efficacy of sleep, indeed, must make its beginning
beyond that limit. For assuredly in sleep some agency is at work which far
surpasses waking efficacy in this respect. It is a fully admitted, although an
absolutely unexplained fact, that the regenerative quality of healthy sleep is
something sui generis, which no completeness of waking quiescence can
rival or approach. A few moments of sleep—a mere blur across the field of
consciousness—will sometimes bring a renovation which hours of lying
down in darkness and silence would not yield. A mere bowing of the head
on the breast, if consciousness ceases for a second or two, may change a
man's outlook on the world. At such moments,—and many persons, like
myself, can fully vouch for their reality,—one feels that what has occurred
in one's organism,—alteration of blood-pressure, or whatever it be,—has
been in some sense discontinuous; that there has been a break in the inward
régime, amounting to much more than a mere brief ignoring of stimuli from
without. The break of consciousness is associated in some way with a
potent physiological change. That is to say, even in the case of a moment of
ordinary sleep we already note the appearance of that special recuperative
energy which is familiar in longer periods of sleep, and which, as we shall
presently see, reaches a still higher level in hypnotic trance.
This recuperative power, then, lies just beyond the red end of our
spectrum of waking faculty. In that obscure region we note only added
power; an increased control over organic functions at the foundation of
bodily life. But when we pass on within the limits of our spectrum of
waking consciousness;—when we come to control over voluntary muscles,
or to sensory capacity, we find that our comparison between sleeping and
waking faculty is no longer a simple one. On the one hand, there is of
course a general blank and abeyance of control over the realm of waking
energies;—or in partial sleep a mere fantastic parody of those energies in
incoherent dream. On the other hand, we find that sleep is capable of
strange developments,—and that night can sometimes suddenly outdo the
most complex achievements of day.
Take first the degree of control over the voluntary muscles. In ordinary
sleep this is neither possessed nor desired; in nightmare its loss is

exaggerated, in quasi-hysterical fashion, into an appalling fear; while in
somnambulism,—a kind of new personality developed ad hoc,—the sleeper
(as we shall see later on) walks on perilous ridges with steady feet. I have
already said that morbid somnambulism bears to sound sleep a relation
something like that which hysteria bears to normal life. But between the
healthy somnambulist and the subject of nightmare we find from another
point of view a contrast resembling that between the man of genius and the
hysteric. The somnambulist, like the man of genius, brings into play
resources which are beyond ordinary reach. On the other hand, just as in
many hysterics certain ordinary powers of movement have lapsed below
voluntary control, so also the dreamer who dimly wishes to move a
constrained limb is often unable to send thither a sufficient current of motor
energy to effect the desired change of position. That nightmare inability to
move, which we thus feel in dream,—"when neither he that fleeth can flee,
nor he that pursueth pursue,"—that sensation which both Homer and Virgil
have selected as the type of paralysing bewilderment,[39]—this is just the
aboulia of the hysteric;—the condition when it takes a man half an hour to
put on his hat, or when a woman sits all the morning looking at her knitting,
but unable to add a stitch.
"Somnambulism," however, is too vague and undefined a term for our
present discussion. It will only be by a comparison with hypnotism, in the
next chapter, that we can hope to get some clearer notion of "sleep-waking"
states.
Let us pass on to consider entencephalic sensory faculty,—"mind's eye"
faculty,—as shown in sleep or dream. Here too we shall find the same rule
to prevail as with motor faculty. That is to say, on the whole the sensory
faculty is of course dimmed and inhibited by sleep; but there are
nevertheless indications of a power subsisting as vividly as ever, or with
even added acuteness.
Baillarger in France and Griesinger in Germany (both about 1845) were
among the first to call attention to the vivid images which rise before the
internal vision of many persons, between sleep and waking. M. Alfred
Maury, the well-known Greek scholar and antiquary, gave to these images a
few years later the title of illusions hypnagogiques, and published a
remarkable series of observations upon himself. Mr. Galton has further
treated of them in his Inquiry into Human Faculty; and cases will be found
in Phantasms of the Living, vol. i, pp. 390, 473, etc.

These visions may be hypnopompic as well as hypnagogic;—may appear,
that is to say, at the moment when slumber is departing as well as at the
moment when it is coming on;—and in either case they are closely related
to dreams; the "hypnagogic illusions" or pictures being sometimes repeated
in dream (as with Maury), and the hypnopompic pictures consisting
generally in the persistence of some dream-image into the first moments of
waking. In either case they testify to an intensified power of inward
visualisation at a very significant moment;—a moment which is actually or
virtually one of sleep, but which yet admits of definite comparison with
adjacent moments of waking. We may call the condition one of cerebral or
"mind's eye" hyperæsthesia,—an exalted sensibility of special brain-centres
in response to those unknown internal stimuli which are always giving rise
to similar but fainter inward visions even in broadly waking hours.
For those who are already good visualisers such phenomena as these,
though striking enough, present no quite unique experience. For bad
visualisers, on the other hand, the vividness of these hypnagogic pictures
may be absolutely a revelation.
The degree of acuteness, not of the visualising faculty alone, but of all the
senses in dream, is a subject for direct observation, and even—for persons
who can at all control their dreams—for direct experiment. Some
correspondents report a considerable apparent accession of sensory power
in dream. Others again speak of the increased vividness of dramatic
conception, or of what has been called in a hypnotic subject "objectivation
of types." "In each of these dreams," writes one lady, "I was a man;—in one
of them a low brute, in the other a dipsomaniac. I never had the slightest
conception of how such persons felt or thought until these experiences."
Another correspondent speaks of dreaming two disconnected dreams,—one
emotional and one geometrical,—simultaneously, and of consequent sense
of confusion and fatigue.
The "Chapter on Dreams," in R. L. Stevenson's volume, Across the Plains
(already referred to in the last chapter), contains a description of the most
successful dream-experiments thus far recorded. By self-suggestion before
sleep Stevenson could secure a visual and dramatic intensity of dream-
representation which furnished him with the motives for some of his most
striking romances. His account, written with admirable psychological
insight, is indispensable to students of this subject. I am mentioning these
well-known phenomena, as the reader will understand, with a somewhat

novel purpose—to show, namely, that the internal sensory perceptions or
imaginative faculty of sleep may exceed that of vigilance in something the
same way as the recuperative agency of sleep surpasses the vis medicatrix
of waking hours.
I pass on to a less frequent phenomenon, which shows us at once intense
imagination during sleep, and a lasting imprint left by these imaginations
upon the waking organism;—an unintended self-suggestion which we may
compare with Stevenson's voluntary self-suggestion mentioned just above.
The permanent result of a dream, I say, is sometimes such as to show that
the dream has not been a mere superficial confusion of past waking
experiences, but has had an unexplained potency of its own,—drawn, like
the potency of hypnotic suggestion, from some depth in our being which the
waking self cannot reach. Two main classes of this kind are conspicuous
enough to be easily recognised—those, namely, where the dream has led to
a "conversion" or marked religious change, and those where it has been the
starting-point of an "insistent idea" or of a fit of actual insanity.[40] The
dreams which convert, reform, change character and creed, have of course a
primâ facie claim to be considered as something other than ordinary
dreams; and their discussion may be deferred till a later stage of our inquiry.
Those, on the other hand, which suddenly generate an insistent idea of an
irrational type are closely and obviously analogous to post-hypnotic self-
suggestions, which the self that inspired them cannot be induced to
countermand. Such is the dream related by M. Taine,[41] where a gendarme,
impressed by an execution at which he has assisted, dreams that he himself
is to be guillotined, and is afterwards so influenced by the dream that he
attempts suicide. Several cases of this kind have been collected by Dr.
Faure;[42] and Dr. Tissié, in his interesting little work, Les Rêves, has added
some curious instances from his own observation.
A striking illustration may be drawn from the following incident in the
story of Krafft-Ebing's patient,[43] Ilma S., the genuineness of whose
stigmata seems proved by that physician's care in observation, and by the
painfulness of certain experiments performed upon her by students as
practical jokes and against her will:—

May 6th, 1888.—The patient is disturbed to-day. She complains to the
sister of severe pain under the left breast, thinks that the professor has burnt
her in the night, and begs the sister to obtain a retreat for her in a convent,
where she will be secure against such attacks. The sister's refusal causes a
hystero-epileptic attack. [At length, in the hypnotic trance] the patient gives
the following explanation of the origin of the pain: "Last night an old man
came to me; he looked like a priest and came in company with a Sister of
Charity, on whose collet there was a large golden B. I was afraid of her. The
old man was amiable and friendly. He dipped a pen in the sister's pocket,
and with it wrote a W and B on my skin under the left breast. Once he
dipped his pen badly and made a blot in the middle of the figure. This spot
and the B pain me severely, but the W does not. The man explained the W
as meaning that I should go to the M church and confess at the W
confessional."
After this account the patient cried out and said, "There stands the man
again. Now he has chains on his hands."
When the patient woke into ordinary life she was suffering pain in the
place indicated, where there were "superficial losses of substance,
penetrating to the corium, which have a resemblance to a reversed W and
B," with "a hyperæmic raised spot between the two." Nowhere in this
peculiar neurotrophic alteration of the skin, which is identical with those
previously produced experimentally, are there traces of inflammation. The
pain and the memory of the dream were removed by the doctor's
suggestion; but the dream self-suggestion to confess at the M church
persisted; and the patient, without knowing why, did actually go and
confess to the priest of her vision.
In this last case we have a dream playing the part of a powerful post-
hypnotic suggestion. The meaning of this vague term "suggestion" we shall
have to discuss in a later chapter. It is enough to notice here the great power
of a subliminal suggestion which can make an impression so much stronger
not only than the usual evanescent touch of dream, but than the actual
experiences of waking day.
But this case may also serve to lead us on to further reflections as to the
connection between dream-memory and hypnotic memory, a connection
which points, as we shall presently see, towards the existence of some

subliminal continuity of memory, lying deeper down than the evocable
memory of common life—the stock of conscious reminiscences on which
we can draw at will.
With regard to memory, as with regard to sensation, we seem in waking
life to be dealing with a selection made for purposes of earthly use. From
the pre-conscious unselective memory which depends on the mere
organisation of living matter, it is the task of consciousness, as it dawns in
each higher organism, to make its own appropriate selection and to develop
into distinctness certain helpful lines of reminiscence. The question of self-
preservation—What must I needs be aware of in order to escape my foes?
—involves the question, What must I needs remember in order to act upon
the facts of which I am aware? The selected currents of memory follow the
selected avenues of sensation; what by disuse I lose the power of noticing at
the time, I also lose the power of recalling afterwards.
For simpler organisms this rule may perhaps suffice. Man needs a more
complex formula. For it may happen, as we have already seen, that two or
more phases of personality in one man may each select from the mass of
potential reminiscences a special group of memories of its own. These
special groups, moreover, may bear to one another all kinds of relations;
one may include another, or they may alternate and may be apparently co-
exclusive.
From these dissociations and alternations of memory there will be many
lessons to learn. The lesson which here presents itself is not the least
important. What is the relation of the sleeping state to these dissociated,
these parallel or concentric memories? Is it the case that when one memory
includes another it is the waking memory—as one might expect from that
state's apparently superior vividness—which shows itself the deeper, the
more comprehensive record?
The answer of actual experience to these questions is unexpectedly direct
and clear. In every recorded instance—so far at least as my memory serves
me, where there has been any unification between alternating states, so as to
make comparison possible—it is the memory furthest from waking life
whose span is the widest, whose grasp of the organism's upstored
impressions is the most profound. Inexplicable as this phenomenon has
been to observers who have encountered it without the needed key, the
independent observations of hundreds of physicians and hypnotists have

united in affirming its reality. The commonest instance, of course, is
furnished by the ordinary hypnotic trance. The degree of intelligence,
indeed, which finds its way to expression in that trance or slumber varies
greatly in different subjects and at different times. But whensoever there is
enough of alertness to admit of our forming a judgment, we find that in the
hypnotic state there is a considerable memory—though not necessarily a
complete or a reasoned memory—of the waking state; whereas with most
subjects in the waking state—unless some special command be imposed
upon the hypnotic self—there is no memory whatever of the hypnotic state.
In many hysterical conditions also the same general rule subsists; namely,
that the further we get from the surface the wider is the expanse of memory
which we encounter.
If all this be true, there are several points on which we may form
expectations definite enough to suggest inquiry. Ordinary sleep is roughly
intermediate between waking life and deep hypnotic trance; and it seems a
priori probable that its memory will have links of almost equal strength
with the memory which belongs to waking life and the memory which
belongs to the hypnotic trance. And this is in fact the case; the fragments of
dream-memory are interlinked with both these other chains. Thus, for
example, without any suggestion to that effect, acts accomplished in the
hypnotic trance may be remembered in dream; and remembered under the
illusion which was thrown round them by the hypnotiser. Thus Dr. Auguste
Voisin suggested to a hypnotised subject to stab a patient—really a stuffed
figure—in the neighbouring bed.[44] The subject did so; and of course knew
nothing of it on waking. But three days afterwards he returned to the
hospital complaining that his dreams were haunted by the figure of a
woman, who accused him of having stabbed and killed her. Appropriate
suggestion laid this ghost of a doll.
Conversely, dreams forgotten in waking life may be remembered in the
hypnotic trance. Thus Dr. Tissié's patient, Albert, dreamt that he was about
to set out on one of his somnambulic "fugues," or aimless journeys, and
when hypnotised mentioned to the physician this dream, which in his
waking state he had forgotten.[45] The probable truth of this statement was
shown by the fact that he did actually set out on the journey thus dreamt of,
and that his journeys were usually preceded and incited by remembered
dreams.

I need not dwell on the existence, but at the same time the incompleteness,
of our dream-memory of waking life; nor on the occasional formation of a
separate chain of memory, constructed from successive and cohering
dreams. It should be added that we do not really know how far our memory
in dream of waking life may have extended; since we can only infer this
from our notoriously imperfect waking memory of past dreams.
A cognate anticipation to which our theory will point will be that dream-
memory will occasionally be found to fill up gaps in waking memory, other
than those due to hypnotic trance; such so-called "ecmnesic" periods, for
instance, as sometimes succeed a violent shock to the system, and may even
embrace some space of time anterior to the shock. These periods
themselves resemble prolonged and unremembered dreams. Such accidents,
however, are so rare, and such dream-memory so hard to detect, that I
mention the point mainly for the sake of theoretical completeness; and must
think myself fortunate in being able to refer the reader to a recent case of
M. Charcot's which affords an interesting confirmation of the suggested
view.[46]
I pass on to the still more novel and curious questions involved in the
apparent existence of a dream-memory which, while accompanying the
memory of ordinary life, seems also to have a wider purview, and to
indicate that the record of external events which is kept within us is far
fuller than we know.
Let us consider what stages such a memory may show.
I. It may include events once known to the waking self, but now definitely
forgotten.
II. It may include facts which have fallen within the sensory field, but
which have never been supraliminally "apperceived" or cognised in any
way. And thus also it may indicate that from this wider range of
remembered facts dream-inferences have been drawn;—which inferences
may be retrospective, prospective, or,—if I may use a word of Pope's with a
new meaning, circumspective,—that is to say, relating not to the past or to
the future, but to the present condition of matters beyond the range of
ordinary perception. It is plain that inferences of this kind (if they exist) will
be liable to be mistaken for direct retrocognition, direct premonition, direct
clairvoyance; while yet they need not actually prove anything more than a
perception on the part of the subliminal self more far-reaching,—a memory

more stable,—than is the perception or the memory of the supraliminal self
which we know.
These hypermnesic dreams, then, may afford a means of drawing our lines
of evidence more exactly; of relegating some marvellous narratives to a
realm of lesser marvel, and at the same time of realising more clearly what
it is in the most advanced cases which ordinary theories are really
powerless to explain.
As to the first of the above-mentioned categories no one will raise any
doubt. It is a familiar fact—or a fact only sufficiently unfamiliar to be noted
with slight surprise—that we occasionally recover in sleep a memory which
has wholly dropped out of waking consciousness.
In such cases the original piece of knowledge has at the time made a
definite impress on the mind,—has come well within the span of
apprehension of the supraliminal consciousness. Its reappearance after
however long an interval is a fact to which there are already plenty of
parallels. But the conclusion to which some cases seem to me to point is
one of a much stranger character. I think that there is evidence to show that
many facts or pictures which have never even for a moment come within
the apprehension of the supraliminal consciousness are nevertheless
retained by the subliminal memory, and are occasionally presented in
dreams with what seems a definite purpose. I quote an interesting case in
Appendix IV. A.[47]
The same point, as we shall hereafter see, is illustrated by the phenomena
of crystal-vision. Miss Goodrich-Freer,[48] for example, saw in the crystal
the announcement of the death of a friend;—a piece of news which
certainly had never been apprehended by her ordinary conscious self. On
referring to the Times, it was found that an announcement of the death of
some one of the same unusual name was contained in a sheet with which
she had screened her face from the fire;—so that the words may have fallen
within her range of vision, although they had not reached what we broadly
call her waking mind.
This instance was of value from the strong probability that the news could
never have been supraliminally known at all;—since it was too important to
have been merely glanced at and forgotten.
In these cases the dream-self has presented a significant scene,—has
chosen, so to say, from its gallery of photographs the special picture which

the waking mind desired,—but has not needed to draw any more complex
inference from the facts presumably at its disposal. I have now to deal with
a small group of dreams which reason as well as remember;—if indeed in
some of them there be not something more than mere reasoning on facts
already in some way acquired,—something which overpasses the scheme
prescribed for the present chapter.
In the first place we cannot doubt that definite data already known may
sometimes be treated in somnambulism or ordinary dream with more than
waking intelligence. Such are the cases of mathematical problems solved in
somnambulism, or of the skeletal arrangement discovered by Agassiz in
common sleep for scattered bones which had baffled his waking skill. I give
in Appendix IV. B. the striking case of Professor Hilprecht where dream-
intelligence is carried to its highest point. Professor Romaine Newbold
(who records the case) is well versed in the analysis of evidence making for
supernormal powers, and his explanation of the vision as the result of
"processes of associative reasoning analogous to those of the upper
consciousness" must, I think, be taken as correct. But had the incident
occurred in a less critical age of the world,—in any generation, one may
say, but this,—how majestic a proof would the phantasmal Babylonian's
message be held to have afforded of his veritable co-operation with the
modern savant in the reconstruction of his remote past!
I repeat that with this case of Professor Hilprecht's we seem to have
reached the utmost intensity of sleep faculty within the limits of our
ordinary spectrum. In almost every region of that spectrum we have found
that the sleeper's faculty, under its narrow conditions, shows scattered signs
of at least a potential equality with the faculty of waking hours.
We have already seen this as regards muscular movements, as regards
inward vision and audition, and as regards memory; and these last records
complete the series by showing us the achievement in sleep of intellectual
work of the severest order. Coleridge's Kubla Khan had long ago shown the
world that a great poet might owe his masterpiece to the obscuration of
waking sense.[49] And the very imperfection of Kubla Khan—the memory
truncated by an interruption—may again remind us how partial must ever
be our waking knowledge of the achievements of sleep.
May I not, then, claim a real analogy between certain of the achievements
of sleep and the achievements of genius? In both there is the same

triumphant spontaneity, the same sense of drawing no longer upon the
narrow and brief endurance of nerves and brain, but upon some unknown
source exempt from those limitations.
Thus far, indeed, the sleep-faculties which we have been considering,
however strangely intensified, have belonged to the same class as the
normal faculties of waking life. We have now to consider whether we can
detect in sleep any manifestation of supernormal faculty—any experience
which seems to suggest that man is a cosmical spirit as well as a terrestrial
organism, and is in some way in relation with a spiritual as well as with a
material world. It will seem, in this view, to be natural that this commerce
with a spiritual environment should be more perceptible in sleep than in
waking. The dogma which my point of view thus renders probable is
perhaps, as a mere matter of history, the dogma of all dogmas which has
been most universally believed by mankind.
"Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus"—for how many narrow
theological propositions have we not heard this proud claim—that they
have been believed everywhere, and by everybody, and in every age? Yet
what can approach the antiquity, the ubiquity, the unanimity of man's belief
in the wanderings of the spirit in dream? In the Stone Age, the sceptic
would have been rash indeed who ventured to contradict it. And though I
grant that this "palæolithic psychology" has gone out of fashion for the last
few centuries, I do not think that (in view of the telæsthetic evidence now
collected) we can any longer dismiss as a mere bizarrerie of dream-imagery
the constant recurrence of the idea of visiting in sleep some distant scene,—
with the acquisition thereby of new facts not otherwise accessible.
Starting, then, not from savage authority, but from the evidential scrutiny
of modern facts, we shall find, I think, that there are coincidences of dream
with truth which neither pure chance nor any subconscious mentation of an
ordinary kind will adequately explain. We shall find that there is a
perception of concealed material objects or of distant scenes and also a
perception of a communion with the thoughts and emotions of other minds.
Both these phenomena have been noted sporadically in many ages and
countries, and were observed with serious attention especially by the early
French mesmerists. The first group of phenomena was called clairvoyance
or lucidité, and the second communication de pensées, or in English,
thought-transference. These terms are scarcely comprehensive enough to
satisfy a more systematic study. The distant perception is not optical, nor is

it confined even to the apparent sense of sight alone. It extends to all the
senses, and includes also impressions hardly referable to any special sense.
Similarly the communication between distant persons is not a transference
of thought alone, but of emotion, of motor impulses, and of many
impressions not easy to define. I ventured in 1882 to suggest the wider
terms telæsthesia, sensation at a distance, and telepathy, fellow-feeling at a
distance, and shall use these words in the present work. But I am far from
assuming that these terms correspond with definite and dearly separated
groups of phenomena, or comprise the whole field of supernormal faculty.
On the contrary, I think it probable that the facts of the metetherial world
are far more complex than the facts of the material world; and the ways in
which spirits perceive and communicate, apart from fleshly organisms, are
subtler and more varied than any perception or communication which we
know.
I have halted above at another line of demarcation which the dreamer's
own sensations suggest,—the distinction between active psychical
excursion or invasion and the passive reception of psychical invasion from
without. But even here, as was also hinted, a clear line of division is hard to
draw. For whether we are dealing with dream-perceptions of distant
material scenes, or of distant living persons, or of discarnate spirits, it is
often impossible for the dreamer himself to say either from what point he is
himself observing, or where the scene of the vision is laid.
For the present I must confine myself to a brief sketch of some of the main
types of supernormal dreams, arranged in a kind of ascending order. I shall
begin with such dreams as primarily suggest a kind of heightening or
extension of the dreamer's own innate perceptive powers, as exercised on
the world around him. And I shall end with dreams which suggest his
entrance into a spiritual world, where commerce with incarnate or
discarnate spirits is subject no longer to the conditions of earthly thought.
I begin, then, with some dreams which seem to carry perceptive faculty
beyond the point at which some unusual form of common vision can be
plausibly suggested in explanation. Mr. Lewis's dream of the landing-order
(Appendix IV. A) may be taken as an instance of such a dream.[50]
I will next refer to certain cases where the sleeper by clairvoyant vision
discerns a scene of direct interest to a mind other than his own;—as the
danger or death of some near friend. Sometimes there is a flash of vision,

which seems to represent correctly the critical scene. Sometimes there is
what seems like a longer gaze, accompanied, perhaps by some sense of
communion with the invaded person. And in some few cases—the most
interesting of all—the circumstances of a death seem to be symbolically
shown to a dreamer, as though by the deceased person, or by some
intelligence connected with him. (See Mrs. Storie's narrative p. 109.)
One of the best instances of the flash of vision is Canon Warburton's,
which I quote from Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 338—a case whose
remoteness is rendered less of a drawback than usual by the character of the
narrator and the simplicity and definiteness of the fact attested.
The following is his account:—
The Close, Winchester, July 16th, 1883.
Somewhere about the year 1848 I went up from Oxford to stay a day or
two with my brother, Acton Warburton, then a barrister, living at 10 Fish
Street, Lincoln's Inn. When I got to his chambers I found a note on the table
apologising for his absence, and saying that he had gone to a dance
somewhere in the West End, and intended to be home soon after one
o'clock. Instead of going to bed, I dozed in an arm-chair, but started up wide
awake exactly at one, ejaculating "By Jove! he's down!" and seeing him
coming out of a drawing-room into a brightly illuminated landing, catching
his foot in the edge of the top stair, and falling headlong, just saving himself
by his elbows and hands. (The house was one which I had never seen, nor
did I know where it was.) Thinking very little of the matter, I fell a-doze
again for half an hour, and was awakened by my brother suddenly coming
in and saying, "Oh, there you are! I have just had as narrow an escape of
breaking my neck as I ever had in my life. Coming out of the ballroom, I
caught my foot, and tumbled full length down the stairs."
That is all. It may have been "only a dream," but I always thought it must
have been something more.
W. Warburton.
In a second letter Canon Warburton adds:—
July 20th, 1883.
My brother was hurrying home from his dance, with some little self-
reproach in his mind for not having been at his chambers to receive his

guest, so the chances are that he was thinking of me. The whole scene was
vividly present to me at the moment, but I did not note particulars any more
than one would in real life. The general impression was of a narrow landing
brilliantly illuminated, and I remember verifying the correctness of this by
questions at the time.
This is my sole experience of the kind.
[The last words are in answer to the question whether he had had similar
vivid visions which had not corresponded with any real event.]
The impression here produced is as though a jerk were given to some
delicate link connecting the two brothers. The brother suffering the crisis
thinks vividly of the other; and one can of course explain the incident, as we
did on its first publication, as the endangered man's projection of the scene
upon his brother's mind. The passive dozing brother, on the other hand,
feels as though he were suddenly present in the scene,—say in response to
some sudden call from the brother in danger,—and I am here bringing into
relief that aspect of the incident, on account of its analogy with cases soon
to be quoted. But the main lesson no doubt may be that no hard and fast line
can be drawn between the two explanations.[51]
And here I feel bound to introduce a sample of a certain class of dreams,
—more interesting, perhaps, and certainly more perplexing than any;—but
belonging to a category of phenomena which at present I can make no
attempt to explain. I mean precognitive dreams;—pictures or visions in
which future events are foretold or depicted, generally with more or less of
symbolism,—and generally also in a mode so remote from the previsions of
our earthly sagacity that we shall find ourselves driven, in a later
discussion, to speak in vague terms of glimpses into a cosmic picture-
gallery;—or of scenic representations composed and offered to us by
intelligences higher and more distant than any spirit whom we have known.
I give in Appendix IV. C, a thoroughly characteristic example;—
characteristic alike in its definiteness, its purposelessness, its isolated
unintelligibility.
Dr. Bruce's narrative, which I next give in Appendix IV. D, written by an
intelligent man, while the facts were yet fresh, seems to me of high
importance. If we accept the rest of his story, we must, I think, suppose that
the sense of spiritual presence with which the incident began was more than
a mere subjective fancy. Shall we refer it to the murdered man's wife;—with

whom the dreamer seemed afterwards to be in telepathic relation? Or shall
we interpret it as a kind of summons from the dying man, drawing on, as it
were, his friend's spirit to witness the actual murder and the subsequent
scene? The fact that another friend, in another locality apparently, had a
vision of similar nature, tells somewhat in favour of the supposition that the
decedent's spirit was operative in both cases; since we very seldom—if ever
—find an agent producing an impression in two separate places at once—or
nearly so—except at or just after the moment of death.
In this view, the incident resembles a scene passing in a spiritual world.
The dying man summons his brother-in-law; the brother-in-law visits the
scene of murder, and there spiritually communicates with his sister, the
widow, who is corporeally in that scene, and then sees further details of the
scene after death, which he does not understand, and which are not
explained to him.
Fantastic though this explanation seems, it is not easy to hit on a simpler
one which will cover the facts as stated. Could we accept it, we should have
a kind of transition between two groups of cases, which although apparently
so different may form parts of a continuous series. I mean the cases where
the dreamer visits a distant scene, and the cases where another spirit visits
the dreamer.
Taking, then, Dr. Bruce's case to bridge the interval between these two
groups, I go on to a case which properly belongs to the second, though it
still has much in common with the first. I shall quote Mrs. Storie's narrative
at full length in the text; because the case is, in my judgment, both
evidentially very strong, and also, in the naiveté of its confusion, extremely
suggestive of the way in which these psychical communications are made.
Mrs. Storie, who is now dead, was, by the testimony of Edmund Gurney,
Professor Sidgwick, and others, a witness eminently deserving of trust; and,
besides a corroboration from her husband of the manifestation of a troubled
dream, before the event was known, we have the actual notes written down
by her, as she informed us, the day, or the day after, the news of the fatal
accident arrived, solely for her own use, and unmistakably reflecting the
incoherent impressiveness of the broken vision. These notes form the
narrative given in Phantasms of the Living (vol. i. p. 370) which I reproduce
here. The fact that the deceased brother was a twin of Mrs. Storie's adds
interest to the case, since one clue (a vague one as yet) to the causes

directing and determining telepathic communications lies in what seems
their exceptional frequency between twins;—the closest of all relations.
Hobart Town, July 1874.
On the evening of the 18th July, I felt unusually nervous. This seemed to
begin [with the occurrence of a small domestic annoyance] about half past
eight o'clock. When I went to my room I even felt as if some one was there.
I fancied, as I stepped into bed, that some one in thought tried to stop me.
At 2 o'clock I woke from the following dream. It seemed like in dissolving
views. In a twinkle of light I saw a railway, and the puff of the engine. I
thought, "What's going on up there? Travelling? I wonder if any of us are
travelling and I dreaming of it." Some one unseen by me answered, "No;
something quite different—something wrong." "I don't like to look at these
things," I said. Then I saw behind and above my head William's upper half
reclining, eyes and mouth half shut; his chest moved forward convulsively,
and he raised his right arm. Then he bent forward, saying, "I suppose I
should move out of this." Then I saw him lying, eyes shut, on the ground,
flat. The chimney of an engine at his head. I called in excitement, "That will
strike him!" The some one answered "Yes—well, here's what it was"; and
immediately I saw William sitting in the open air—faint moonlight—on a
raised place sideways. He raised his right arm, shuddered, and said, "I can't
go on, or back, No." Then he seemed lying flat. I cried out, "Oh! Oh!" and
others seemed to echo, "Oh! Oh!" He seemed then upon his elbow, saying,
"Now it comes." Then as if struggling to rise, turned twice round quickly,
saying, "Is it the train? the train, the train," his right shoulder reverberating
as if struck from behind. He fell back like fainting; his eyes rolled. A large
dark object came between us like panelling of wood, and rather in the dark
something rolled over, and like an arm was thrown up, and the whole thing
went away with a swish. Close beside me on the ground there seemed a
long dark object. I called out, "They've left something behind; it's like a
man." It then raised its shoulders and head, and fell down again. The same
some one answered, "Yes, sadly." [? "Yes," sadly.] After a moment I seemed
called on to look up, and said, "Is that thing not away yet?" Answered,
"No." And in front, in light, there was a railway compartment in which sat
Rev. Mr. Johnstone, of Echuca. I said, "What's he doing there?" Answered,
"He's there." A railway porter went up to the window asking, "Have you
seen any of——." I caught no more, but I thought he referred to the thing

left behind. Mr. Johnstone seemed to answer "No"; and the man went
quickly away—I thought to look for it. After all this the some one said close
to me, "Now I'm going." I started, and at once saw
{a tall dark figure at my head}
{William's back at my side. } He put his right hand (in grief) over his face,
and the other almost touching my shoulder, he crossed in front, looking
stern and solemn. There was a flash from the eyes, and I caught a glimpse
of a fine pale face like ushering him along, and indistinctly another. I felt
frightened, and called out, "Is he angry?" "Oh, no." "Is he going away?"
Answered, "Yes," by the same some one, and I woke with a loud sigh, which
woke my husband, who said, "What is it?" I told him I had been dreaming
"something unpleasant"—named a "railway," and dismissed it all from my
mind as a dream. As I fell asleep again I fancied the some one said, "It's all
gone," and another answered, "I'll come and remind her."
The news reached me one week afterwards. The accident had happened to
my brother on the same night about half past 9 o'clock. Rev. Mr. Johnstone
and his wife were actually in the train which struck him. He was walking
along the line which is raised two feet on a level country. He seemed to
have gone 16 miles—must have been tired and sat down to take off his
boot, which was beside him, dozed off and was very likely roused by the
sound of the train; 76 sheep-trucks had passed without touching him, but
some wooden projection, likely the step, had touched the right side of his
head, bruised his right shoulder, and killed him instantaneously. The night
was very dark. I believe now that the some one was (from something in the
way he spoke) William himself. The face with him was white as alabaster
and something like this [a small sketch pasted on] in profile. There were
many other thoughts or words seemed to pass, but they are too many to
write down here.
The voice of the some one unseen seemed always above the figure of
William which I saw. And when I was shown the compartment of the
carriage with Mr. Johnstone, the some one seemed on a line between me
and it—above me.
[In an account-book of Mrs. Storie's, on a page, headed July 1874, we find
the 18th day marked, and the words, "Dear Willie died," and "Dreamed,
dreamed of it all," appended.

The first letter, from the Rev. J. C. Johnstone to the Rev. John Storie,
announcing the news of the accident, is lost. The following are extracts
from his second and third letters on the subject:—]
Echuca, 10th August 1874.
The place where Hunter was killed is on an open plain, and there was
consequently plenty of room for him to escape the train had he been
conscious; but I think Meldrum's theory is the correct one, that he had sat
down to adjust some bandages on his leg and had thoughtlessly gone off to
sleep. There is only one line of rails, and the ground is raised about 2 feet—
the ground on which the rails rest. He had probably sat down on the edge,
and lain down backwards so as to be within reach of some part of the train.
It was not known at the time that an accident had occurred. Mrs. Johnstone
and myself were in the train. Meldrum says he was not very much crushed.
The top of the skull was struck off, and some ribs were broken under the
armpit on one side. His body was found on the Sunday morning by a herd-
boy from the adjoining station.
August 29th, 1874.
The exact time at which the train struck poor Hunter must have been about
9.55 P.M., and his death must have been instantaneous.
[The above corresponds with the account of the inquest in the Riverine
Herald for July 22nd. The Melbourne Argus also describes the accident as
having taken place on the night of Saturday, the 18th.
The following remarks are taken from notes made by Professor Sidgwick,
during an interview with Mrs. Storie, in April 1884, and by Mrs. Sidgwick
after another interview in September 1885:—]
Mrs. Storie cannot regard the experience exactly as a dream, though she
woke up from it. She is sure that it did not grow more definite in
recollection afterwards. She never had a series of scenes in a dream at any
other time; and she has never had anything like a hallucination. They were
introduced by a voice in a whisper, not recognised as her brother's. He had
sat on the bank as he appeared in the dream. The engine she saw behind him
had a chimney of peculiar shape, such as she had not at that time seen; and
she remembers that Mr. Storie thought her foolish about insisting on the
chimney—unlike (he said) any which existed; but he informed her when he
came back from Victoria, where her brother was, that engines of this kind

had just been introduced there. She had no reason to think that any
conversation between the porter and the clergyman actually occurred. The
persons who seemed to lead her brother away were not recognised by her,
and she only saw the face of one of them.
Mr. Storie confirms his wife having said to him at the time of the dream,
"What is that light?" Before writing the account first quoted, she had just
mentioned the dream to her husband, but had not described it. She desired
not to think of it, and also was unwilling to worry him about it because of
his Sunday's work. This last point, it will be observed, is a confirmation of
the fact that the dream took place on the Saturday night; and "it came out
clearly" (Mrs. Sidgwick says) "that her recollection about the Saturday
night was an independent recollection, and not read back after the accident
was known." The strongly nervous state that preceded the dream was quite
unique in Mrs. S.'s experience. But as it appeared that, according to her
recollection, it commenced at least an hour before the accident took place, it
must be regarded as of no importance evidentially. The feeling of a
presence in the room was also quite unique.
"Here," says Gurney, "the difficulty of referring the true elements of the
dream to the agent's mind [is very great]. For Mr. Hunter was asleep; and
even if we can conceive that the image of the advancing engine may have
had some place in his mind, the presence of Mr. Johnstone could not have
been perceived by him. But it is possible, of course, to regard this last item
of correspondence as accidental, even though the dream was telepathic. It
will be observed that the dream followed the accident by about four hours;
such deferment is, I think, a strong point in favour of telepathic, as opposed
to independent, clairvoyance."
I propose as an alternative explanation,—for reasons which I endeavour to
justify in later chapters,—that the deceased brother, aided by some other
dimly discerned spirit, was endeavouring to present to Mrs. Storie a series
of pictures representing his death—as realised after his death. I add this last
clause, because one of the marked points in the dream was the presence in
the train of Mr. Johnstone of Echuca—a fact which (as Gurney remarks) the
dying man could not possibly know.
I have dwelt on these two cases of Dr. Bruce and Mrs. Storie, because the
reader will, I think, come to feel, as our evidence unrolls itself, that he has
here complex experiences which are confirmed at various points by simpler

experiences, in such a way as to make these stories seem a confused but an
intimate transcript of what other narratives show in hints and glimpses
alone.
In Mrs. Storie's case the whole experience, as we have seen, presented
itself as a dream; yet as a dream of quite unusual type, like a series of
pictures presented to the sleeper who was still conscious that she was lying
in bed. In other cases the "psychical invasion" of the spirit either of a living
or of a deceased person seems to set up a variety of sleep-waking states—
both in agent and percipient. In one bizarre narrative a man dreaming that
he has returned home is heard in his home calling for hot water—and has
himself a singular sense of "bilocation" between the railway carriage and
his bedroom.[52] In another curious case is recorded a kind of encounter in
dreamland, apparently more or less remembered by both persons.[53]
An invasion of this type coming upon a sleeping person is apt to induce
some change in the sleeper's state, which, even if he regards it as a complete
awakening, is generally shown not to be so in fact by the dreamlike
character of his own recorded feelings and utterances. Gurney called these
"Borderland Cases," and the whole collection in Phantasms of the Living
will repay perusal. I introduce one such case in Appendix IV. E, as being at
once very perplexing and, I think, very strongly attested. I knew Mr. and
Mrs. T., who certainly were seriously anxious for complete accuracy, and
who had (as the narrative shows) made a brief memorandum and consulted
various persons on the incident at the time.
These cases of invasion by the spirits of living persons pass on into cases
of invasion by the dying, the impression being generally that of the
presence of the visitant in the percipient's surroundings.[54] Sometimes the
phantasm is seen as nearly as can be ascertained at the time of death. But
there is no perceptible break in the series at this point. Some appear shortly
after death, but before the death is known to the percipient. [See Appendix
IV. F]. Finally, there are cases when the appearance takes place some time
after death, but presents features unknown to the percipient.[55]
We have now briefly reviewed certain phenomena of sleep from a
standpoint somewhat differing from that which is commonly taken. We
have not (as is usual) fixed our attention primarily on the negative
characteristics of sleep, or the extent to which it lacks the capacities of
waking hours. On the contrary, we have regarded sleep as an independent

phase of personality, existing with as good a right as the waking phase, and
dowered with imperfectly expressed faculties of its own. In investigating
those faculties we have been in no wise deterred by the fact of the apparent
uselessness of some of them for our waking ends. Useless is a pre-
scientific, even an anti-scientific term, which has perhaps proved a greater
stumbling-block to research in psychology than in any other science. In
science the use of phenomena is to prove laws, and the more bizarre and
trivial the phenomena, the greater the chance of their directing us to some
law which has been overlooked till now. In reviewing the phenomena of
sleep, then, we found in the first place that it possesses a specific
recuperative energy which the commonly accepted data of physiology and
psychology cannot explain. We saw that in sleep there may be an increased
co-ordination or centralisation of muscular control, and also an increased
vividness of entencephalic perception, indicating a more intimate
appreciation of intra-peripheral changes than is manifest in waking life. In
accordance with this view, we found that the dreaming self may undergo
sensory and emotional experiences apparently more intense than those of
vigilance, and may produce thereby lasting effects upon the waking body
and mind. Similarly again, we saw that that specific impress on body and
mind which we term memory may in sleeping or hypnotic states be both
wider in range and fuller in content than the evocable memory of the
waking day. Nay, not memory only, but power of inference, of argument,
may be thus intensified, as is shown by the solution in sleep of problems
which have baffled waking effort.
All these are fragmentary indications,—useless for practical purposes if
you will,—of sleeping faculty exercised on the same order of things as
waking faculty, and with comparable or even superior power. But we were
bound to push our inquiry further still—we were bound to ask whether the
self of sleep showed any faculty of a quite different order from that by
which waking consciousness maintains the activity of man. We found that
this was so indeed; that there was evidence that the sleeping spirit was
susceptible of relations unfettered by spatial bonds; of telæsthetic
perception of distant scenes; of telepathic communication with distant
persons, or even with spirits of whom we can predicate neither distance nor
nearness, since they are released from the prison of the flesh.
The inference which all this evidence suggests is entirely in accordance
with the hypothesis on which my whole work is based.

I have assumed that man is an organism informed or possessed by a soul.
This view obviously involves the hypothesis that we are living a life in two
worlds at once; a planetary life in this material world, to which the
organism is intended to react; and also a cosmic life in that spiritual or
metetherial world, which is the native environment of the soul. From that
unseen world the energy of the organism needs to be perpetually
replenished. That replenishment we cannot understand: we may figure it to
ourselves as a protoplasmic process;—as some relation between
protoplasm, ether, and whatever is beyond ether, on which it is at present
useless to speculate.
Admitting, for the sake of argument, these vast assumptions, it will be
easy to draw the further inference that it may be needful that the soul's
attention should be frequently withdrawn from the business of earthly life,
so as to pursue with greater intensity what we may call its protoplasmic
task,—the maintenance of the fundamental, pervading connection between
the organism and the spiritual world. Nay, this profounder condition, as
responding to more primitive, more fundamental needs, will itself be more
primitive than the waking state. And this is so: sleep is the infant's dominant
phase: the pre-natal state resembles sleep rather than waking; and so does
the whole life-condition of our lowly ancestors. And as the sleeping state is
the more primitive, so also is it the more generalised, and the more plastic.
Out of this dreamy abeyance between two worlds, the needs of the material
world are constantly developing some form of alert activity, some faculty
which was potential only until search for food and the defence against
enemies compelled a closer heed to "the life of relation," lest the relation
should become only that of victim to devourer.
We shall thus have two phases of personality developing into separate
purposes and in separate directions from a parent stem. The waking
personality will develop external sense organs and will fit itself
progressively for the life of relation to the external world. It will endeavour
to attain an ever completer control over the resources of the personality, and
it will culminate in what we term genius when it has unified the subliminal
as far as possible with the supraliminal in its pursuit of deliberate waking
ends.
The sleeping personality will develop in ways less easy to foresee. What,
on any theory, will it aim at, beyond the familiar intensification of
recuperative power? We can only guess, on my theory, that its development

will show some increasing trace of the soul's less exclusive absorption in
the activity of the organism. The soul has withdrawn from the specialised
material surface of things (to use such poor metaphor as we can) into a
realm where the nature of the connection between matter and spirit—
whether through the intermediacy of the ether or otherwise—is more
profoundly discerned. That same withdrawal from the surface which, while
it diminishes power over complex muscular processes, increases power
over profound organic processes, may at the same time increase the soul's
power of operating in that spiritual world to which sleep has drawn it
nearer.
On this view of sleep, be it observed, there will be nothing to surprise us
in the possibility of increasing the proportion of the sleeping to the waking
phase of life by hypnotic suggestion. All we can say is that, while the soul
must insist on at least the minimum quantity of sleep needful to keep the
body alive, we can see no superior limit to the quantity of sleep which it
may choose to take,—the quantity of attention, that is, which it may choose
to give to the special operations of sleep as compared with those of waking
life.
At this point we must for the present pause. The suggested hypothesis will
indeed cover the actual facts as to sleep adduced in this chapter. But it
covers them by virtue of assumptions too vast to be accepted without
further confirmation. It must necessarily be our duty in later chapters to
trace the development of the sleeping personality in both the directions
indicated above;—in the direction of organic recuperation through the
hypnotic trance, and in the direction of the soul's independent operation
through that form of trance which leads to possession and to ecstasy. We
shall begin at once in the next chapter to trace out that great experimental
modification of sleep, from which, under the names of mesmerism or of
hypnotism, results of such conspicuous practical value have already been
won.

CHAPTER V

HYPNOTISM

εἱλετο ἑ ῥἁβδον, τὑ τ' ἁνδρὡν δμματα θελγει,
ὁν ἑθἑλει, τοὑς δ' αὑτε κἱ ὑπνὡοτας ἑγεἱρι.
—HOMER.
IN the last chapter we were led on to adopt a conception of sleep which,
whether or not it prove ultimately in any form acceptable by science, is at
any rate in deep congruity with the evidence brought forward in this work.
Our human life, in this view, exists and energises, at the present moment,
both in the material and in the spiritual world. Human personality, as it has
developed 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. The subliminal self, mainly directing the sleeping phase,
is able either to rejuvenate the organism by energy drawn in from the
spiritual world;—or, on the other hand, temporarily and partially to relax its
connection with that organism, in order to expatiate in the exercise of
supernormal powers;—telepathy, telesthæsia, ecstasy.
Such were the suggestions of the evidence as to dream and vision; such, I
may add, will be seen to be the suggestions of spontaneous somnambulism,
which has not yet fallen under our discussion. Yet claims so large as these
demand corroboration from observation and experiment along many
different lines of approach. Some such corroboration we have, in
anticipatory fashion, already acquired. Discussing in Chapter II. the various
forms of disintegration of personality, we had frequent glimpses of
beneficent subliminal powers. We saw the deepest stratum of the self
intervening from time to time with a therapeutic object, or we caught it in
the act of exercising, even if aimlessly or sporadically, some faculty beyond
supraliminal reach. And we observed, moreover, that the agency by which
these subliminal powers were invoked was generally the hypnotic trance.
Of the nature of that trance I then said nothing; it was manifest only that
here was some kind of induced or artificial somnambulism, which seemed

to systematise that beneficial control of the organism which spontaneous
sleep-waking states had exercised in a fitful way. It must plainly be our
business to understand ab initio these hypnotic phenomena; to push as far
as may be what seems like an experimental evolution of the sleeping phase
of personality.
Let us suppose, then, that we are standing at our present point, but with no
more knowledge of hypnotic phenomena than existed in the boyhood of
Mesmer. We shall know well enough what, as experimental psychologists,
we desire to do; but we shall have little notion of how to set about it. We
desire to summon at our will, and to subdue to our use, these rarely
emergent sleep-waking faculties. On their physical side, we desire to
develop their inhibition of pain and their reinforcement of energy; on their
intellectual side, their concentration of attention; on their emotional side,
their sense of freedom, expansion, joy. Above all, we desire to get hold of
those supernormal faculties—telepathy and telæsthesia—of which we have
caught fitful glimpses in somnambulism and in dream.
Yet to such hopes as these the so-called "experience of ages" (generally a
very short and scrappy induction!) will seem altogether to refuse any
practical outcome. History, indeed,—with the wonted vagueness of history,
—will offer us a long series of stories of the strange sanative suggestion or
influence of man on man;—beginning, say, with David and Saul, or with
David and Abishag, and ending with Valentine Greatrakes,—or with the
Stuarts' last touch for the King's evil. But in knowledge of how actually to
set about it, we should still be just on the level of the Seven Sages.[56]
And now let the reader note this lesson on the unexhausted possibilities of
human organisms and human life. Let him take his stand at one of the
modern centres of hypnotic practice,—in Professor Bernheim's hospital-
ward, or Dr. van Renterghem's clinique; let him see the hundreds of patients
thrown daily into hypnotic trance, in a few moments, and as a matter of
course; and let him then remember that this process, which now seems as
obvious and easy as giving a pill, was absolutely unknown not only to
Galen and to Celsus, but to Hunter and to Harvey; and when at last
discovered was commonly denounced as a fraudulent fiction, almost up to
the present day. Nay, if one chances to have watched as a boy some cure
effected in Dr. Elliotson's Mesmeric Hospital, before neglect and calumny
had closed that too early effort for human good;—if one has seen popular
indifference and professional prejudice check the new healing art for a

generation;—is not one likely to have imbibed a deep distrust of all a priori
negations in the matter of human faculty;—of all obiter dicta of eminent
men on subjects with which they do not happen to be acquainted? Would
not one, after such an experience, rather choose (with Darwin) "the fool's
experiment" than any immemorial ignorance which has stiffened into an
unreasoning incredulity?
Mesmer's experiment was almost a "fool's experiment," and Mesmer
himself was almost a charlatan. Yet Mesmer and his successors,—working
from many different points of view, and following many divergent theories,
—have opened an ever-widening way, and have brought us now to a
position where we can fairly hope, by experiments made no longer at
random, to reproduce and systematise most of those phenomena of
spontaneous somnambulism which once seemed to lie so tantalisingly
beyond our grasp.
That promise is great indeed; yet it is well to begin by considering
precisely how far it extends. We must not suppose that we shall at once be
subduing to our experiment a central, integrated, reasonable Self.
We must be content (at first at any rate) if we can affect the personality in
the same limited way as hysteria and somnambulism have affected it; but
yet can act deliberately and usefully where these have acted hurtfully and at
random. It is enough to hope that we may inhibit pain, as it is inhibited for
the hysteric; or concentrate attention, as it is concentrated for the
somnambulist; or change the tastes and passions, as these are changed in
alternating personalities; or (best of all) recover and fix something of that
supernormal faculty of which we have caught fugitive glimpses in vision
and dream. Our proof of the origination of any phenomenon in the deeper
strata of our being must lie in the intrinsic nature of the faculty exhibited;—
not in the wisdom of its actual direction. That must often depend on the
order given from above the threshold; just as the magic mill of the fable
continues magical, although, for lack of the proper formula to stop it, it be
still grinding out superfluous salt at the bottom of the sea.
This brief introduction will, I hope, show that hypnotism is no
disconnected or extraneous insertion into experimental psychology, but
rather a summary name for a group of necessary, though empirical and
isolated, attempts to bring under control that range of submerged faculty
which has already from time to time risen into our observation. The inquiry

has been mainly the work of a few distinguished men, who have each of
them pushed some useful ideas as far as they could, but whose work has not
been adequately supported by successors.
I should much doubt whether there have been a hundred men in all
countries together, at the ordinary level of professional intelligence, who
during the century since Mesmer have treated hypnotism as the serious
study of their lives. Some few of the men who have so treated it have been
men of great force and strong convictions; and it will be found that there
has consequently been a series of sudden developments of groups of
phenomena, differing much from each other, but corresponding with the
special beliefs and desires of the person who headed each movement in
turn. I will mention some of the chief examples, so as to show the sporadic
nature of the efforts made, and the great variety of the phenomena elicited.
The first name that must be mentioned is, of course, that of Mesmer
himself. He believed primarily in a sanative effluence, and his method
seems to have been a combination of passes, suggestion, and a supposed
"metallotherapy" or "magneto-therapy"—the celebrated baquet—which no
doubt was merely a form of suggestion. His results, though very imperfectly
described, seem to have been peculiar to himself. The crise which many of
his patients underwent sounds like a hysterical attack; but there can be no
doubt that rapid improvement in symptoms often followed it, or he would
not have made so great an impression on savants as well as on the
fashionable world of Paris. To Mesmer, then, we owe the first conception of
the therapeutic power of a sudden and profound nervous change. To
Mesmer, still more markedly, we owe the doctrine of a nervous influence or
effluence passing from man to man,—a doctrine which, though it must
assume a less exclusive importance than he assigned to it, cannot, in my
view, be altogether ignored or denied.
The leading figure among his immediate successors, the Marquis de
Puységur, seems from his writings[57] to have been one of the ablest and
most candid men who have practised mesmerism; and he was one of the
very few who have conducted experiments, other than therapeutic, on a
large scale. The somnambulic state may also be said to have been his
discovery; and he obtained clairvoyance or telæsthesia in so many
instances, and recorded them with so much of detail, that it is hard to
attribute all to mal-observation, or even to telepathy from persons present.
Other observers, as Bertrand, a physician of great promise, followed in the

same track, and this brief period was perhaps the most fertile in
disinterested experiments that our subject has yet known. Much was then
done in Germany also; and there, too, there is scattered testimony to
supernormal powers.[58]
Next came the era of Elliotson in England, and of Esdaile in his hospital at
Calcutta. Their method lay in mesmeric passes, Elliotson's object being
mostly the direct cure of maladies, Esdaile's a deep anæsthesia, under which
he performed hundreds of serious operations. His success in this direction
was absolutely unique;—was certainly (setting aside supernormal
phenomena) the most extraordinary performance in mesmeric history. Had
not his achievements been matters of official record, the apparent
impossibility of repeating them would probably by this time have been held
to have disproved them altogether.
The next great step which hypnotism made was actually regarded by
Elliotson and his group as a hostile demonstration. When Braid discovered
that hypnosis could be induced without passes, the mesmerists felt that their
theory of a sanative effluence was dangerously attacked. And this was true;
for that theory has in fact been thrown into the shade,—too completely so,
in my opinion,—first by the method used in Braid's earlier work of the
production of hypnotic phenomena by means of the upward and inward
squint, and secondly, by the much wider and more important discovery of
the efficacy of mere suggestion, set forth in his later writings. Braid's
hypnotic experience differed much from that of hypnotists before and after
him. His early method of the convergent squint produced results which no
one else has been able to produce; and the state which it induced appeared
in his view to arrest and dissipate even maladies of which neither hypnotist
nor patient had thought as capable of cure. But he afterwards abandoned
this method in favour of simple verbal suggestion, as he found that what
was required was merely to influence the ideas of his patients. He showed
further that all so-called phrenological phenomena and the supposed effects
of magnets, metals, etc., could be produced equally well by suggestion.[59]
He also laid stress on the subject's power both of resisting the commands of
the operator and of inducing hypnotic effects in himself without the aid of
an operator. To my mind the most important novelty brought out by Braid
was the possibility of self-hypnotisation by concentration of will. This inlet
into human faculty, in some ways the most important of all, has been as yet
but slackly followed. But it is along with Braid's group of ideas that I

should place those of an able but much inferior investigator, Dr.
Fahnestock, although it is not clear that the latter knew of Braid's work. His
book, Statuvolism, or Artificial Somnambulism (Chicago, 1871), has
received less attention than it merits;—partly perhaps from its barbarous
title, partly from the crudities with which it is encumbered, and partly from
the fact of its publication at what was at that date a town on the outskirts of
civilisation. Fahnestock seems to have obtained by self-suggestion with
healthy persons results in some ways surpassing anything since recorded.
There is no reason to doubt these results, except the fact that they have not
yet been repeated with equal success; and my present purpose is to show
how little importance can as yet be attached in the history of hypnotic
experiment to the mere absence thus far of successful repetition.
The next great stage was again strikingly different. It was mainly French;
the impulse was given largely by Professor Charles Richet, whose work has
proved singularly free from narrowness or misconception; but the
movement was developed in a special and a very unfortunate direction by
Charcot and his school. It is a remarkable fact that although Charcot was
perhaps the only man of eminence whose professional reputation has ever
been raised by his dealings with hypnotism, most of his work thereon is
now seen to have been mistaken and aberrant,—a mere following of a blind
alley, from which his disciples are now gradually returning. Charcot's
leading phenomena (as with several of his predecessors above mentioned)
were of a type which has seldom since been obtained. The once celebrated
"three stages" of the grand hypnotisme are hardly anywhere now to be seen.
But in this case the reason is not that other hypnotists could not obtain the
phenomena if they would; it is rather (as I have already indicated) that
experience has convinced them that the sequences and symptoms on which
Charcot laid stress were merely very elaborate products of the long-
continued, and, so to say, endemic suggestions of the Salpêtrière.
We come next to the movement which is now on the whole dominant, and
to which the greatest number of cures may at present be credited. The
school of Nancy—which originated with Liébeault, and which is now
gradually merging into a general consensus of hypnotic practice—threw
aside more and more decisively the supposed "somatic signs" of Charcot,—
the phenomena of neuro-muscular irritability and the like, which he
regarded as the requisite proof of hypnosis;—until Bernheim boldly
affirmed that hypnotic trance was no more than sleep, and that hypnotic

suggestion was at once the sole cause of hypnotic responsiveness and yet
was undifferentiated from mere ordinary advisory speech. This was
unfortunately too good to be true. Not one sleep in a million is really
hypnosis; not one suggestion in a million reaches or influences the
subliminal self. If Bernheim's theories, in their extreme form, were true,
there would by this time have been no sufferers left to heal.
What Bernheim has done is to cure a number of people without mesmeric
passes, and without any special predisposing belief on either side,—beyond
a trust in his own power. And this is a most valuable achievement,
especially as showing how much may be dispensed with in hypnotic
practice—to how simple elements it may be reduced.
"Hypnotic trance," says Bernheim, in effect, "is ordinary sleep; hypnotic
suggestion is ordinary command. You tell the patient to go to sleep, and he
goes to sleep; you tell him to get well, and he gets well immediately." Even
thus (one thinks) has one heard the conjuror explaining "how it's done,"—
with little resulting hope of emulating his brilliant performance. An
ordinary command does not enable an ordinary man to get rid of his
rheumatism, or to detest the previously too acceptable taste of brandy. In
suggestion, in short, there must needs be something more than a name; a
profound nervous change must needs be started by some powerful nervous
stimulus from without or from within. Before contenting ourselves with
Bernheim's formula, we must consider yet again what change we want to
effect, and whether hypnotists have actually used any form of stimulus
which was likely to effect it.
According to Bernheim we are all naturally suggestible, and what we want
to effect through suggestion is increased suggestibility. But let us get rid for
the moment of that oracular word. What it seems to mean here is mainly a
readier obedience of the organism to what we wish it to do. The sleep or
trance with which hypnotism is popularly identified is not essential to our
object, for the subliminal modifications are sometimes attained without any
trace of somnolence. Let us consider, then, whether any known nervous
stimuli, either massive or specialised, tend to induce—not mere sleep or
catalepsy—but that kind of ready modifiability,—of responsiveness both in
visible gesture and in invisible nutritive processes,—for the sake of which
hypnosis is in serious practice induced.

Now of the external stimuli which influence the whole nervous system the
most conspicuous are narcotic drugs. Opium, alcohol, chloroform, cannabis
indica, etc., affect the nerves in so many strange ways that one might hope
that they would be of use as hypnotic agents. And some observers have
found that slight chloroformisation rendered subjects more suggestible.
Janet has cited one case where suggestibility was developed during
recovery from delirium tremens. Other hypnotisers (as Bramwell) have
found chloroform fail to render patients hypnotisable; and alcohol is
generally regarded as a positive hindrance to hypnotic susceptibility. More
experiment with various narcotics is much needed; but thus far the
scantiness of proof that narcotics help towards hypnosis goes rather against
the view that hypnosis is a direct physiological sequence from any form of
external stimulus.
The apparent resemblance, indeed, between narcosis and hypnosis
diminishes on a closer analysis. A stage may occur both in narcotised and in
hypnotised subjects where there is incoherent, dream-like mentation; but in
the narcotised subject this is a step towards inhibition of the whole nervous
energy—the highest centres being paralysed first; whereas in hypnosis the
inhibition of supraliminal faculty seems often at least to be merely a
necessary preliminary to the liberation of fresh faculty which presently
manifests itself from a profounder region of the self.
Next take another group of massive effects produced on the nervous
system by external stimuli;—those forms, namely, of trance and cataplexy
which are due to sudden shock. With human beings this phenomenon varies
from actual death from failure of heart-action, or paralysis, or stupor
attonitus (a recognised form of insanity), any of which may result from a
mere alarming sight or unwelcome announcement, down to the cataleptic
immobility of a Salpêtrière patient, when she hears a sudden stroke on the
gong.
Similar phenomena in certain animals, as frogs, beetles, etc., are well
known. It is doubtful, however, whether any of these sudden disablements
should be classed as true hypnoses. It has not, I think, been shown that in
any case they have induced any real responsiveness to control, or power of
obeying suggestion; unless it be (as in some Salpêtrière cases) a form of
suggestion so obvious and habitual that the obedience thereto may be called
part of the actual cataplexy itself. Thus the "wax-like flexibility" of the
cataleptic, whose arms remain in the position where you place them, must

not be regarded as a readier obedience to control, but rather as a state which
involves not a more but a less alert and capable responsiveness of the
organism to either external or internal stimuli.
So with regard to animals—crocodiles, frogs, and the like. I hold
theoretically that animals are probably hypnotisable and suggestible; and
the records of Rarey's horse-taming, etc., seem to point in that direction.[60]
But in the commoner experiments with frogs, where mere passivity is
produced, the resemblance seems to extend only to the lethargic stage in
human beings,[61] and what relation that lethargy bears to suggestibility is
not, I think, really known; although I shall later on suggest some
explanation on psychological grounds.
It seems plain, at any rate, that it must be from stimuli applied to men and
not to animals, and from stimuli of a special and localised rather than of a
massive kind, that we shall have to learn whatever can be learnt as to the
genesis of the true hypnotic control.
Now there exists a way of inducing hypnosis in some hysterical persons
which seems intermediate between massive and localised stimulations. It is
indeed a local stimulation; but there seems no reason beyond some deep-
seated caprice of the organism why the special tract which is thus sensitive
should have become developed in that direction.
I speak of the induction of trance in certain subjects by pressure upon so-
called hypnogenous zones. These zones form a curious development of
hysterical cliniques. Their starting-point is the well-known phenomenon of
patches of anæsthesia found upon hysterical subjects—the "witch-marks" of
our ancestors.
So far as we at present know, the situation of these "marks" is altogether
capricious. It does not apparently depend, that is to say, upon any central
lesion, in the same way as do the "referred pains," familiar in deep-seated
organic complaints, which manifest themselves by superficial patches of
tenderness, explicable by the distribution of nerve-trunks. The anæsthetic
patches are an example of what I have called the irrational self-suggestions
of the hypnotic stratum;—determined by dream-like fancies rather than
necessitated by purely physiological antecedents.
Quite in accordance with this view, we find that under favourable
conditions—especially in a hospital of hysterics—these anomalous patches
or zones develop and specialise themselves in various ways. Under Dr.

Pitres at Bordeaux (for example), we have zones hystérogènes, zones
hypnogènes, zones hypnofrénatrices, etc.; that is to say, he finds that
pressure on certain spots in certain subjects will bring on or will check
hysterical accesses, or accesses of what is ranked as hypnotic sleep. There is
no doubt that this sleep does in certain subjects follow instantly upon the
pressure of certain spots,—constant for each subject, but different for one
subject and for another;—and this without any conscious co-operation, or
even foreknowledge, on the patient's part. Stated thus nakedly, this seems
the strongest possible instance of the induction of hypnosis by localised
stimulus. The reader, however, will at once understand that in my view
there is here no simple physiological sequence of cause and effect. I must
regard the local pressure as a mere signal—an appeal to the pre-formed
capacities of lawlessly acting centres in the hypnotic stratum. A scrap of the
self has decided, in dreamlike fashion, that pressure on a certain point of the
body's surface shall produce sleep;—just as it has decided that pressure on
that same point or on some other point shall not produce pain. Self-
suggestion, and no mere physiological nexus, is responsible for the sleep or
the hysterical access which follows the touch. The anæsthetic patches are
here a direct, but a capriciously chosen avenue to the subliminal being, and
the same random self-suggestiveness which is responsible for frequent
determinations that hysterical subjects shall not be hypnotised has in this
case decided that they shall be hypnotised, if you go about it in exactly the
right way.
Next in order among forms of localised stimulus used for inducing
hypnosis may be placed monotonous stimulation,—to whatever part of the
body it be applied. It was at one time the fashion to attribute almost all
hypnotic phenomena to this cause, and Edmund Gurney and I endeavoured
to point out the exaggeration.[62] Of this presently; but first let us consider
the few cases where the monotonous stimulation has undoubtedly been of a
kind to affect the organism strongly. The late Dr. Auguste Voisin, of Paris,
was perhaps more markedly successful than any physician in producing
hypnosis in extreme cases;—in maniacal persons especially, whose
attention it seemed impossible to fix. He often accomplished this by holding
their eyes open with the blepharostat, and compelling them to gaze,
sometimes for hours together, at a brilliant electric light. Exhaustion
produces tranquillity and an almost comatose sleep—in which the physician
has often managed to give suggestions of great value. This seems

practically the only class of cases where a directly physiological antecedent
for the sleep can be proved; and even here the provable effect is rather the
exhaustion of morbid excitability than any direct induction of suggestibility.
This dazzling process is generally accompanied with vigorous verbal
suggestion; and it is, of course, quite possible that the patients might have
been thrown into hypnosis by that suggestion alone, had their minds been
capable at first of sufficient attention to receive it.
Braid's upward and inward squint has an effect of the same deadening
kind as the long gazing at a light, and helps in controlling wandering
attention; but Braid himself in later years (as mentioned above) attributed
his hypnotic successes wholly to suggestion.
From monotonous excitations which, whatever their part in inducing
hypnosis, are, at any rate, such as can sensibly affect the organism, I come
down to the trivial monotonies of watch-tickings, "passes," etc., which are
still by a certain school regarded as capable of producing a profound change
in the nervous condition of the person before whose face the hypnotiser's
hands are slowly waved for ten or twenty minutes. I regard this as a much
exaggerated view. The clock's ticking, for instance, if it is marked at all, is
at least as likely to irritate as to soothe; and the constant experience of life
shows that continued monotonous stimuli, say the throbbing of the screw at
sea, soon escape notice and produce no hypnotic effect at all. It is true,
indeed, that monotonous rocking sends some babies to sleep; but other
babies are merely irritated by the process, and such soporific effect as
rocking may possess is probably an effect on spinal centres or on the
semicircular canals. It depends less on mere monotony than on massive
movement of the whole organism.
I think, then, that there is no real ground for supposing that the trivial
degree of monotonous stimulation produced by passes often repeated can
induce in any ordinary physiological manner that "profound nervous
change" which is recognised as the prerequisite condition of any hypnotic
results. I think that passes are effectual generally as mere suggestions, and
must primâ facie be regarded in that light, as they are, in fact, regarded by
many experienced hypnotisers (as Milne Bramwell) who have employed
them with good effect. Afterwards, when reason is given for believing in a
telepathic influence or impact occasionally transmitted from the operator to
the subject at a distance, we shall consider whether passes may represent

some other form of the same influence, operating in close physical
contiguity.
First, however, let us consider the point which we have now reached. We
have successively dismissed various supposed modes of physiologically
inducing hypnotic trance. We stand at present in the position of the Nancy
school;—we have found nothing but suggestion which really induces the
phenomena.
But on the other hand we cannot possibly regard the word suggestion as
any real answer to the important question how the hypnotic responsiveness
is induced, on what conditions it depends.[63]
It must be remembered that many of the results which follow upon
suggestion are of a type which no amount of willingness to follow the
suggestion could induce, since they lie quite outside the voluntary realm.
However disposed a man may be to believe me, however anxious to please
me, one does not see how that should enable him, for instance, to govern
the morbidly-secreting cells in an eruption of erysipelas. He already
fruitlessly wishes them to stop their inflammation; the mere fact of my
expressing the same wish can hardly alter his cellular tissue.
Here, then, we come to an important conclusion which cannot well be
denied, yet is seldom looked fully in the face. Suggestion from without
must for the most part resolve itself into suggestion from within. Unless
there be some telepathic or other supernormal influence at work between
hypnotiser and patient (which I shall presently show ground for believing to
be sometimes, though not often, the case), the hypnotiser can plainly do
nothing by his word of command beyond starting a train of thought which
the patient has in most cases started many times for himself with no result;
the difference being that now at last the patient starts it again, and it has a
result. But why it thus succeeds on this particular occasion, we simply do
not know. We cannot predict when the result will occur; still less can we
bring it about at pleasure.
Nay, we do not even know whether it might not be possible to dispense
altogether with suggestion from outside in most of the cases now treated in
this way, and merely to teach the patient to make the suggestions for
himself. If there be no "mesmeric effluence" passing from hypnotiser to
patient, the hypnotiser seems little more than a mere objet de luxe;—a
personage provided simply to impress the imagination, who must needs

become even absurdly useless so soon as it is understood that he has no
other function or power.
Self-suggestion, whatever this may really mean, is thus in most cases,
whether avowedly or not, at the bottom of the effect produced. It has
already been used most successfully, and it will probably become much
commoner than it now is;—or, I should rather say (since every one no doubt
suggests to himself when he is in pain that he would like the pain to cease),
I anticipate that self-suggestion, by being in some way better directed, will
become more effective, and that the average of voluntary power over the
organism will rise to a far higher level than it at present reaches. I believe
that this is taking place even now; and that certain schemes of self-
suggestion, so to call them, are coming into vogue, where patients in large
masses are supplied with effective conceptions, which they thus impress
repeatedly upon themselves without the need of a hypnotiser's attendance
on each occasion. The "Miracles of Lourdes" and the cures effected by
"Christian Science" fall, in my view, under this category. We have here
suggestions given to a quantity of more or less suitable people en masse,
much as a platform hypnotiser gives suggestions to a mixed audience, some
of whom may then be affected without individual attention from himself.
The suggestion of the curative power of the Lourdes water, for instance, is
thus thrown out, partly in books, partly by oral addresses; and a certain
percentage of persons succeed in so persuading themselves of that curative
efficacy that when they bathe in the water they are actually cured.
These schemes of self-suggestion, as I have termed them, constitute one of
the most interesting parts of my subject, but space forbids that I should
enter into a discussion of them here. It is sufficient to point out that in order
to make self-suggestion operative, no strong belief or enthusiasm, such as
those schemes imply, is really necessary. No recorded cases of self-
suggestion, I think, are more instructive than those published by Dr. Hugh
Wingfield in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. v. p. 279. (The paper was printed
anonymously.) Dr. Wingfield was a Demonstrator in Physiology in the
University of Cambridge, and his subjects were mainly candidates for the
Natural Sciences Tripos. In these cases there was no excitement of any
kind, and no previous belief. The phenomena occurred incidentally during a
series of experiments on other points, and were a surprise to every one
concerned. The results achieved were partly automatic writing and partly
phenomena of neuro-muscular excitability;—stiffening of the arms, and so

forth. "It seems probable," says Dr. Wingfield, "that all phenomena capable
of being produced by the suggestion of the hypnotiser can also be produced
by self-suggestion in a self-suggestive subject."
Experiments like these—confirming with modern care the conclusions
reached by Fahnestock and others at various points in hypnotic history—
seem to me to open a new inlet into human faculty, as surprising in its way
as those first wild experiments of Mesmer himself. Who would have
supposed that a healthy undergraduate could "by an effort of mind" throw
his whole body into a state of cataleptic rigidity, so that he could rest with
his heels on one chair and his head on another? or that other healthy young
men could "close their own eyes so that they were unable to open them,"
and the like? The trivial character of these laboratory experiments makes
them physiologically the more remarkable. There is the very minimum of
predisposing conditions, of excited expectation, or of external motive
prompting to extraordinary effort. And the results are not subjective merely
—relief of pain and so on—but are definite neuro-muscular changes,
capable (as in the case of the head and heels on separate chairs) of
unmistakable test.
Yet, important though these and similar experiments in self-suggestion
may be, they do not solve our problem as to the ultimate origin and
distribution of the faculty thus displayed. We know no better with self-
suggestion than with suggestion from outside why it is that one man
succeeds where others fail, or why a man who succeeds once fails in his
next attempt. Within the ordinary range of physiological explanations
nothing (I repeat) has as yet been discovered which can guide us to the true
nature or exciting causes of this characteristic responsiveness of hypnosis.
If we are to find any light, it must be in some direction which has as yet
been little explored.
The hint which I have to offer here involves, I hope, something more than
a mere change of appellation. I define suggestion as "successful appeal to
the subliminal self";—not necessarily to that self in its most central, most
unitary aspect; but to some one at least of those strata of subliminal faculty
which I have in an earlier chapter described. I do not indeed pretend that my
explanation can enable us to reduce hypnotic success to a certainty. I cannot
say why the process should be so irregular and capricious; but I can show
that this puzzle is part and parcel of a wider mystery;—of the obscure
relationships and interdependencies of the supraliminal and the subliminal

self. In split personalities, in genius, in dreams, in sensory and motor
automatisms, we find the same fitfulness, the same apparent caprice.
Leaving perforce this problem for the present unsolved, let us consider the
various ways in which this conception of subliminal operation may throw
light on the actual phenomena of hypnotism;—phenomena at present
scattered in bewildering confusion.
The word hypnotism itself implies that some kind of sleep or trance is
regarded as its leading characteristic. And although so-called hypnotic
suggestions do often take effect in the waking state,[64] our usual test of the
hypnotiser's success lies in the slumber—light or deep—into which his
subject is thrown. It is, indeed, a slumber which admits at times of strange
wakings and activities; but it is also manifestly profounder than the sleep
which we habitually enjoy.
If sleep, then, be the phase of personality specially consecrated to
subliminal operation, it follows that any successful appeal to the subliminal
self will be likely to induce some form of sleep. And further, if that form of
sleep be in fact not an inevitable result of physiological needs, but a
response to a psychological appeal, it seems not unlikely that we should be
able to communicate with it without interrupting it;—and should thus be
able to guide or supplement subliminal operations, just as in genius the
subliminal self guided or supplemented supraliminal operations.
Now I hold that in all the varied trances, lethargies, sleep-waking states, to
which hypnotism introduces us, we see the subliminal self coming to the
surface in ways already familiar, and displacing just so much of the
supraliminal as may from time to time be needful for the performance of its
own work. That work, I say, will be of a character which we know already;
the difference is that what we have seen done spontaneously we now see
done in response to our appeal.
Armed with this simplifying conception,—simplifying in spite of its frank
admission of an underlying mystery,—we shall find no added difficulty in
several points which have been the subjects of eager controversy. The
sequence of hypnotic phenomena, the question of the stages of hypnotism,
is one of these. I have already briefly described how Charcot propounded
his three stages—lethargy, catalepsy, somnambulism—as though they
formed the inevitable development of a physiological law;—and how
completely this claim has now had to be withdrawn. Other schemes have

been drawn out, by Liébeault, etc., but none of them seems to do more than
reflect the experience of some one hypnotist's practice. The simplest
arrangement is that of Edmund Gurney, who spoke only of an "alert stage"
and a "deep stage" of hypnosis; and even here we cannot say that either
stage invariably precedes the other. The alert stage, which often came first
with Gurney's subjects, comes last in Charcot's scheme; and it is hardly safe
to say more than that hypnotism is apt to show a series of changes from
sleep-waking to lethargy and back again, and that the advanced stages show
more of subliminal faculty than the earlier ones. There is much significance
in an experiment of Dr. Jules Janet, who, by continued "passes," carried on
Wittman, Charcot's leading subject, beyond her usual somnambulic state
into a new lethargic state, and out again from thence into a new sleep-
waking state markedly superior to the old.
Gurney held the view that the main distinction of kind between his "alert"
and his "deep" stage of hypnosis was to be found in the domain of memory,
while memory also afforded the means for distinguishing the hypnotic state
as a whole from the normal one. As a general rule (though with numerous
exceptions), the events of ordinary life are remembered in the trance, while
the trance events are forgotten on waking, but tend to recur to the memory
on rehypnotisation. But the most interesting part of his observations
consisted in showing alternations of memory in the alert and deep stages of
the trance itself;—the ideas impressed in the one sort of state being almost
always forgotten in the other, and as invariably again remembered when the
former state recurs. (Proceedings S.P.R. vol. ii., pp. 61 et seq. [523 A].) On
experimenting further, he met with a stage in which there was a distinct
third train of memory, independent of the others;—and this, of course,
suggests a further doubt as to there being any fixed number of stages in the
trance. The later experiments of Mrs. Sidgwick [523 B] on the same
subject, in which eight or nine distinct trains of memory were found—each
recurring when the corresponding stage of depth of the trance was reached
—seem to show conclusively that the number, may vary almost indefinitely.
We have already seen that in cases of alternating personalities the number
of personalities similarly varies, and the student who now follows or repeats
Gurney's experiments, with the increased knowledge of split personalities
which recent years have brought, cannot fail to be struck with the analogies
between Gurney's artificial light and deep states,—with their separate
chains of memory,—and those morbid alternating personalities, with their

complex mnemonic cleavages and lacunæ, with which we dealt in Chapter
II. The hypnotic stages are in fact secondary or alternating personalities of
very shallow type, but for that very reason all the better adapted for
teaching us from what kinds of subliminal disaggregation the more serious
splits in personality take their rise.
And beneath and between these awakenings into limited, partial alertness
lies that profound hypnotic trance which one can best describe as a
scientific or purposive rearrangement of the elements of sleep;—a
rearrangement in which what is helpful is intensified, what is merely
hindering or isolating is removed or reduced. A man's ordinary sleep is at
once unstable and irresponsive. You can wake him with a pin-prick, but if
you talk to him he will not hear or answer you, until you rouse him with the
mere noise. That is sleep as the needs of our timorous ancestors determined
that it should be.
Hypnotic sleep, on the contrary, is at once stable and responsive; strong in
its resistance to such stimuli as it chooses to ignore; ready in its
accessibility to such appeals as it chooses to answer.
Prick or pinch the hypnotised subject, and although some stratum of his
personality may be aware, in some fashion, of your act, the sleep will
generally remain unbroken. But if you speak to him,—or even speak before
him,—then, however profound his apparent lethargy, there is something in
him which will hear.[65]
All this is true even of earlier stages of trance. Deeper still lies the stage of
highest interest;—that sleep-waking in which the subliminal self is at last
set free,—is at last able not only to receive but to respond: when it begins to
tell us the secrets of the sleeping phase of personality, beginning with
directions as to the conduct of the trance or of the cure, and going on to who
knows what insight into who knows what world afar?
Without, then, entering into more detail as to the varying forms which
hypnosis at different stages may assume, I have here traced its central
characteristic;—the development, namely, of the sleeping phase of
personality in such fashion as to allow of some supraliminal guidance of the
subliminal self.
We have here a definition of much wider purview than any which has
been habitually applied to the process of hypnotisation or to the state of
hypnosis. To test its validity, to explain its scope, we need a survey of

hypnotic results much wider in range than any enumeration of the kind at
present usual in text-books. Regarding hypnotic achievements mainly in
their mental aspects, I must seek for some broad principle of classification
which on the one hand may not be so exclusively moral as to be
physiologically untranslatable,—like the distinction between vice and
virtue;—or on the other hand so exclusively physiological as to be morally
untranslatable,—like the distinction between cerebral anæmia and
hyperæmia.
Perhaps the broadest contrast which is expressible in both moral and
physiological terms is the contrast between check and stimulus,—between
inhibition and dynamogeny. Not, indeed, that such terms as check and
stimulus can be pressed in detail. The central power,—the ruling agency
within the man which gives the command,—is no doubt the same in both
cases. But the common contrast between negative and positive exhortations,
—"this you shall not do," "this you shall do,"—will help to give clearness
to our review of the influences of hypnotism in its bearings on intelligence
and character,—its psychological efficacy.
The most rudimentary form of restraint or inhibition lies in our effort to
preserve the infant or young child from acquiring what we call "bad tricks."
These morbid affections of motor centres, trifling in their inception, will
sometimes grow until they are incurable by any régime or medicament;—
nay, till an action so insignificant as sucking the thumb may work the ruin
of a life.
In no direction, perhaps, do the results of suggestion appear more
inexplicable than here. Nowhere have we a more conspicuous touching of a
spring;—a more complete achievement, almost in a single moment, of the
deliverance which years of painful effort have failed to effect.[66]
These cases stand midway between ordinary therapeutics and moral
suasion. No one can here doubt the importance of finding the shortest and
swiftest path to cure. Nor is there any reason to think that cures thus
obtained are less complete or permanent than if they had been achieved by
gradual moral effort. These facts should be borne in mind throughout the
whole series of the higher hypnotic effects, and should serve to dispel any
anxiety as to the possible loss of moral training when cure is thus magically
swift. Each of these effects consists, as we must suppose, in the
modification of some group of nervous centres; and, so far as we can tell,

that is just the same result which moral effort made above the conscious
threshold more slowly and painfully attains. This difference, in fact, is like
the difference between results achieved by diligence and results achieved by
genius. Something valuable in the way of training,—some exercise in
patience and resolve,—no doubt may be missed by the man who is
"suggested" into sobriety;—in the same way as it was missed by the
schoolboy Gauss,—writing down the answers to problems as soon as set,
instead of spending on them a diligent hour. But moral progress is in its
essence as limitless as mathematical; and the man who is thus carried over
rudimentary struggles may still find plenty of moral effort in life to train his
character and tax his resolution.
Among these morbid tricks kleptomania has an interest of its own, on
account of the frequent doubt whether it is not put forward as a mere excuse
for pilfering. It may thus happen that the cure is the best proof of the
existence of the disease; and certain cures indicate that the impulse has
veritably involved a morbid excitability of motor centres, acted on by
special stimuli,—an idée fixe with an immediate outcome in act.[67]
Many words and acts of violence fall under the same category, in cases
where the impulse to swear or to strike has acquired the unreasoning
automatic promptness of a tic, and yet may be at once inhibited by
suggestion. Many undesirable impulses in the realm of sex are also capable
of being thus corrected or removed.
The stimulants and narcotics, to which our review next leads us, form a
standing menace to human virtue. By some strange accident of our
development, the impulse of our organisms towards certain drugs—alcohol,
opium, and the like—is strong enough to overpower, in a large proportion
of mankind, not only the late-acquired altruistic impulses, but even the
primary impulses of self-regard and self-preservation. We are brought back,
one may almost say, to the "chimiotaxy" of the lowest organisms, which
arrange themselves inevitably in specific relation to oxygen, malic acid, or
whatever the stimulus may be. We thus experience in ourselves a strange
conflict between moral responsibility and molecular affinities;—the central
will overborne by dumb unnumbered elements of our being. With this
condition of things hypnotic suggestion deals often in a curious way. The
suggestion is not generally felt as a strengthening of the central will. It
resembles rather a molecular redisposition; it leaves the patient indifferent
to the stimulus, or even disgusted with it. The man for whom alcohol has

combined the extremes of delight and terror now lives as though in a world
in which alcohol did not exist at all.[68]
Even for the slave of morphia the same sudden freedom is sometimes
achieved. It has been said of victims to morphia-injection that a cure means
death;—so often has suicide followed on the distress caused by giving up
the drug. But in certain cases cured by suggestion it seems that no craving
whatsoever has persisted after the sudden disuse of the drug. There is
something here which is in one sense profounder than moral reform. There
is something which suggests a spirit within us less injured than we might
have feared by the body's degradation. The morphinomaniac character—
the lowest type of subjection to a ruling vice—disappears from the
personality in proportion as the drug is eliminated from the system. The
shrinking outcast turns at once into the respectable man.[69]
But apart from troubles consequent on any intelligible instinct, any
discoverable stimulus of pleasure, there are a multitude of impulses, fears,
imaginations, one or more of which may take possession of persons not
otherwise apparently unhealthy or hysterical, sometimes to an extent so
distressing as to impel to suicide.
Some of these "phobies" have been often described of late years,—as, for
instance, agoraphobia, which makes a man dread to cross an open space;
and its converse claustrophobia, which makes him shrink from sitting in a
room with closed doors; or the still more distressing mysophobia, which
makes him constantly uneasy lest he should have become dirty or defiled.
All these disorders involve a kind of displacement or cramp of the
attention; and for all of them, one may broadly say, hypnotic suggestion is
the best and often the only cure. Suggestion seems to stimulate antagonistic
centres; to open clogged channels; to produce, in short, however we
imagine the process, a rapid disappearance of the insistent notion.
I have spoken of this effect as though it were mainly to be valued
intellectually, as a readjustment of the dislocated attention. But I must note
also that the moral results may be as important here as in the cases of
inhibition of dipsomania and the like, already mentioned. These morbid
fears which suggestion relieves may be ruinously degrading to a man's
character. The ingredients of antipathy, of jealousy, which they sometimes
contain, may make him dangerous to his fellows as well as loathsome to

himself. One or two cases of the cure of morbid jealousy are to my mind
among the best records which hypnotism has to show.[70]
But this is not all. The treasure of memory is mixed with rubbish; the
caution which experience has taught has often been taught too well;
philosophic calm has often frozen into apathy. Plato would have the old
men in his republic plied well with wine on festal days, that their tongues
might be unloosed to communicate their wisdom without reserve.
"Accumulated experience," it has been said with much truth in more
modern language,[71] "hampers action, disturbs the logical reaction of the
individual to his environment. The want of control which marks the
decadence of mental power is [sometimes] itself undue control, a
preponderance of the secondary over the primary influences."
Now the removal of shyness, or mauvaise honte, which hypnotic
suggestion can effect, is in fact a purgation of memory,—inhibiting the
recollection of previous failures, and setting free whatever group of
aptitudes is for the moment required. Thus, for the boy called on to make an
oration in a platform exhibition, hypnotisation sets free the primary instinct
of garrulity without the restraining fear of ridicule. For the musical
executant, on the other hand, a similar suggestion will set free the
secondary instinct which the fingers have acquired, without the interference
of the learner's puzzled, hesitating thoughts.
I may remark here (following Gurney and Bramwell) how misleading a
term is mono-ideism for almost any hypnotic state. There is a selection of
ideas to which the hypnotic subject will attend, and there is a concentration
upon the idea thus selected; but those ideas themselves may be both
complex and constantly shifting, and indeed this is just one of the ways in
which the hypnotic trance differs from the somnambulic—in which it may
happen that only a relatively small group of brain-centres are awake enough
to act. The somnambulic servant-girl, for instance, may persist in laying the
tea-table, whatever you say to her, and this may fairly be called mono-
ideism; but the hypnotic subject (as Bramwell has justly insisted) can be
made to obey simultaneously a greater number of separate commands than
he could possibly attend to in waking life.
From these inhibitions of memory,—of attention as directed to the
experiences of the past,—we pass on to attention as directed to the
experiences of the present. And here we are reaching a central point; we are

affecting the macula lutea (as it has been well called) of the mental field.
Many of the most important of hypnotic results will be best described as
modifications of attention.
Any modification of attention is of course likely to be at once a check and
a stimulus;—a check to certain thoughts and emotions, a stimulus to others.
And in many cases it will be the dynamogenic aspect of the change—the
new vigour supplied in needed directions—which will be for us of greatest
interest. Yet from the inhibitive side also we have already had important
achievements to record. All these arrests and destructions of idées fixes, of
which so much has been said, were powerful modifications of attention,
although the limited field which they covered made it simpler to introduce
them under a separate heading.
And even now it may not be without surprise that the reader finds
described under the heading of inhibition of attention a phenomenon so
considerable and so apparently independent as hypnotic suppression of
pain. This induced analgesia has from the first been one of the main
triumphs of mesmerism or hypnotism. All have heard that mesmerism will
stop headaches;—that you can have a tooth out "under mesmerism" without
feeling it. The rivalry between mesmerism and ether, as anæsthetic agents in
capital operations, was a conspicuous fact in the medical history of early
Victorian times. But the ordinary talk, at any rate of that day, seemed to
assume that if mesmerism produced an effect at all it was an effect
resembling that produced by narcotics—a modification of the intimate
structure of the nerve or of the brain which rendered them for the time
incapable of transmitting or of feeling painful sensations. The state of a
man's nervous system, in fact, when he is poisoned by chloroform, or
stunned by a blow, or almost frozen to death, or nearly drowned, etc., is
such that a great part of it is no longer fit for its usual work,—is no longer
capable of those prolongations of neurons, or whatever they be, which
constitute its specific nervous activity. We thus get rid of pain by getting rid
for the time of a great deal of other nervous action as well; and we have to
take care lest by pushing the experiment too far we get rid of life into the
bargain. But on the other hand, a man's nervous system, when hypnotic
suggestion has rendered him incapable of pain, is quite as active and
vigorous as ever,—quite as capable of transmitting and feeling pain,—
although capable also of inhibiting it altogether. In a word, the hypnotic
subject is above instead of below pain.

To understand this apparent paradox we must remind ourselves that pain
probably originated as a warning of danger,—a warning which, while useful
to active creatures with miscellaneous risks, has become only a mixed
advantage to beings of more advanced intelligence and sensitivity. There
are many occasions when, knowing it to be useless, we wish to shut off
pain, to rise as definitely above it as our earliest ancestors were below it, or
as the drunken or narcotised man is below it. This is just what hypnotic
suggestion enables us to do.
Hypnotism attacks the real origo mali;—not, indeed, the pressure on the
tooth-nerve, which can only be removed by extraction, but the
representative power of the central sensorium which converts that pressure
for us into pain. It diverts attention from the pain, as the excitement of
battle might do; but diverts it without any competing excitement whatever.
To this topic of influence on attention we shall have to recur again and
again. For the present it may suffice if I refer the reader to a few cases—
chosen from among some thousands where hypnotic practice has removed
or obviated the distress or anguish till now unmistakably associated with
various bodily incidents—from the extraction of a tooth to the great pain
and peril of childbirth.[72]
This suppression of pain has naturally been treated from the therapeutic
point of view, as an end in itself; and neither physician nor patient has been
inclined to inquire exactly what has occurred;—what physiological or
psychological condition has underlain this great subjective relief. Yet in the
eye of experimental psychology the matter is far from a simple one. We are
bound to ask what has been altered. Has there been a total ablation, or some
mere translation of pain? What objective change on the bodily side has
occurred in nerve or tissue? and, on the mental side, how far does the
change in consciousness extend? How deep does it go? Does any subliminal
knowledge of the pain persist?
The very imperfect answers which can at present be given to these
questions may, at any rate, suggest directions for further inquiry.
(1) In the first place, it seems clear that when pain is inhibited in any but
the most simple cases, a certain group of changes is produced whose nexus
is psychological rather than physiological. That is to say, one suggestion
seems to relieve at once all the symptoms which form one idea of pain or
distress in the patient's mind; while another suggestion is often needed to

remove some remaining symptom, which the patient regards as a different
trouble altogether. The suggestion thus differs both from a specific remedy,
which might relieve a specific symptom, and from a general narcotisation,
which would relieve all symptoms equally. In making suggestions,
moreover, the hypnotiser finds that he has to consider and meet the patient's
own subjective feelings, describing the intended relief as the patient wishes
it to be described, and not attempting technical language which the patient
could not follow. In a word, it is plain that in this class, as in other classes
of suggestion, we are addressing ourselves to a mind, an intelligence, which
can of itself select and combine, and not merely to a tissue or a gland
responsive in a merely automatic way.
(2) It will not then surprise us if,—pain being thus treated as a
psychological entity,—there shall prove to be a certain psychological
complexity in the response to analgesic suggestion.
By this I mean that there are occasional indications that some memory of
the pain, say, of an operation has persisted in some stratum of the
personality;—thus apparently indicating that there was somewhere an
actual consciousness of the pain when the operation was performed.[73] We
find accounts of the revival of pain in dreams after operations performed
under chloroform.[74]
(3) Such experiences, if more frequent, might tempt us to suppose that the
pain is not wholly abrogated, but merely translated to some stratum of
consciousness whose experiences do not enter into our habitual chain of
memories. Yet we possess (strangely enough) what seems direct evidence
that the profoundest organic substratum of our being is by suggestion
wholly freed from pain. It had long been observed that recoveries from
operations performed in hypnotic trance were unusually benign;—there
being less tendency to inflammation than when the patient had felt the
knife. The same observation—perhaps in a less marked degree—has since
been made as to operations under chemical anæsthesia. The shock to the
system, and the irritation to the special parts affected, are greatly
diminished by chloroform. And more recently Professor Delbœuf, by an
experiment of great delicacy on two symmetrical wounds, of which one was
rendered painless by suggestion, has distinctly demonstrated that pain tends
to induce and keep up inflammation.[75]

Thus it seems that pain is abrogated at once on the highest and on the
lowest level of consciousness; yet possibly in some cases (though not
usually[76]) persists obscurely in some stratum of our personality into which
we gain only occasional and indirect glimpses. And if indeed this be so, it
need in no way surprise us. We need to remember at every point that we
have no reason whatever to suppose that we are cognisant of all the trains of
consciousness, or chains of memory, which are weaving themselves within
us. I shall never attain on earth—perhaps I never shall in any world attain—
to any complete conspectus of the variously interwoven streams of vitality
which are, in fact, obscurely present in my conception of myself.
It is to hypnotism in the first place that we may look for an increased
power of analysis of these intercurrent streams, these irregularly super-
posed strata of our psychical being. In the meantime, this power of
inhibiting almost any fraction of our habitual consciousness at pleasure
gives for the first time to the ordinary man—if only he be a suggestible
subject—a power of concentration, of choice in the exercise of faculty, such
as up till now only the most powerful spirits—a Newton or an Archimedes
—have been able to exert.
The man who sits down in his study to write or read,—in perfect safety
and intent on his work,—continues nevertheless to be involuntarily and
inevitably armed with all that alertness to external sights and sounds, and all
that sensibility to pain, which protected his lowly ancestors at different
stages of even pre-human development. It is much as though he were forced
to carry about with him all the external defences which his forefathers have
invented for their defence;—to sit at his writing-table clad in chain-mail and
a respirator, and grasping an umbrella and a boomerang. Let him learn, if he
can, inwardly as well as outwardly, to get rid of all that, to keep at his
command only the half of his faculties which for his purpose is worth more
than the whole. Dissociation and choice;—dissociation between elements
which have always hitherto seemed inextricably knit;—choice between
faculties which till now we have had to use all together or not at all;—such
is the promise, such is the incipient performance of hypnotic plasticity in its
aspect of inhibitive suggestion.
I come now to the division of hypnotic achievement with which I next
proposed to deal, namely, the dynamogenic results of hypnotic suggestion.
These I shall arrange in an order resembling that which we try to follow in
education:—proceeding from external senses to internal sensory and other

central operations; and thence again to attention and will, and so to
character which is a kind of resultant of all these.
I will begin, then, with what seems the most external and measurable of
these different influences—the influence, namely, of suggestion upon man's
perceptive faculties;—its power to educate his external organs of sense.
This wide subject is almost untouched as yet; and there is no direction in
which one could be more confident of interesting results from further
experiment.
The exposition falls naturally into three parts, as suggestion effects one or
other of the three following objects:
(1) Restoration of ordinary senses from some deficient condition.
(2) Verification of ordinary senses;—hyperæsthesiæ.
(3) Development of new senses;—heteræsthesiæ.
(1) The first of these three headings seems at first sight to belong to
therapeutics rather than to psychology. It is, however, indispensable as a
preliminary to the other two heads; since by learning how and to what
extent suggestion can repair defective senses we have the best chance of
guessing at its modus operandi when it seems to excite the healthy senses to
a point beyond their normal powers.[77]
Two points may be mentioned here. Improvement of vision seems
sometimes to result from relaxation of an involuntary ciliary spasm, which
habitually over-corrects some defect of the lens. This is interesting, from
the analogy thus shown in quite healthy persons to the fixed ideas, the
subliminal errors and fancies characteristics of hysteria. The stratum of self
whose business it is to correct the mechanical defect of the eye has in these
instances done so amiss, and cannot set itself right. The corrected form of
vision is as defective as the form of vision which it replaced. But if the state
of trance be induced, or if it occur spontaneously, it sometimes happens that
the error is suddenly righted; the patient lays aside spectacles; and since we
must assume that the original defect of mechanism remains, it seems that
that defect is now perfectly instead of imperfectly met. This shows a
subliminal adjusting power operating during trance more intelligently than
the supraliminal intelligence had been able to operate during waking life.
Another point of interest lies in the effect of increased attention, as
stimulated by suggestion, upon the power of hearing. Dr. Liébeault[78]

records two cases which are among the most significant that I know. If such
susceptibility to self-suggestion could be reached by patients generally,
there might be, with no miracle at all, a removal of perhaps half the
annoyance which deafness inflicts on mankind.
I pass on to cases of the production by suggestion or self-suggestion of
hyperæsthesia,—of a degree of sensory delicacy which overpasses the
ordinary level, and the previous level of the subject himself.
The rudimentary state of our study of hypnotism is somewhat strangely
illustrated by the fact that most of the experiments which show
hyperæsthesia most delicately have been undertaken with a view of proving
something else—namely, mesmeric rapport, or the mesmerisation of
objects, or telepathy. In these cases the proof of rapport, telepathy, etc.,
generally just falls short,—because one cannot say that the action of the
ordinary senses might not have reached the point necessary for the
achievement, though there is often good reason to believe that the subject
was supraliminally ignorant of the way in which he was, in fact, attaining
the knowledge in question.
In these extreme cases, indeed, the explanation by hyperæsthesia is not
always proved. There may have been telepathy, although one has not the
right to assume telepathy, in view of certain slighter, but still remarkable,
hyperæsthetic achievements, which are common subjects of demonstration.
The ready recognition of points de repère, on the back of a card or the like,
which are hardly perceptible to ordinary eyes, is one of the most usual of
these performances.
In this connection the question arises as to the existence of physiological
limits to the exercise of the ordinary senses. In the case of the eye a
minimum visibile is generally assumed; and there is special interest in a case
of clairvoyance versus cornea-reading, where, if the words were read (as
appears most probable) from their reflection upon the cornea of the
hypnotiser, the common view as to the minimum visibile is greatly
stretched.[79]
With regard to the other senses, whose mechanism is less capable of
minute dissection, one meets problems of a rather different kind. What are
the definitions of smell and touch? Touch is already split up into various
factors—tactile, algesic, thermal; and thermal touch is itself a duplicate
sense, depending apparently on one set of nerve-terminations adapted to

perceive heat, and another set adapted to perceive cold. Taste is similarly
split up; and we do not call anything taste which is not definitely referred to
the mouth and adjacent regions. Smell is vaguer; and there are cognate
sensations (like that of the presence of a cat) which are not referred by their
subject to the nose. The study of hyperæsthesia does in this sense prepare
the way for what I have termed heteræsthesia; in that it leaves us more
cautious in definition as to what the senses are, it accustoms us to the notion
that people become aware of things in many ways which they cannot
definitely realise.
Let us now consider the evidence for heteræsthesia;—for the existence,
that is to say, under hypnotic suggestion, of any form of sensibility
decidedly different from those with which we are familiar. It would sound
more accurate if one could say "demanding some end-organ different from
those which we know that we possess." But we know too little of the range
of perceptivity of these end-organs in the skin which we are gradually
learning to distinguish—of the heat-feeling spots, cold-feeling spots, and
the like—to be able to say for what purposes a new organ would be needed.
For certain heteræsthetic sensations, indeed, as the perception of a magnetic
field, one can hardly assume that any end-organ would be necessary. It is
better, therefore, to speak only of modes of sensibility.
Looking at the matter from the evolutionary point of view, the question
among sensations was one of the development of the fittest; that is to say
that, as the organism became more complex and needed sensations more
definite than sufficed for the protozoon, certain sensibilities got themselves
defined and stereotyped upon the organism by the evolution of end-organs.
[80] Others failed to get thus externalised; but may, for aught we know,
persist nevertheless in the central organs;—say, for instance, in what for
man are the optic or olfactory tracts of the brain. There will then be no
apparent reason why these latent powers should not from time to time
receive sufficient stimulus, either from within or from without, to make
them perceptible to the waking intelligence, or perceptible at least in states
(like trance) of narrow concentration.
As the result of these considerations, I approach alleged heteræsthesiæ of
various kinds with no presumption whatever against their real occurrence.
Yet on the other hand, my belief in the extent of possible hyperæsthesia
continually suggests to me that the apparently new perceptions may only
consist of a mixture of familiar forms of perception, pushed to a new

extreme, and centrally interpreted with a new acumen, while there is no
doubt that many experiments supposed to furnish evidence of such new
perceptions merely illustrate the effect of suggestion or self-suggestion.
Without, however, presuming to criticise past evidence wholesale, I yet
hope that the experience now attained may lead to a much greater number
of well-guarded experiments in the near future. In Appendix V.A, I very
briefly present the actual state of this inquiry. In default of any logical
principle, I shall there divide these alleged forms of sensibility according as
they are excited by inorganic objects on the one hand, or by organisms
(dead or living) on the other.
In the meantime I pass on to that group of the dynamogenic effects of
suggestion which affect the more central vital operations—either the vaso-
motor system, or the neuro-muscular system, or the central sensory tracts.
The effects of suggestion on character—induced changes to which we can
hardly guess the nervous concomitant—will remain to be dealt with later.
First, then, as to the effects of suggestion on the vaso-motor system.
Simple effects of this type form the commonest of "platform experiments."
The mesmerist holds ammonia under his subject's nose, and tells him it is
rose-water. The subject smells it eagerly, and his eyes do not water. The
suggestion, that is to say, that the stinging vapour is inert has inhibited the
vaso-motor reflexes which would ordinarily follow, and which no ordinary
effort of will could restrain. Vice versâ, when the subject smells rose-water,
described as ammonia, he sneezes and his eyes water. These results, which
his own will could not produce, follow on the mesmerist's word. No one
who sees these simple tests applied can doubt the genuineness of the
influence at work. We find then, as might be expected, that action on glands
and secretions constitutes a large element in hypnotic therapeutics. The
literature of suggestion is full of instances where a suppressed secretion has
been restored at a previously arranged moment, almost with "astronomical
punctuality." And yet to what memory is that command retained? by what
signal is it announced? or by what agency obeyed?
In spite of this underlying obscurity, common to every branch of
suggestion, these vaso-motor phenomena are by this time so familiar that no
further description of them is necessary.
This delicate responsiveness of the vaso-motor system has given rise to
some curious spontaneous phenomena, and has suggested some

experiments, which are probably as yet in their infancy. The main point of
interest is that at this point spontaneous self-suggestion, and subsequently
suggestion from without, have made a kind of first attempt at the
modification of the human organism in what may be called fancy directions,
—at the production of a change which has no therapeutic aim, and so to say,
no physiological unity; but which is guided by an intellectual caprice along
lines with which the organism is not previously familiar. I speak of the
phenomenon commonly known as "stigmatisation," from the fact that its
earliest spontaneous manifestations were suggested by imaginations
brooding on the stigmata of Christ's passion;—the marks of wounds in
hands and feet and side. This phenomenon, which was long treated both by
savants and by devotees as though it must be either fraudulent or
miraculous,—ou supercherie, ou miracle,—is now found (like a good many
other phenomena previously deemed subject to that dilemma) to enter
readily within the widening circuit of natural law. Stigmatisation is, in fact,
a form of vesication; and suggested vesication—with the quasi-burns and
real blisters which obediently appear in any place and pattern that is ordered
—is a high development of that same vaso-motor plasticity of which the
ammonia-rose-water experiment was an early example.[81]
The group of suggestive effects which we reach next in order is a wide
and important one. The education of the central sensory faculties,—of our
power of inwardly representing to ourselves sights and sounds, etc.,—is not
less important than the education of the external senses. The powers of
construction and combination which our central organs possess differ more
widely in degree in different healthy individuals than the degrees of
external perception itself. And the stimulating influence of hypnotism on
imagination is perhaps the most conspicuous phenomenon which the whole
subject offers; yet it has been little dwelt upon, save from one quite
superficial point of view.
Every one knows that a hypnotised subject is easily hallucinated;—that if
he is told to see a non-existent dog, he sees a dog,—that if he is told not to
see Mr. A., he sees everything in the room, Mr. A. excepted. Common and
conspicuous, I say, as this experiment is, even the scientific observer has
too often dealt with it with the shallowness of the platform lecturer. The
lecturer represents this induced hallucinability simply as an odd illustration
of his own power over the subject. "I tell him to forget his name, and he
forgets his name; I tell him that he has a baby on his lap, and he sees and

feels and dandles it." At the best, such a hallucination is quoted as an
instance of "mono-ideism." But the real kernel of the phenomenon is not the
inhibition but the dynamogeny;—not the abstraction of attention or
imagination from other topics, but the increased power which imagination
gains under suggestion;—the development of faculty, useless, if you will, in
that special form of imagining the baby, but faculty mentally of a high order
—faculty in one shape or another essential to the production of almost all
the most admired forms of human achievement.
On this theme I shall have much to say; yet here again it will be
convenient to defer fuller discussion until I review what I have termed
"sensory automatism" in a more general way. We shall then see that this
quickened imaginative faculty is not educed by hypnosis alone; that it is a
part of the equipment of the subliminal self, and will be better treated at
length in connection with other spontaneous manifestations. Enough here to
have pointed out the main fact; for when pointed out it can hardly be
disputed, although its significance for the true comprehension of hypnotic
phenomena has been too often overlooked.
Yet here, and in direct connection with hypnotism, certain special features
of hallucinations need to be insisted upon, both as partly explaining certain
more advanced hypnotic phenomena, and also as suggesting lines of
important experiment. The first point is this.
Post-hypnotic hallucinations can be postponed at will. That is to say, a
constant watchfulness is exercised by the subject, so that if, for example,
the hypnotiser tells him that he will (when awakened) poke the fire when
the hypnotiser has coughed three times, the awakened subject, although
knowing nothing of the order in his waking state, will be on the look-out for
the coughs, amid all other disturbances, and will poke the fire at the fore-
ordained signal.[82] Moreover, when the post-hypnotic suggestion is
executed there will often be a slight momentary relapse into the hypnotic
state, and the subject will not afterwards be aware that he has (for instance)
poked the fire at all. This means that the suggested act belongs properly to
the hypnotic, not to the normal chain of memory; so that its performance
involves a brief reappearance of the subliminal self which received the
order.
Another characteristic of these suggested hallucinations tells in exactly the
same direction. It is possible to suggest no mere isolated picture,—a black

cat on the table, or the like,—but a whole complex series of responses to
circumstances not at the time predictable. This point is well illustrated by
what are called "negative hallucinations" or "systematised anæsthesiæ."
Suppose, for instance, that I tell a hypnotised subject that when he awakes
there will be no one in the room with him but myself. He awakes and
remembers nothing of this order, but sees me alone in the room. Other
persons present endeavour to attract his attention in various ways.
Sometimes he will be quite unconscious of their noises and movements;
sometimes he will perceive them, but will explain them away, as due to
other causes, in the same irrational manner as one might do in a dream. Or
he may perceive them, be unable to explain them, and feel considerable
terror until the "negative hallucination" is dissolved by a fresh word of
command. It is plain, in fact, throughout, that some element in him is at
work all the time in obedience to the suggestion given,—is keeping him by
ever fresh modifications of his illusion from discovering its unreality.
Nothing could be more characteristic of what I have called a "middle-level
centre" of the subliminal self—of some element in his nature which is
potent and persistent without being completely intelligent;—a kind of
dream-producer, ready at any moment to vary and defend the dream.
Another indication of the subliminal power at work to produce these
hallucinations is their remarkable range—a range as wide, perhaps, as that
over which therapeutic effects are obtainable by suggestion. The post-
hypnotic hallucination may affect not sight and hearing alone (to which
spontaneous hallucinations are in most cases confined), but all kinds of
vaso-motor responses and organic sensations—cardiac, stomachic, and the
like—which no artifice can affect in a waking person. The legendary flow
of perspiration with which the flatterer sympathises with his patron's
complaint of heat—si dixeris "Æstuo," sudat—is no exaggeration if applied
to the hypnotic subject, who will often sweat and shiver at your bidding as
you transplant him from the Equator to frosty Caucasus.
Well, then, given this strength and vigour of hallucination, one sees a
possible extension of knowledge in more than one direction. To begin with,
by suggestion to the subject that he is feeling or doing something which is
beyond his normal range of faculties, we may perhaps enable him to
perceive or to act as thus suggested.
What we need is to address to a sensitive subject a series of strong
suggestions of the increase of his sensory range and power. We must needs

begin by suggesting hallucinatory sensations:—the subject should be told
that he perceives some stimulus which is, in fact, too feeble for ordinary
perception. If you can make him think that he perceives it, he probably will
after a time perceive it; the direction given to his attention heightening
either peripheral or central sensory faculty. You may then be able to attack
the question as to how far his specialised end-organs are really concerned in
the perception;—and it may then be possible to deal in a more fruitful way
with those alleged cases of transposition of senses which have so great a
theoretical interest as being apparently intermediate between hyperæsthesia
and telæsthesia or clairvoyance. If we once admit (as I, of course, admit)
the reality of telæsthesia, it is just in some such way as this that we should
expect to find it beginning.
I start from the thesis that the perceptive power within us precedes and is
independent of the specialised sense-organs, which it has developed for
earthly use.
νοὑς ὁρα καἱ νοὑς ἁκοὑει τἁλλα κωφἁ καἱ τυφλα.
I conceive further that under certain circumstances this primary telæsthetic
faculty resumes direct operations, in spite of the fleshly barriers which are
constructed so as to allow it to operate through certain channels alone. And
I conceive that in thus resuming exercise of the wider faculty, the incarnate
spirit will be influenced or hampered by the habits or self-suggestions of the
more specialised faculty; so that there may be apparent compromises of
different kinds between telæsthetic and hyperæsthetic perception,—as the
specialised senses endeavour, as it were, to retain credit for the perception
which is in reality widening beyond their scope.
In this attitude of mind, then, I approach the recorded cases of
transposition of special sense.[83]
Two main hypotheses have been put forward as a general explanation of
such cases, neither of which seems to me quite satisfactory. (1) The
common theory would be that these are merely cases of erroneous self-
suggestion;—that the subject really sees with the eye, but thinks that he sees
with the knee, or the stomach, or the finger-tips. This may probably have
been so in many, but not, I think, in all instances. (2) Dr. Prosper Despine
and others suppose that, while the accustomed cerebral centres are still
concerned in the act of sight, the finger-end (for example) acts for the nonce
as the end-organ required to carry the visual sensation to the brain. I cannot

here get over the mechanical difficulty of the absence of a lens. However
hyperæsthetic the finger-end might be (say) to light and darkness, I can
hardly imagine its acting as an organ of definite sight.
My own suggestion (which, for aught I know, may have been made
before) is that the finger-end is no more a true organ of sight than the
arbitrary "hypnogenous zone" is a true organ for inducing trance. I think it
possible that there may be actual telæsthesia,—not necessarily involving
any perception by the bodily organism;—and that the spirit which thus
perceives in wholly supernormal fashion may be under the impression that
it is perceiving through some bizarre corporeal channel—as the knee or the
stomach. I think, therefore, that the perception may not be optical sight at
all, but rather some generalised telæsthetic perception represented as visual,
but incoherently so represented; so that it may be referred to the knee
instead of the retina. And here again, as at several previous points in my
argument, I must refer the reader to what will be said in my chapter on
Possession by external spirits (Chapter IX.) to illustrate the operation even
of the subject's own spirit acting without external aid.
And now I come to the third main type of the dynamogenic efficacy of
suggestion: its influence, namely, on attention, on will, and on character—
character, indeed, being largely a resultant of the direction and persistence
of voluntary attention.
It will be remembered that for convenience' sake I have discussed the
dynamogenic effect of suggestion first upon the external senses, then upon
the internal sensibility,—the mind's eye, the mind's ear, and the imagination
generally;—and now I am turning to similar effects exercised upon that
central power which reasons upon the ideas and images which external and
internal senses supply, which chooses between them, and which reacts
according to its choice. These are "highest-level centres," which I began by
saying that the hypnotist could rarely hope to reach;—since those
spontaneous somnambulisms which the hypnotic trance imitates and
develops do so seldom reach them. We have, however, already found a
good deal of intelligence of a certain kind in hypnotic phenomena; what we
do here is to pass from one stage to another and higher stage of
consciousness of intelligent action.
To explain this statement, let us dwell for a moment upon the degree of
intelligence which is sometimes displayed in those modifications of the

organism which suggestion effects. Take, for instance, the formation of a
cruciform blister, as recorded by Dr. Biggs, of Lima.[84] In this experiment
the hypnotised subject was told that a red cross would appear on her chest
every Friday during a period of four months. For the carrying out of this
suggestion an unusual combination of capacities was needed;—the capacity
of directing physiological changes in a new way, and also, and combined
therewith, the capacity of recognising and imitating an abstract, arbitrary,
non-physiological idea, such as that of cruciformity.
All this, in my view, is the expression of subliminal control over the
organism—more potent and profound than supraliminal, and exercised
neither blindly nor wisely, but with intelligent caprice.
Bearing this in mind as we go on to suggestions more directly affecting
central faculty, in which highest-level centres begin to be involved, we need
not be surprised to find an intermediate stage in which high faculties are
used in obedience to suggestion, for purely capricious ends.
I speak of calculations subliminally performed in the carrying out of post-
hypnotic suggestions.
These suggestions à échéance—commands, given in the trance, to do
something under certain contingent circumstances, or after a certain time
has elapsed—form a very convenient mode of testing the amount of
mentation which can be started and carried out without the intervention of
the supraliminal consciousness. Experiments have been made in this
direction by three men especially who have in recent times done some of
the best work on the psychological side of hypnotism, namely, Edmund
Gurney, Delbœuf, and Milne Bramwell.
Dr. Milne Bramwell's experiments[85] (to mention these as a sample of the
rest) were post-hypnotic suggestions involving arithmetical calculations; the
entranced subject, for instance, being told to make a cross when 20,180
minutes had elapsed from the moment of the order. Their primary
importance lay in showing that a subliminal or hypnotic memory persisted
across the intervening gulf of time,—days and nights of ordinary life,—and
prompted obedience to the order when at last it fell due. But incidentally, as
I say, it became clear that the subject, whose arithmetical capacity in
common life was small, worked out these sums subliminally a good deal
better than she could work them out by her normal waking intelligence.

Of course, all that was needed for such simple calculations was close
attention to easy rules; but this was just what the waking mind was unable
to give, at least without the help of pencil and paper. If we lay this long and
careful experiment side by side with the accounts already given of the
solution of problems in somnambulic states, it seems clear that there is yet
much to be done in the education of subliminal memory and acumen as a
help to supraliminal work.
Important in this connection is Dr. Dufay's account of help given to an
actress in the representation of her rôles by hypnotisation.[86] It seems
obvious that stage-fright is just the kind of nervous annoyance from which
hypnotisation should give relief. Somewhat similarly I believe some
persons can secure a cheap substitute for genius on stage or platform,
evoking by suggestion or self-suggestion a helpful subliminal uprush. Here
again, the hypnotisation is a kind of extension of "secondary
automatism,"—of the familiar lapse from ordinary consciousness of
movements (walking, pianoforte-playing, etc.), which have been very
frequently performed. The possibilities thus opened up are very great: no
less than the combination by mankind of the stability of instinct with the
plasticity of reason. There seems no reason why man's range of automatism
should not thus be largely increased in two main ways: many things now
unpleasant to do might be done with indifference, and many things now
difficult to do might be done with ease.
And now let us pass on from these specialised influences of suggestion on
certain kinds of attention to its influence on attention generally, as needed,
for instance, in education. If we can arrest the shifting of the mental focus
to undesired ideational centres in at all the same way as we can arrest the
choreic or fidgety shiftings of motor impulse to undesired motor centres, we
shall have done perhaps as much for the world's ordinary work as if we had
raised the average man's actual intelligence a step higher in the scale. We
shall have checked waste, although we may not have improved quality. The
well-known case of Dr. Forel's warders,[87] who were enabled by hypnotic
suggestion to sleep soundly by the side of the patients they had to watch,
and wake only when the patients required to be restrained, shows us how by
this means the attention may be concentrated on selected impressions and
waste of energy be avoided in a way that could hardly be compassed by any
ordinary exercise of the will.

How far, indeed, we can go in actually heightening intelligence by
suggestion we have yet to learn. We must not expect to add a cubit to
intellectual any more than to physical stature. Limitations at birth must
prevent our developing the common man into a Newton; but there seems no
reason why we should not bring up his practical achievements much nearer
than at present to the maximum of his innate capacity.[88]
In passing on from the influence of suggestion on attention to its influence
on will, I am not meaning to draw any but the most every-day distinction
between these two forms of inward concentration. The point, in fact, which
I wish now to notice is rather a matter of common observation than a
provable and measurable phenomenon. I speak of the energy and resolution
with which a hypnotic suggestion is carried out;—the ferocity, even, with
which the entranced subject pushes aside the opposition of much more
powerful men. I do not, indeed, assert that he would thus risk very serious
injury; for I believe (with Bramwell and others) that there does exist
somewhere within him a knowledge that the whole proceeding is a mere
experiment. But, nevertheless, he actually risks something; he behaves, in
short, as a confident, resolute man would behave, and this however timid
and unaggressive his habitual character may be. I believe that much
advantage may yet be drawn from this confident temper. We can thus inhibit
the acquired self-distrust and shyness of the supraliminal self, and get the
subliminal self concentrated upon some task which may be as difficult as
we please;—which may, if we can adjust it rightly, draw out to the
uttermost the innate powers of man.
It has been supposed that the mere fact of being hypnotised tended to
weaken the will; that the hypnotised person fell inevitably more and more
under the control of the hypnotiser, and even that he could at last be induced
to commit crimes by suggestion. In his article "What is Hypnotism?"[89] Dr.
Milne Bramwell shows on how small a foundation of fact these fanciful
theories have been erected. It may suffice to say here that nothing is easier,
either for subject or for hypnotiser, than to avert undue influence. A trusted
friend has only to suggest to the hypnotised subject that no one else will be
able to affect him, and the thing is done. As to the crimes supposed to be
committed by hypnotised persons under the influence of suggestion, the
evidence for such crimes, in spite of great efforts made to collect it and set
it forth, remains, I think, practically nil.

This fact, I must add, is quite in harmony with the views expressed in the
present chapter. For it implies that the higher subliminal centres (so to term
them) never really abdicate their rule; that they may indeed remain passive
while the middle centres obey the experimenter's caprice, but are still ready
to resume their control if such experiment should become really dangerous
to the individual. And this runs parallel with common experience in the
spontaneous somnambulisms. The sleeper may perform apparently rash
exploits; but yet, unless he be suddenly awakened, serious accidents are
very rare. Nevertheless, both in spontaneous and in induced somnambulism,
accidents may occur; nor should any experiment be undertaken in a careless
or jesting spirit.
But the rôle of the hypnotiser, as our command over hypnotic artifice
increases, is likely to become continually smaller in proportion to the rôle
played by the subject himself. Especially must this be so where the object is
to strengthen the subject's own power of will. All that can be done from
without in such a case is to imbue the man's spirit with the sense of its
unexhausted prerogatives,—the strength which he may then employ, not
only to avert pain or anxiety, but in any active direction which his original
nature itself admits.
These last words may naturally lead us on to our next topic: the influence
of suggestion on character,—on that function of combined attention and
will, which is, of course, also ultimately a function of the possibilities latent
in the individual germ.
First of all, then, and going back to the evidence already given as to the
cure of the victims of morphia, we may say with truth that there we have
seen as tremendous a moral lift—as sudden an elevation from utter baseness
to at least normal living—as can be anywhere presented to us.
Here, then, the question arises as to the possible range of such sudden
reformations. Did we succeed with the morphinomaniac only because his
was a functional, and not an organic, degradation?
And may it not be a much harder task to create honesty, purity,
unselfishness in a brain whose very conformation must keep the spirit that
thinks through it nearly on the level of the brute? The question is of the
highest psychological interest; the answer, though as yet rudimentary, is
unexpectedly encouraging. The examples given in Appendix V. B show that
if the subject is hypnotisable, and if hypnotic suggestion be applied with

sufficient persistency and skill, no depth of previous baseness and foulness
need prevent the man or woman whom we charge with "moral insanity," or
stamp as a "criminal-born," from rising into a state where he or she can
work steadily, and render services useful to the community.[90]
I purposely limit my assertion to these words. We must still work within
the bounds of natural capacity. Just as we cannot improvise a genius, we
cannot improvise a saint. But what experience seems to show is that we can
select from the lowest and poorest range of feelings and faculties enough of
sound feeling, enough of helpful faculty, to keep the man in a position of
moral stability, and capable of falling in with the common labours of his
kind.
And here we approach a point of much interest. Hypnotic suggestion or
self-suggestion is not an agency which stands wholly alone. It melts into the
suasion of ordinary life. Ministers of religion as well as physicians have
always wielded with authority the suasive power. From the crude animistic
dances and ceremonies of the savage up to the "missions" and "revivals" in
English and American churches and chapels, we find sudden and exciting
impressions on mind and sense called into play for the purpose of
producing religious and moral change.[91] Among the lower races especially
these exciting reunions often involve both hysterical and hypnotic
phenomena. There are sometimes convulsive accesses and there is
sometimes the milder phenomenon of a deep restorative sleep. The
influence exerted upon the convert is intermediate between hypnotic
artifice, dependent on trance-states for access to subliminal plasticity, and
ordinary moral suasion, addressed primarily to ordinary waking reason.
Let us pause here to consider the point which we have already reached.
We began by defining hypnotism as the empirical development of the
sleeping phase of man's personality. In that sleeping phase the most
conspicuous element—the most obvious function of the subliminal self—is
the repair of wasted tissues, the physical, and therefore also largely the
moral, refreshment and rejuvenation of the tired organism.
But we found reason to believe that the subliminal self has other functions
to fulfil during sleep. Those other functions are concerned in some
unknown way with the spiritual world; and the indication of their exercise
is given by the sporadic occurrence, in the sleeping phase, of supernormal
phenomena. Such phenomena, as we shall presently see, occur also at

various points in hypnotic practice. To them we must now turn, if our
account of the phenomena of induced somnambulism is to be complete.
Yet here, in order to give completeness to our intended review, we shall
need a certain apparent extension of the scope of this chapter. We shall need
to consider a group of cases which might have been introduced at various
points in our scheme, but which are perhaps richest in their illustrations of
the supernormal phenomena of hypnotism.
Spontaneous somnambulisms,—those crude uprushes of incoherent
subliminal faculty which sometimes break through the surface of sleep,—
seem to occupy a kind of midway position among the various phenomena
through which our inquiry has thus far carried us.
The somnambulism often starts as an exaggerated dream; it develops into
a kind of secondary personality. The thoughts and impulses which the
upheaval raises into manifestations—the psychical output—resemble
sometimes the inspirations of genius, sometimes the follies of hysteria. And,
finally, the spontaneous sleep-waking state itself is manifestly akin to
hypnosis,—is sometimes actually interchangeable with the induced
somnambulisms of the hypnotic trance. The chain of memory which
repeated spontaneous somnambulisms gradually form,—while lying quite
outside the primary or waking memory,—will often be found to form a part
of the hypnotic memory, which gradually accretes in similar fashion from
repeated hypnosis.
For one form of sleep-waking capacity we are already prepared by what
has been said in Chapter IV. of the solution of problems in sleep. This is one
of the ways in which we can watch the gradual merging of a vivid dream
into a definite somnambulic act. The solution of a problem (as we have
seen) may present itself merely as a sentence or a diagram, constructed in
dream and remembered on waking. Or the sleeper (as in various cases
familiar in text-books) may rise from bed and write out the chain of
reasoning, or the sermon, or whatever it may be. Or again, in rarer cases the
somnambulic output may take the form of oratory, and edifying discourses
may be delivered by a preacher whom no amount of shaking or pinching
will silence or, generally, even interrupt. This, so to speak, is genius with a
vengeance; this is a too persistent uprush of subliminal zeal, co-operating
even out of season with the hortatory instincts of the waking self.

The group of sleep-waking cases which we may next discuss illustrates a
natural evolution of the faculty of the sleeping phase of personality. The
subliminal self, exercising in sleep a profounder influence over the
organism than the supraliminal can exert, may also be presumed to possess
a profounder knowledge of the organism—of its present, and therefore of its
future—than the supraliminal self enjoys.
There are cases[92] in which the somnambulic personality is discerned
throughout as a wiser self—advising a treatment, or at least foreseeing
future developments of the disease with great particularity. Of course, in
such a case prediction is often simply a form of suggestion; the symptom
occurs simply because it has been ordained beforehand. In the case of cures
of long-standing disease the sagacity which foresees probably co-operates
with the control which directs the changes in the organism.
The next stage is a very important one. We come to the manifestation in
spontaneous sleep-waking states of manifestly supernormal powers,—
sometimes of telepathy, but more commonly of clairvoyance or telæsthesia.
Unfortunately, these cases have been, as a rule, very insufficiently observed.
Still, it appears that in spontaneous somnambulism there is frequently some
indication of supernormal powers, though the observers—even if competent
in other ways—have generally neglected to take account of the
hyperæsthesia and heightening of memory and of general intelligence that
often accompany the state.
Before leaving this subject of spontaneous sleep-waking states I ought
briefly to mention a form of trance with which we shall have to deal more at
length in a later chapter. I speak of trance ascribed to spirit-possession. As
will be seen, I myself fully adopt this explanation in a small number of the
cases where it is put forward. Yet I do not think that spirit-agency is
necessarily present in all the trances even of a true subject of possession.
With all the leading sensitives—with D. D. Home, with Stainton Moses,
with Mrs. Piper and with others—I think that the depth of the trance has
varied greatly on different occasions, and that sometimes the subliminal self
of the sensitive is vaguely simulating, probably in an unconscious dream-
like way, an external intelligence. This hypothesis suggested itself to several
observers in the case especially of D. D. Home, with whom the moments of
strong characterisation of a departed personality, though far from rare, were
yet scattered among tracts of dreamy improvisation which suggested only
the utterance of Home's subliminal self. However we choose to interpret

these trances, they should be mentioned in comparison with all the other
sleep-waking states. They probably form the best transition between those
shallow somnambulisms, on the one hand, which are little more than a vivid
dream, and those profound trances, on the other hand, in which the native
spirit quits, as nearly as may be, the sensitive's organism, and is for the time
replaced, as nearly as may be, by an invading spirit from that unseen world.
This brief review of non-hypnotic somnambulisms has not been without
its lessons. It has shown us that the supernormal powers which we have
traced in each of the preceding chapters in turn do also show themselves, in
much the same fashion, in spontaneous sleep-waking states of various
types. We must now inquire how far they occur in sleep-waking states
experimentally induced.
And here the very fact of induction suggests to us a question specially
applicable to the hypnotic state itself. Is hypnosis ever supernormally
induced? Can any one, that is to say, be thrown into hypnotic trance by a
telepathic impact? or, to phrase it more generally, by any influence,
inexplicable by existing science, which may pass from man to man?
In the first place one may say that of the anti-mesmeric schools of
opinion, the "purely physiological" school has on the whole failed, the
"purely suggestive" school has triumphantly succeeded. The school of
Nancy, reinforced by hypnotists all over Europe, has abundantly proved that
"pure suggestion" (whatever that be) is the determining cause of a very
large proportion of hypnotic phenomena. That is beyond dispute; and the
two other schools, the "pure physiologists" and the "mesmerists" alike, must
now manage to prove as best they can that their favourite methods play any
real part in the induction of any case of hypnosis. For to the pure
suggestionist, monotonous stimulation and mesmeric passes are alike in
themselves inert, are alike mere facilitations of suggestion, acting not
directly on the patient's organism, but rather on his state of mental
expectation.
I reply that there is absolutely no need to go as far as this. In admitting
suggestion as a vera causa of hypnosis, we are recognising a cause which,
if we really try to grasp it, resolves itself into subliminal operation, brought
about we know not how. So far, therefore, from negativing and excluding
any obscure and perhaps supernormal agency, the suggestion theory leaves
the way for any such agency broadly open. Some unknown cause or other

must determine whether each suggestion is to "take" or no; and that
unknown cause must presumably act somehow upon the subliminal self. We
should have something like a real explanation of suggestion, if we could
show that a suggestion's success or failure was linked with some telepathic
impact from the suggester's mind, or with some mesmeric effluence from
his person.
I know well that in many cases we can establish no link of this kind. In
Bernheim's rapid hospital practice there seems no opportunity to bring the
hypnotist's will, or the hypnotiser's organism, into any effective rapport
with the subject. Rather, the subject seems to do all that is wanted for
himself almost instantaneously. He often falls into the suggested slumber
almost before the word "Dormez!" has left the physician's mouth. But on
the other hand, this is by no means the only type of hypnotic success. Just
as in the mesmeric days, so also now there are continual instances where
much more than the mere command has been needed for effective
hypnotisation. Persistence, proximity, passes—all these prove needful still
in the practice even of physicians who place no faith at all in the old
mesmeric theory.
The fact is, that since the days of those old controversies between
mesmerists proper and hypnotists proper, the conditions of the controversy
have greatly changed. The supposed mesmeric effluence was then treated as
an entirely isolated, yet an entirely physiological phenomenon. There was
supposed to be a kind of radiation or infection passing from one nervous
system to another. It was of this that Cuvier (for instance) was convinced; it
was this theory which Elliotson defended in the Zoist with a wealth of
illustration and argument to which little justice has even yet been done. Yet
it was hard to prove effluence as opposed to suggestion, because where
there was proximity enough for effluence to be effective there was also
proximity enough for suggestion to be possible. Only in some few
circumstances,—such as Esdaile's mesmerisation of a blind man over a
wall,[93]—was it possible to claim that the mesmeric trance had been
induced without any suspicion whatever on the subject's part that the
mesmerist was trying to entrance him.
Since those days, however, the evidence for telepathy—for psychical
influence from a distance—has grown to goodly proportions. A new form of
experiment has been found possible, from which the influence of suggestion
can be entirely excluded. It has now, as I shall presently try to show, been

actually proved that the hypnotic trance can be induced from a distance so
great, and with precautions so complete, that telepathy or some similar
supernormal influence is the only efficient cause which can be conceived.
I subjoin one of a series of experiments in this "telepathic hypnotism."
(See Appendix V. C.) These experiments are not easy to manage, since it is
essential at once to prevent the subject from suspecting that the experiment
is being tried, and also to provide for his safety in the event of its success.
In Dr. Gibert's experiment, for instance, it was a responsible matter to bring
this elderly woman in her dream-like state through the streets of Havre. It
was needful to provide her with an unnoticed escort; and, in fact, several
persons had to devote themselves for some hours to a single experiment.
I have cited first this experiment at a distance, without attempting to
analyse the nature of the suggestion given or power employed by the
hypnotist. Of course it is plain that if one can thus influence unexpectant
persons from a distance there must be sometimes some kind of power
actually exercised by the hypnotiser;—something beyond the mere tact and
impressiveness of address, which is all that Bernheim and his followers
admit or claim. Evidence of this has been afforded by the occasional
production of organic and other effects in hypnotised subjects by the
unuttered will of the operator when near them. The ingenious experiments
of Gurney[94] in the production of local rigidity and anæsthesia were
undertaken to test whether the agency employed were more in the nature of
an effort of will or,—as the early mesmerists claimed,—of an emission of
actual "mesmeric fluid" or physical effluence of some sort. Gurney was
inclined to think that his results could not be explained solely by mental
suggestion or telepathy, because the physical proximity of the operator's
hand seemed necessary to produce them, and he thought it probable that
they were due to a direct nervous influence, exercised through the hand of
the operator, but not perceptible through the ordinary sensory channels.
Mrs. Sidgwick's experiments[95] of the same kind, however, in which
success was obtained when the operator was standing with folded arms
several feet away from the subject, removed Gurney's main objection to the
telepathic explanation. The fact that a thick sheet of glass over the subject's
hands did not interfere with the results also afforded some presumption
against the hypothesis of a physical influence; and Mrs. Sidgwick pointed
out that the delicate discrimination involved in the specific limitations of
the effects is much more easily attributable to mental suggestion, through

the action of the operator's mind on that of the subject, than to any direct
physical influence on the latter's nerves.
It is, however, in my view, by no means improbable that effluences, as yet
unknown to science, but perceptible by sensitive persons as the telepathic
impulse is perceptible, should radiate from living human organisms. I see
no reason to assume that the varied and concordant statements made by
patients in the Zoist and early mesmeric works merely reflect subjective
fancies. I have myself performed and witnessed experiments on intelligent
persons expressly designed to test whether or no the sensation following the
hand was a mere fancy. It seems to me hardly likely that persons who have
never experienced other purely subjective sensations, and who are expressly
alive to the question here at issue, should nevertheless again and again feel
the classical tingling, etc., along the track of the hypnotiser's passes without
any real external cause. To assume that all which they feel is a mere result
of suggestion, may be a premature attempt at simplifying modes of
supernormal communication which, in fact, are probably not simpler but
more complex than any idea which we have as yet formed of them.
And here at last we arrive at what is in reality the most interesting group
of inquiries connected with the hypnotic trance.
We have just seen that the subliminal state of the hypnotised subject may
be approached by ways subtler than mere verbal suggestion—by telepathic
impacts and perhaps by some effluence of kindred supernormal type. We
have now to trace the supernormal elements in the hypnotic response.
Whether those elements are most readily excited by a directly subliminal
appeal, or whether they depend mainly on the special powers innate in the
hypnotised person, we can as yet but imperfectly guess. We can be pretty
sure, at any rate, that they are not often evoked in answer to any rapid and,
so to say, perfunctory hypnotic suggestion; they do not spring up in
miscellaneous hospital practice; they need an education and a development
which is hardly bestowed on one hypnotised subject in a hundred. The first
stage of this response lies in a subliminal relation established between the
subject and his hypnotiser, and manifesting itself in what is called rapport,
or in community of sensation. The earlier stages of rapport—conditions
when the subject apparently bears or feels the hypnotiser only, and so forth
—arise probably from mere self-suggestion or from the suggestions of the
operator, causing the conscious attention of the subject to be exclusively
directed to him. Indications of the possible development of a real link

between the two persons may rather be found in the cases where there is
provable community of sensation,—the hypnotised subject tasting or
feeling what the hypnotiser (unknown to the subject) does actually at that
moment taste or feel.
We have thus brought the hypnotised subject up to the point of knowing
supernormally, at any rate, the superficial sensations of his hypnotiser. From
that starting-point,—or, at any rate, from some supernormal perception of
narrow range,—his cognition widens and deepens. He may seem to discern
some picture of the past, and may retrace the history of some object which
he holds in his hand, or he may seem to wander in spirit over the habitable
globe, and to bring back knowledge of present facts discernible by no other
means. Perhaps he seems to behold the future, predicting oftenest the
organic history of some person near him; but sometimes discerning, as it
were pictorially, scattered events to which we can guess at no attainable
due. For all this there is already more of positive evidence than is generally
realised; nor (I must repeat) is there any negative evidence which might
lead us to doubt that further care in developing hypnotic subjects may not at
any moment be rewarded in the same way. We have here, in fact, a
successful branch of investigation which has of late years been practically
dropped from mere inattention to what has been done already,—mere
diversion of effort to the easier and more practical triumphs of suggestive
therapeutics.[96]
The next group of cases to which I pass relate chiefly to knowledge of
present facts. I may first refer to some experiments in thought-transference
with hypnotised persons[97] analogous to the experiments with persons in a
normal condition recorded in my next chapter. Here the subject seems
simply to become aware telepathically of the thoughts of his hypnotiser, the
hypnotic condition perhaps facilitating the transfer of the impression. Next
come the cases of what used to be called "travelling clairvoyance" in the
hypnotic state. These are more like the partially retrocognitive cases in that
they cannot be traced with certainty to the contemporary thoughts of any
particular person. In travelling clairvoyance we seem to have a development
of "invasive dreams,"—of those visions of the night in which the sleeper
seems to visit distant scenes and to bring back intelligence otherwise
unattainable. These distant hypnotic visions seem to develop out of thought-
transference; thus the subject may discern an imaginary picture as it is
conceived in the hypnotiser's mind. Thence he may pass on and discern a

true contemporaneous scene,[98] unknown to any one present, and in some
few cases there is an element of apparent prevision in the impression.[99]
Our survey of that important, though inchoate, appeal to the subliminal
self which passes under the name of hypnotism is now nearly as complete
—in its brief sketchy form—as the present state of knowledge permits.
I have attempted to trace the inevitable rise of hypnotism—its necessary
development out of the spontaneous phenomena which preceded and which
might so naturally have suggested it. I have shown, nevertheless, its almost
accidental initiation, and then its rapid development in ways which no
single experimenter has ever been able to correlate or to foresee. I am
bound to say something further as to its prospect in the future. A systematic
appeal to the deeper powers in man—conceived with the generality with
which I have here conceived it—cannot remain a mere appanage of medical
practice. It must be fitted on in some way to the whole serious life of man;
it must present itself to him as a development of faiths and instincts which
lie already deep in his heart. In other words, there must needs be some
scheme of self-suggestion,—some general theory which can give the
individual a basis for his appeal, whether he regards that appeal as directed
to an intelligence outside himself or to his own inherent faculties and
informing soul. These helps to the power of generalisation—to the feeling
of confidence—we must consider now.
The schemes of self-suggestion which have actually been found effective
have covered, not unnaturally, a range as wide as all the superstition and all
the religion of men. That is to say that each form of supernatural belief in
turn has been utilised as a means of securing that urgently-needed temporal
blessing—relief from physical pain. We see the same tendency running
through fetichistic, polytheistic, monotheistic forms of belief. Beginning
with fetichistic peoples, we observe that charms of various kinds,—inert
objects, arbitrary gestures, meaningless words,—have probably been
actually the most general means which our race has employed for the cure
of disease. We know how long some forms of primitive belief persisted in
medicine,—as, for example, the doctrine of likenesses, or the cure of a
disease by some object supposed to resemble its leading symptom. What is,
however, even more remarkable is the efficacy which charms still continue
in some cases to possess, even when they are worn merely as an experiment
in self-suggestion by a person who is perfectly well aware of their intrinsic
futility. Experiments on this subject seem to show that the mere continual

contact of some small unfamiliar object will often act as a reminder to the
subliminal self, and keep, at any rate, some nervous disturbances in check.
Until one reads these modern examples, one can hardly realise how
veritably potent for good may have been the savage amulet, the savage
incantation.
The transition from fetichistic to polytheistic conceptions of cure is, of
course, a gradual one. It may be said to begin when curative properties are
ascribed to objects not arbitrarily, nor on account of the look of the objects
themselves, but on account of their having been blessed or handled by some
divine or semi-divine personage, or having formed part of his body or
surroundings during some incarnation. Thus Lourdes water, bottled and
exported, is still held to possess curative virtue on account of the Virgin's
original blessing bestowed upon the Lourdes spring. But generally the
influence of the divine or divinised being is more directly exercised, as in
oracles, dreams, invisible touches, or actual theophanies, or appearances of
the gods to the adoring patient. It will be seen as we proceed how amply the
tradition of Lourdes has incorporated these ancient aids to faith.
But at this point our modern experience suggests to us a remarkable
interpolation in the antique chain of ideas. It is now alleged that departed
persons need not exert influence through their dead bones alone, nor yet
only by their supposed intermediacy with higher powers. There intervenes,
in fact, the whole topic of spirit-healing,—which cannot, however, be
treated fully here.
Next in the ascending scale from polytheism to monotheism we come to
the "Miracles of Lourdes," to which I have just alluded, where the supposed
healer is the Virgin Mary, reverenced as semi-divine. This form of belief,
however, retains (as has been said) some affinity with fetichism, since the
actual water from the Lourdes spring, supposed to have been blessed by the
Virgin, is an important factor in the cures.[100]
Much further removed from primitive belief is the appeal made by
Christian scientists to the aid of Jesus Christ;—either as directly answering
prayer, or as enabling the worshippers to comprehend the infinite love on
which the universe is based, and in face of which pain and sickness become
a vain imagination or even a sheer nonentity. To the readers of this chapter,
however, there will be nothing surprising in my own inclination to include

all these efforts at health under the general category of schemes of self-
suggestion.
In my view they are but crude attempts at a practical realisation of the
essential truth that it is possible by a right disposition of our own minds to
draw energy from an environing world of spiritual life.
It seems, at least, that no real explanation of hypnotic vitalisation can, in
fact, be given except upon the general theory supported in this work—the
theory that a world of spiritual life exists, an environment profounder than
those environments of matter and ether which in a sense we know. Let us
look at this hypothesis a little more closely. When we say that an organism
exists in a certain environment, we mean that its energy, or some part
thereof, forms an element in a certain system of cosmic forces, which
represents some special modification of the ultimate energy. The life of the
organism consists in its power of interchanging energy with its
environment,—of appropriating by its own action some fragment of that
pre-existent and limitless Power. We human beings exist in the first place in
a world of matter, whence we draw the obvious sustenance of our bodily
functions.
We exist also in a world of ether;—that is to say, we are constructed to
respond to a system of laws,—ultimately continuous, no doubt, with the
laws of matter, but affording a new, a generalised, a profounder conception
of the Cosmos. So widely different, indeed, is this new aspect of things
from the old, that it is common to speak of the ether as a newly-known
environment. On this environment our organic existence depends as
absolutely as on the material environment, although less obviously. In ways
which we cannot fathom, the ether is at the foundation of our physical
being. Perceiving heat, light, electricity, we do but recognise in certain
conspicuous ways,—as in perceiving the "X rays" we recognise in a way
less conspicuous,—the pervading influence of etherial vibrations which in
range and variety far transcend our capacity of response.
Within, beyond, the world of ether,—as a still profounder, still more
generalised aspect of the Cosmos,—must lie, as I believe, the world of
spiritual life. That the world of spiritual life does not depend upon the
existence of the material world I hold as now proved by actual evidence.
That it is in some way continuous with the world of ether I can well
suppose. But for our minds there must needs be a "critical point" in any

such imagined continuity; so that the world where life and thought are
carried on apart from matter, must certainly rank again as a new, a
metetherial environment. In giving it this name I expressly imply only that
from our human point of view it lies after or beyond the ether, as
metaphysic lies after or beyond physics. I say only that what does not
originate in matter or in ether originates there; but I well believe that
beyond the ether there must be not one stage only, but countless stages in
the infinity of things.
On this hypothesis there will be an essential concordance between all
views—spiritual or materialistic—which ascribe to any direction of
attention or will any practical effect upon the human organism. "The prayer
of faith shall save the sick," says St. James. "There is nothing in hypnotism
but suggestion," says Bernheim. In my clumsier language these two
statements (setting aside a possible telepathic element in St. James' words)
will be expressible in identical terms. "There will be effective therapeutical
or ethical self-suggestion whenever by any artifice subliminal attention to a
bodily function or to a moral purpose is carried to some unknown pitch of
intensity which draws energy from the metetherial world."
A great practical question remains, to which St. James' words supply a
direct, though perhaps an inadequate answer, while Bernheim's words
supply no answer at all.
What is this saving faith to be, and how is it to be attained? Can we find
any sure way of touching the spring which moves us so potently, at once
from without and from within? Can we propose any form of self-suggestion
effective for all the human race? any controlling thought on which all alike
can fix that long-sought mountain-moving faith?
Assuredly no man can extemporise such a faith as this. Whatever form it
may ultimately take, it must begin as the purification, the intensification, of
the purest, the intensest beliefs to which human minds have yet attained. It
must invoke the whole strength of all philosophies, of all religions;—not
indeed the special arguments or evidence adduced for each, which lie
outside my present theme, but all the spiritual energy by which in truth they
live. And so far as this purpose goes, of drawing strength from the unseen,
if one faith is true, all faiths are true; in so far at least as human mind can
grasp or human prayer appropriate the unknown metetherial energy, the
inscrutable Grace of God.

CHAPTER VI

SENSORY AUTOMATISM

Βλἑπομεν γἁρ ἁρτι δἱ'ἑσὑπτρου ἑν ἁινἱγματι.
EACH of the several lines of inquiry pursued in the foregoing chapters has
brought indications of something transcending sensory experience in the
reserves of human faculty; and we have come to a point where we need
some further colligating generalisation—some conception under which
these scattered phenomena may be gathered in their true kinship.
Some steps at least towards such a generalisation the evidence to be
presented in these next chapters may allow us to take. Considering together,
under the heading of sensory and motor automatism, the whole range of that
subliminal action of which we have as yet discussed fragments only, we
shall gradually come to see that its distinctive faculty of telepathy or
telæsthesia is in fact an introduction into a realm where the limitations of
organic life can no longer be assumed to persist. Considering, again, the
evidence which shows that that portion of the personality which exercises
these powers during our earthly existence does actually continue to exercise
them after our bodily decay, we shall recognise a relation—obscure but
indisputable—between the subliminal and the surviving self.
I begin, then, with my definition of automatism, as the widest term under
which to include the range of subliminal emergences into ordinary life. The
turbulent uprush and downdraught of hysteria; the helpful uprushes of
genius, co-operating with supraliminal thought; the profound and
recuperative changes which follow on hypnotic suggestion; these have been
described under their separate headings. But the main mass of subliminal
manifestations remains undescribed. I have dealt little with veridical
hallucinations, not at all with automatic writing, nor with the utterances of
spontaneous trance. The products of inner vision or inner audition
externalised into quasi-percepts,—these form what I term sensory
automatisms. The messages conveyed by movement of limbs or hand or
tongue, initiated by an inner motor impulse beyond the conscious will—

these are what I term motor automatisms. And I claim that when all these
are surveyed together their essential analogy will be recognised beneath
much diversity of form. They will be seen to be messages from the
subliminal to the supraliminal self; endeavours—conscious or unconscious
—of submerged tracts of our personality to present to ordinary waking
thought fragments of a knowledge which no ordinary waking thought could
attain.
I regard supraliminal life merely as a privileged case of personality; a
special phase of our personality, which is easiest for us to study, because it
is simplified for us by our ready consciousness of what is going on in it; yet
which is by no means necessarily either central or prepotent, could we see
our whole being in comprehensive view.
Now if we thus regard the whole supraliminal personality as a special case
of something much more extensive, it follows that we must similarly regard
all human faculty, and each sense severally, as mere special or privileged
cases of some more general power.
All human terrene faculty will be in this view simply a selection from
faculty existing in the metetherial world; such part of that antecedent, even
if not individualised, faculty as may be expressible through each several
human organism.
Each of our special senses, therefore, may be conceived as straining
towards development of a wider kind than earthly experience has as yet
allowed. And each special sense is both an internal and an external sense;
involves a tract of the brain, of unknown capacity, as well as an end-organ,
whose capacity is more nearly measurable. The relation of this internal,
mental, mind's-eye vision to non-sensory psychological perception on the
one hand, and to ocular vision on the other hand, is exactly one of the points
on which some profounder observation will be seen to be necessary. One
must at least speak of "mind's eye" perception in these sensory terms, if one
is to discuss it at all.
But ordinary experience at any rate assumes that the end-organ alone can
acquire fresh information, and that the central tract can but combine this
new information already sent in to it. This must plainly be the case, for
instance, with optical or acoustic knowledge;—with such knowledge as is
borne on waves of ether or of air, and is caught by a terminal apparatus,

evolved for the purpose. But observe that it is by no means necessary that
all seeing and all hearing should be through eye or ear.
The vision of our dreams—to keep to vision alone for greater simplicity—
is non-optical vision. It is usually generated in the central brain, not sent up
thither from an excited retina. Optical laws can only by a stretch of terms be
said to apply to it at all.
Let us attempt some rough conspectus, which may show something of the
relation in which central and peripheral vision stand to each other.
We start from a region below the specialisation of visual faculty. The
study of the successive dermal and nervous modifications which have led
up to that faculty belongs to Biology, and all that our argument needs here
is to point out that the very fact that this faculty has been developed in a
germ, animated by metetherial life, indicates that some perceptivity from
which sight could take its origin pre-existed in the originating, the unseen
world. We know vaguely how vision differentiated itself peripherally, with
the growing sensibility of the pigment-spot to light and shadow. But there
must have been a cerebral differentiation also, and also a psychological
differentiation, namely, a gradual shaping of a distinct feeling from obscure
feelings, whose history we cannot recover.
Yet I believe that we have still persistent in our brain-structure some dim
vestige of the transition from that early undifferentiated continuous
sensitivity to our existing specialisation of sense. Probably in all of us,
though in some men much more distinctly than in others, there exist certain
synæsthesiæ or concomitances of sense-impression, which are at any rate
not dependent on any recognisable link of association.[101] My present point
is that such synæsthesiæ stand on the dividing line between percepts
externally and internally originated. These irradiations of sensitivity,
sometimes apparently congenital, cannot, on the one hand, be called a
purely mental phenomenon. Nor again can they be definitely classed under
external vision; since they do sometimes follow upon a mental process of
association. It seems safer to term them entencephalic, on the analogy of
entoptic, since they seem to be due to something in brain-structure, much as
entoptic percepts are due to something in the structure of the eye.
I will, then, start with the synæsthesiæ as the most generalised form of
inward perception, and will pass on to other classes which approach more
nearly to ordinary external vision.

From these entencephalic photisms we seem to proceed by an easy
transition to the most inward form of unmistakable entoptic vision—which
is therefore the most inward form of all external vision—the flash of light
consequent on electrisation of the optic nerve. Next on our outward road we
may place the phosphenes caused by pressure on the optic nerve or
irritation of the retina. Next Purkinje's figures, or shadows cast by the
blood-vessels of the middle layer upon the bacillary layer of the retina.
Then muscæ volitantes, or shadows cast by motes in the vitreous humour
upon the fibrous layer of the retina.
Midway, again, between entoptic and ordinary external vision we may
place after-images; which, although themselves perceptible with shut eyes,
presuppose a previous retinal stimulation from without;—forming, in fact,
the entoptic sequelæ of ordinary external vision.
Next comes our ordinary vision of the external world—and this, again, is
pushed to its highest degree of externality by the employment of artificial
aids to sight. He who gazes through a telescope at the stars has
mechanically improved his end-organs to the furthest point now possible to
man.
And now, standing once more upon our watershed of entencephalic vision,
let us trace the advancing capacities of internal vision. The forms of vision
now to be considered are virtually independent of the eye; they can persist,
that is to say, after the destruction of the eye, if only the eye has worked for
a few years, so as to give visual education to the brain. We do not, in fact,
fully know the limits of this independence, which can only be learnt by a
fuller examination of intelligent blind persons than has yet been made. Nor
can we say with certainty how far in a seeing person the eye is in its turn
influenced by the brain. I shall avoid postulating any "retropulsive current"
from brain to retina, just as I have avoided any expression more specific
than "the brain" to indicate the primary seat of sight. The arrangement here
presented, as already explained, is a psychological one, and can be set forth
without trespassing on controverted physiological ground.
We may take memory-images as the simplest type of internal vision. These
images, as commonly understood, introduce us to no fresh knowledge; they
preserve the knowledge gained by conscious gaze upon the outer world. In
their simplest spontaneous form they are the cerebral sequelæ of external
vision, just as after-images are its entoptic sequelæ. These two classes of

vision have been sometimes confounded, although the distinction is a
marked one. Into the cerebral storage of impressions one element habitually
enters which is totally absent from the mere retinal storage, namely, a
psychical element—a rearrangement or generalisation of the impressions
retinally received.
Next we come to a common class of memory-images, in which the
subliminal rearrangement is particularly marked. I speak of dreams—which
lead us on in two directions from memory-images; in the direction of
imagination-images, and in the direction of hallucinations. Certain
individual dreams, indeed, of rare types point also in other directions which
later on we shall have to follow. But dreams as a class consist of confused
memory-images, reaching a kind of low hallucinatory intensity, a glow, so
to say, sufficient to be perceptible in darkness.
I will give the name of imagination-images to those conscious
recombinations of our store of visual imagery which we compose either for
our mere enjoyment, as "waking dreams," or as artifices to help us to the
better understanding of facts of nature confusedly discerned. Such, for
instance, are imagined geometrical diagrams; and Watt, lying in bed in a
dark room and conceiving the steam-engine, illustrates the utmost limit to
which voluntary internal visualisation can go.
Here at any rate the commonly admitted category of stages of inward
vision will close. Thus far and no farther the brain's capacity for presenting
visual images can be pushed on under the guidance of the conscious will of
man. It is now my business to show, on the contrary, that we have here
reached a mere intermediate point in the development of internal vision.
These imagination-images, valuable as they are, are merely attempts to
control supraliminally a form of vision which—as spontaneous memory-
images have already shown us—is predominantly subliminal. The memory-
images welled up from a just-submerged stratum; we must now consider
what other images also well upward from the same hidden source.
To begin with, it is by no means certain that some of Watt's images of
steam-engines did not well up from that source,—did not emerge ready-
made into the supraliminal mind while it rested in that merely expectant
state which forms generally a great part of invention. We have seen in
Chapter III. that there is reason to believe in such a conveyance in the much
inferior mental processes of calculating boys, etc., and also in the mental

processes of the painter. In short, without pretending to judge of the
proportion of voluntary to involuntary imagery in each several creative
mind, we must undoubtedly rank the spontaneously emergent visual images
of genius as a further stage of internal vision.
And now we have reached, by a triple road, the verge of a most important
development of inward vision—namely, that vast range of phenomena
which we call hallucination. Each of our last three classes had led up to
hallucination in a different way. Dreams actually are hallucinations; but
they are usually hallucinations of low intensity; and are only rarely capable
of maintaining themselves for a few seconds (as hypnopompic illusions)
when the dreamer wakes to the stimuli of the material world. Imagination-
images may be carried to a hallucinatory pitch by good visualisers.[102] And
the inspirations of genius—Raphael's San Sisto is the classical instance—
may present themselves in hallucinatory vividness to the astonished artist.
A hallucination, one may say boldly, is in fact a hyperæsthesia; and
generally a central hyperæsthesia. That is to say, the hallucination is in
some cases due indirectly to peripheral stimulation; but often also it is the
result of a stimulus to "mind's-eye vision," which sweeps the idea onwards
into visual form, regardless of ordinary checks.
Here, then, is a comprehensive and reasonable way of regarding these
multifarious hallucinations or sensory automatisms. They are phenomena
which must neither be feared nor ignored, but rather controlled and
interpreted. Nor will that interpretation be an easy matter. The interpretation
of the symbols by which the retina represents the external world has been,
whether for the race or for the individual, no short or simple process. Yet
ocular vision is in my view a simple, easy, privileged case of vision
generally; and the symbols which represent our internal percepts of an
immaterial world are likely to be far more complex than any impressions
from the material world on the retina.
All inward visions are like symbols abridged from a picture-alphabet. In
order to understand any one class of hallucinations we ought to have all
classes before us. At the lower limit of the series, indeed, the analysis of the
physician should precede that of the psychologist. We already know to
some extent, and may hope soon to know more accurately, what sensory
disturbance corresponds to what nervous lesion. Yet these violent
disturbances of inward perception—the snakes of the drunkard, the scarlet

fire of the epileptic, the jeering voices of the paranoiac—these are perhaps
of too gross a kind to afford more than a kind of neurological introduction
to the subtler points which arise when hallucination is unaccompanied by
any observable defect or malady.
It is, indeed, obvious enough that the more idiognomonic the hallucination
is, the more isolated from any other disturbance of normality, the greater
will be its psychological interest. An apparently spontaneous modification
of central percepts—what phenomenon could promise to take us deeper
into the mystery of the mind?
Yet until quite recently—until, in short, Edmund Gurney took up the
inquiry in 1882—this wide, important subject was treated, even in serious
text-books, in a superficial and perfunctory way. Few statistics were
collected; hardly anything was really known; rather there was a facile
assumption that all hallucinations or sensory automatisms must somehow be
due to physical malady, even when there was no evidence whatever for such
a connection. I must refer my readers to Gurney's résumé in his chapter on
"Hallucinations" in Phantasms of the Living, if they would realise the
gradual confused fashion in which men's minds had been prepared for the
wider view soon to be opened, largely by Gurney's own statistical and
analytical work. The wide collection of first-hand experiences of sensory
automatisms of every kind which he initiated, and which the S.P.R. "Census
of Hallucinations" continued after his death, has for the first time made it
possible to treat these phenomena with some surety of hand.[103]
The results of these inquiries show that a great number of sensory
automatisms occur among sane and healthy persons, and that for many of
these we can at present offer no explanation whatever. For some of them,
however, we can offer a kind of explanation, or at least an indication of a
probable determining cause, whose mode of working remains wholly
obscure.
Thus, in some few instances, although there is no disturbance of health,
there seems to be a predisposition to the externalisation of figures or
sounds. Since this in no way interferes with comfort, we must simply class
it as an idiosyncratic central hyperæsthesia—much like the tendency to
extremely vivid dreams, which by no means always implies a poor quality
of sleep.

In a few instances, again, we can trace moral predisposing causes—
expectation, grief, anxiety.
These causes, however, turn out to be much less often effective than might
have been expected from the popular readiness to invoke them. In two ways
especially the weakness of this predisposing cause is impressed upon us. In
the first place, the bulk of our percipients experience their hallucinations at
ordinary unexciting moments; traversing their more anxious crises without
any such phenomenon. In the second place, those of our percipients whose
hallucination is in fact more or less coincident with some distressing
external event, seldom seem to have been predisposed to the hallucination
by a knowledge of the event. For the event was generally unknown to them
when the corresponding hallucination occurred.
This last remark, it will be seen, introduces us to the most interesting and
important group of percipients and of percepts; the percipients whose gift
constitutes a fresh faculty rather than a degeneration; the percepts which are
veridical—which are (as we shall see cause to infer) in some way generated
by some event outside the percipient's mind, so that their correspondence
with that event conveys some new fact, in however obscure a form. It is this
group, of course, which gives high importance to the whole inquiry; which
makes the study of inward vision no mere curiosity, but rather the opening
of an inlet into forms of knowledge to which we can assign no bound.
Now these telepathic hallucinations will introduce us to very varying
forms of inward vision. It will be well to begin their study by recalling and
somewhat expanding the thesis already advanced: that man's ocular vision
is but a special or privileged case of visual power, of which power his inner
vision affords a more extensive example.
Ocular vision is the perception of material objects, in accordance with
optical laws, from a definite point in space. Our review of hallucinations
has already removed two of these limitations. If I see a hallucinatory figure
—and figures seen in dreams come under this category—I see something
which is not a material object, and I see it in a manner not determined by
optical laws. A dream-figure may indeed seem to conform to optical laws;
but that will be the result of self-suggestion, or of organised memories, and
will vary according to the dreamer's visualising power. While a portrait-
painter may see a face in dream which he can paint from memory when he

wakes, the ordinary man's dream-percept will be vague, shifting, and
unrememberable.
Similarly, if I see a subjective hallucinatory figure "out in the room," its
aspect is not determined by optical laws (it may even seem to stand behind
the observer, or otherwise outside his visual field), but it will more or less
conform—by my mere self-suggestion, if by nothing else—to optical laws;
and, moreover, it will still seem to be seen from a fixed point in space,
namely, from the stationary observer's eyes or brain.
All this seems fairly plain, so long as we are admittedly dealing with
hallucinatory figures whose origin must be in the percipient's own mind.
But so soon as we come to quasi-percepts which we believe to exist or to
originate somewhere outside the percipient's mind, our difficulties come
thick and fast.
If there be some external origin for our inward vision (which thereby
becomes veridical) we must not any longer assume that all veridical inward
vision starts or is exercised from the same point. If it gets hold of facts
(veridical impressions or pictures, not mere subjective fancies), we cannot
be sure a priori whether it somehow goes to find the facts, or the facts come
to find it. Again, we cannot any longer take for granted that it will be
cognisant only of phantasmal or immaterial percepts. If it can get at
phantasmal percepts outside the organism, may it not get at material
percepts also? May it not see distant houses, as well as the images of distant
souls?
Hazardous as these speculations may seem, they nevertheless represent an
attempt to get our notions of supersensory things as near down to our
notions of sensory things as we fairly can. Whatever may be our ultimate
conception of an ideal world, we must not for the present attempt to start
from any standpoint too far removed from the temporal and spatial
existence which alone we know.
As telepathy is a conception intermediate between the apparent isolation
of minds here communicating only as a rule through material organs, and
the ultimate conception of the unity of all mind, so the conception which I
am about to propose, of a recognition of space without our concomitant
subjection to laws of matter, is strictly intermediate between man's
incarnate condition and the condition which we may imagine him
ultimately to attain. We cannot possibly infer a priori that all recognition of

space must needs disappear with the disappearance of the particular bodily
sensations by means of which our conception of space has been developed.
But we can imagine that a spirit should be essentially independent of space,
and yet capable of recognising it.
Provisionally admitting this view, let us consider what range we are now
led to assign to inner vision, when it is no longer merely subjective but
veridical; bringing news to the percipient of actual fact outside his own
organism.
We infer that it may represent to us (1) material objects; or (2) symbols of
immaterial things; (3) in ways not necessarily accordant with optical laws;
and (4) from a point of view not necessarily located within the organism, by
means of what I have called a psychical excursion. I will take an illustration
from a case which is recorded in detail in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. vii. p. 41
[666 C].
A Mrs. Wilmot has a vision of her husband in a cabin in a distant steamer.
Besides her husband, she sees in the cabin a stranger (who was in fact
present there), with certain material details. Now here I should say that Mrs.
Wilmot's inner vision discerned material objects, from a point of view
outside her own organism. But, on the other hand, although the perception
came to her in visual terms, I do not suppose that it was really optical, that
it came through the eye.
Mrs. Wilmot might believe, say, that her husband's head concealed from
her some part of the berth in which he lay; but this would not mean a real
optical concealment, but only a special direction of her attention, guided by
preconceived notions of what would be optically visible from a given point.
As we proceed further we shall see, I think, in many ways how needful is
this excursive theory to explain many telepathic and all telæsthetic
experiences; many, I mean, of the cases where two minds are in
communication, and all the cases where the percipient learns material facts
(as words in a closed book, etc.) with which no other known mind is
concerned.
Another most important corollary of this excursive theory must just be
mentioned here. If there be spiritual excursion to a particular point of space,
it is conceivable that this should involve not only the migrant spirit's
perception from that point, but also perception of that point by persons
materially present near it. That point may become a phantasmogenetic

centre, as well as a centre of outlook. In plain words, if A has spiritually
invaded B's room, and there sees B, B on his part may see A symbolically
standing there; and C and D if present may see A as well.
This hint, here thrown out as an additional argument for the excursive
theory, will fall to be developed later on. For the present we must confine
our attention to our immediate subject: the range of man's inner vision, and
the means which he must take to understand, to foster, and to control it.
The first and simplest step in the control of inner vision is the repression
by hypnotic suggestion of degenerative hallucinations. It is a noteworthy
fact that such of these as are at all curable are much more often curable by
hypnotism than in any other way.
The next step is one to which, as the reader of my chapter on hypnotism
already knows, I attribute an importance much greater than is generally
accorded to it. I refer to the hypnotiser's power not only of controlling but
of inducing hallucinations in his subject.
As I have already said, the evocation of hallucinations is commonly
spoken of as a mere example of the subject's obedience to the hypnotiser. "I
tell my subject to raise his arm, and he raises it; I tell him to see a tiger in
the room, and he sees one accordingly." But manifestly these two incidents
are not on the same level, and only appear to be so through a certain laxity
of language. The usage of speech allows me to say, "I will make my subject
lift his arm," although I am of course unable to affect the motor centres in
his brain which start that motion. But it is so easy for a man to lift his arm
that my speech takes that familiar power for granted, and notes, only his
readiness to lift it when I tell him—the hypnotic complaisance which
prompts him to obey me if I suggest this trivial action. But when I say, "I
will make him see a tiger," I take for granted a power on his part which is
not familiar, which I have no longer a right to assume. For under ordinary
circumstances my subject simply cannot see a tiger at will; nor can I affect
the visual centres which might enable him to do so. All that I can ask him to
do, therefore, is to choose this particular way of indicating that in his
hypnotic condition he has become able to stimulate his central sensory
tracts more powerfully than ever before.

And not only this. His hallucinations are in most cases elaborate products
—complex images which must have needed intelligence to fashion them—
although the process of their fashioning is hidden from our view. In this
respect they resemble the inspirations of genius. For here we find again just
what we found in those inspirations—the uprush of a complex intellectual
product, performed beneath the threshold, and projected ready-made into
ordinary consciousness. The uprushing stream of intelligence, indeed, in the
man of genius flowed habitually in conformity with the superficial stream.
Only rarely does the great conception intrude itself upon him with such
vigour and such untimeliness as to bring confusion and incoherence into his
ordinary life. But in the case of these induced hallucinations the incongruity
between the two streams of intelligence is much more marked. When a
subject, for instance, is trying to keep down some post-hypnotic
hallucinatory suggestion, one can watch the smooth surface of the
supraliminal river disturbed by that suggestion as though by jets of steam
from below, which sometimes merely break in bubbles, but sometimes
force themselves up bodily through the superficial film.
It is by considering hallucinations in this generalised manner and among
these analogies, that we can best realise their absence of necessary
connection with any bodily degeneration or disease. Often, of course, they
accompany disease; but that is only to say that the central sensory tracts,
like any other part of the organism, are capable of morbid as well as of
healthful stimulus. Taken in itself, the mere fact of the quasi-externalisation
of a centrally initiated image indicates strong central stimulation, and
absolutely nothing more. There is no physiological law whatever which can
tell us what degree of vividness our central pictures may assume
consistently with health—short of the point where they get to be so
indistinguishable from external preceptions that, as in madness, they
interfere with the rational conduct of life. That point no well-attested case
of veridical hallucinations, so far as my knowledge goes, has yet
approached.
It was, of course, natural that in the study of these phantasms, as
elsewhere, the therapeutic interest should have preceded the psychological,
but in the newer practical study of eugenics—the study which aims at
improving the human organism, instead of merely conserving it—
experimental psychology is indispensable, and one branch of this is the
experimental study of mental visions.

Let us consider whether, apart from such a rare and startling incident as an
actual hallucination, there is any previous indication of a habit of receiving,
or a power of summoning, pictures from a subliminal store-house? Any
self-suggestion, conscious or unconscious, which places before the
supraliminal intelligence visual images apparently matured elsewhere?
Such indications have not been wanting. In the chapter on Genius, and in
the chapter on Sleep, we have traced the existence of many classes of these
pictures; all of them ready, as it would seem, to manifest themselves on
slight inducement. Dream-figures will rise in any momentary blur of
consciousness; inspirations will respond to the concentrated desire or the
mere passing emotion of the man of genius; after-images will recur, under
unknown conditions, long after the original stimulus has been withdrawn;
memory-images will surge up into our minds with even unwished-for
vividness; the brilliant exactness of illusions hypnagogiques will astonish us
in the revealing transition from waking to sleep.
All is prepared, so to say, for some empirical short-cut to a fuller control
of these subjacent pictures; just as before Mesmer and Puységur all was
prepared for an empirical short-cut to trance, somnambulism, suggestibility.
All that we want is to hit on some simple empirical way of bringing out
the correlation between all these types of subjacent vision, just as
mesmerism was a simple empirical way of bringing out the correlation
between various trances and sleep-waking states.
Crystal-vision, then, like hypnotic trance, might have been gradually
evolved by a series of reasoned experiments, along an unexceptionable
scientific road.
In reality, of course, this prehistoric practice must have been reached in
some quite different way. It does not fall within the scope of this book to
trace the various streams of divination which converge into Dr. Dee's
magic, and "the attracting of spirits into the ball." But it is really to the
Elizabethan Dr. Dee—one of the leading savants of his time—that the
credit must be given of the first systematic attempt to describe, analyse, and
utilise these externalised pictures.[104]
I will describe briefly the general type of the experiment, and we shall see
how near we can get to a psychological explanation.
Let the observer gaze, steadily but not fatiguingly, into some speculum, or
clear depth, so arranged as to return as little reflection as possible. A good

example of what is meant will be a glass ball enveloped in a black shawl, or
placed in the back part of a half-opened drawer; so arranged, in short, that
the observer can gaze into it with as little distraction as may be from the
reflection of his own face or of surrounding objects. After he has tried (say)
three or four times, for ten minutes or so at a time—preferably in solitude,
and in a state of mental passivity—he will perhaps begin to see the glass
ball or crystal clouding, or to see some figure or picture apparently in the
ball. Perhaps one man or woman in twenty will have some slight occasional
experience of this kind; and perhaps one in twenty of these seers (the
percentages must as yet be mainly guess-work) will be able by practice to
develop this faculty of inward vision up to a point where it will sometimes
convey to him information not attainable by ordinary means.
How comes it, in the first place, that he sees any figure in the crystal at
all? Common hypnotic experiments supply two obvious answers, each of
which no doubt explains some part of the phenomena.
In the first place, we know that the hypnotic trance is often induced by
gazing at some small bright object. This may or may not be a mere effect of
suggestion; but it certainly sometimes occurs, and the "scryer" consequently
may be partially hypnotised, and in a state which facilitates hallucinations.
In the second place, a hypnotised subject—hypnotised but in a fully alert
state—can often be caused by suggestion to see (say) a portrait upon a
blank card; and will continue to see that portrait on that card, after the card
has been shuffled with others; thus showing that he discerns with unusual
acuteness such points de repère, or little guiding marks, as may exist on the
surface of even an apparently blank card.
Correspondently with the first of these observations, we find that crystal-
vision is sometimes accompanied by a state of partial hypnotisation,
perhaps merging into trance. This has been the case with various French
hysterical subjects; and not only with them but with that exceptionally
sound and vigorous observer, Mr. J. G. Keulemans. His evidence (in
Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 516-521) is just what one would have
expected a priori on such a matter.
Correspondently with the second of the above observations, we find that
points de repère do occasionally seem to determine crystal visions.
This, again, has been noticed among the French hysterical subjects; and
not only with them, but with another among our best observers, Mrs.

Verrall.
These things being so—both these causes being apparently operative
along the whole series of "scryers," or crystal-gazers, from the most
unstable to the most scientific—one might be tempted to assume that these
two clues, if we could follow them far enough, would explain the whole
group of phenomena. Persons who have not seen the phenomena, indeed,
can hardly be persuaded to the contrary. But the real fact is, as even those
who have seen much less of crystal-gazing than I have will very well know,
that these explanations cannot be stretched to cover a quarter—perhaps not
even a tenth—of the phenomena which actually occur.
Judging both from the testimony of scryers themselves, and from the
observations of Dr. Hodgson and others (myself included), who have had
many opportunities of watching them, it is very seldom that the gaze into
the glass ball induces any hypnotic symptoms whatever. It does not induce
such symptoms with successful scryers any more than with unsuccessful.
Furthermore, there is no proof that the gift of crystal-vision goes along with
hypnotic sensibility. The most that one can say is that the gift often goes
along with telepathic sensibility; but although telepathic sensibility may
sometimes be quickened by hypnotism, we have no proof that those two
forms of sensitiveness habitually go together.
The ordinary attitude of the scryer, I repeat, is one of complete
detachment; an interested and often puzzled scrutiny and analysis of the
figures which display themselves in swift or slow succession in the crystal
ball.
This last sentence applies to the theory of points de repère as well. As a
general rule, the crystal vision, however meaningless and fantastic, is a
thing which changes and develops somewhat as a dream does; following, it
may be, some trivial chain of associations, but not maintaining, any more
than a dream maintains, any continuous scheme of line or colour. At the
most, the scraps of reflection in the crystal could only start such a series of
pictures as this. And the start, the initiation of one of these series, is often
accompanied by an odd phenomenon mentioned above—a milky clouding
of the crystal, which obscures any fragments of reflected images, and from
out of which the images of the vision gradually grow clear. I cannot explain
this clouding. It occurs too often and too independently to be a mere effect
of suggestion. It does not seem to depend on any optical condition—to be,

for instance, a result of change of focus of the eye, or of prolonged gazing.
It is a picture like other pictures; it may come when the eyes are quite fresh
(nor ought they ever to be strained); and it may persist for some time, so
that the scryer looks away and back again, and sees it still. It comes at the
beginning of a first series of pictures, or as a kind of drop scene between
one series of pictures and another. Its closest parallel, perhaps, is the mist or
cloud out of which phantasmal figures, "out in the room," sometimes seem
to form themselves.
Moreover, the connection, if one can so call it, between the crystal and the
vision is a very variable one. Sometimes the figures seem clearly defined
within the crystal and limited thereby; sometimes all perception of the
crystal or other speculum disappears, and the scryer seems clairvoyantly
introduced into some group of life-sized figures. Nay, further, when the
habit of gazing is fully acquired, some scryers can dispense with any
speculum whatever, and can see pictures in mere blackness; thus
approximating to the seers of "faces in the dark," or of illusions
hypnagogiques.
On the whole it seems safest to attempt at present no further explanation
of crystal-gazing than to say that it is an empirical method of developing
internal vision; of externalising pictures which are associated with changes
in the sensorial tracts of the brain, due partly to internal stimuli, and partly
to stimuli which may come from minds external to the scryer's own. The
hallucinations thus induced appear to be absolutely harmless. I at least
know of no kind of injury resulting from them; and I have probably heard
of most of the experiments made in England, with any scientific aim or
care, during the somewhat limited revival of crystal-gazing which has
proceeded for the last few years.
The crystal picture is what we must call (for want of knowledge of
determining causes) a random glimpse into inner vision, a reflection caught
at some odd angle from the universe as it shines through the perturbing
medium of that special soul. Normal and supernormal knowledge and
imaginings are blended in strangely mingled rays. Memory, dream,
telepathy, telæsthesia, retrocognition, precognition, all are there. Nay, there
are indications of spiritual communications and of a kind of ecstasy.[105]
We cannot pursue all these phenomena at once. In turning, as we must
now turn, to the spontaneous cases of sensory automatism—of every type

of which the induced visions of the crystal afford us a foretaste—we must
needs single out first some fundamental phenomenon, illustrating some
principle from which the rarer or more complex phenomena may be in part
at least derived. Nor will there be difficulty in such a choice. Theory and
actual experience point here in the same direction. If this inward vision, this
inward audition, on whose importance I have been insisting, are to have any
such importance—if they are to have any validity at all—if their contents
are to represent anything more than dream or meditation—they must
receive knowledge from other minds or from distant objects;—knowledge
which is not received by the external organs of sense. Communication must
exist from the subliminal to the subliminal as well as from the supraliminal
to the supraliminal parts of the being of different individual men. Telepathy,
in short, must be the prerequisite of all these supernormal phenomena.
Actual experience, as we shall presently see, confirms this view of the
place of telepathy. For when we pass from the induced to the spontaneous
phenomena we shall find that these illustrate before all else this
transmission of thought and emotion directly from mind to mind.
Now as to telepathy, there is in the first place this to be said, that such a
faculty must absolutely exist somewhere in the universe, if the universe
contains any unembodied intelligences at all. If there be any life less rooted
in flesh than ours—any life more spiritual (as men have supposed that a
higher life would be), then either it must not be social life—there can be no
exchange of thought in it at all—or else there must exist some method of
exchanging thought which does not depend upon either tongue or brain.
Thus much, one may say, has been evident since man first speculated on
such subjects at all. But the advance of knowledge has added a new
presumption—it can be no more than a presumption—to all such cosmic
speculations. I mean the presumption of continuity. Learning how close a
tie in reality unites man with inferior lives,—once treated as something
wholly alien, impassably separated from the human race—we are led to
conceive that a close tie may unite him also with superior lives,—that the
series may be fundamentally unbroken, the essential qualities of life the
same throughout. It used to be asked whether man was akin to the ape or to
the angel. I reply that the very fact of his kinship with the ape is proof
presumptive of his kinship with the angel.

It is natural enough that man's instinctive feeling should have anticipated
any argument of this speculative type. Men have in most ages believed, and
do still widely believe, in the reality of prayer; that is, in the possibility of
telepathic communication between our human minds and minds above our
own, which are supposed not only to understand our wish or aspiration, but
to impress or influence us inwardly in return.
So widely spread has been this belief in prayer that it is somewhat strange
that men should not have more commonly made what seems the natural
deduction—namely, that if our spirits can communicate with higher spirits
in a way transcending sense, they may also perhaps be able in like manner
to communicate with each other. The idea, indeed, has been thrown out at
intervals by leading thinkers—from Augustine to Bacon, from Bacon to
Goethe, from Goethe to Tennyson.
Isolated experiments from time to time indicated its practical truth. Yet it
is only within the last few years that the vague and floating notion has been
developed into definite theory by systematic experiment.
To make such experiment possible has indeed been no easy matter. It has
been needful to elicit and to isolate from the complex emotions and
interactions of common life a certain psychical element of whose nature and
working we have beforehand but a very obscure idea.
If indeed we possessed any certain method of detecting the action of
telepathy,—of distinguishing it from chance coincidence or from
unconscious suggestion,—we should probably find that its action was
widely diffused and mingled with other more commonplace causes in many
incidents of life. We should find telepathy, perhaps, at the base of many
sympathies and antipathies, of many wide communities of feeling;
operating, it may be, in cases as different as the quasi-recognition of some
friend in a stranger seen at a distance just before the friend himself
unexpectedly appears, and the Phêmê or Rumour which in Hindostan or in
ancient Greece is said to have often spread far an inexplicable knowledge of
victory or disaster.
But we are obliged, for the sake of clearness of evidence, to set aside,
when dealing with experimentation, all these mixed emotional cases, and to
start from telepathic communications intentionally planned to be so trivial,
so devoid of associations or emotions, that it shall be impossible to refer
them to any common memory or sympathy; to anything save a direct

transmission of idea, or impulse, or sensation, or image, from one to
another mind.
The reader who has studied the evidence originally set forth in Chapters
II. and III. of Phantasms of the Living will, I trust, carry away a pretty clear
notion of what can at present actually be done in the way of experimental
transferences of small definite ideas or pictures from one or more persons—
the "agent" or "agents"—to one or more persons—the "percipient" or
"percipients."[106] In these experiments actual contact has been forbidden,
to avoid the risk of unconscious indications by pressure. It is at present still
doubtful how far close proximity really operates in aid of telepathy, or how
far its advantage is a mere effect of self-suggestion—on the part either of
agent or of percipient. Some few pairs of experimenters have obtained
results of just the same type at distances of half a mile or more.[107]
Similarly, in the case of induction of hypnotic trance, Dr. Gibert attained at
the distance of nearly a mile results which are usually supposed to require
close and actual presence. [See Appendix V. C.]
We must clearly realise that in telepathic experiment we encounter just the
same difficulty which makes our results in hypnotic therapeutics so
unpredictable and irregular. We do not know how to get our suggestions to
take hold of the subliminal self. They are liable to fail for two main reasons.
Either they somehow never reach the subliminal centres which we wish to
affect, or they find those centres preoccupied with some self-suggestion
hostile to our behest. This source of uncertainty can only be removed by a
far greater number of experiments than have yet been made—experiments
repeated until we have oftener struck upon the happy veins which make up
for an immense amount of sterile exploration. Meantime we must record,
but can hardly interpret. Yet there is one provisional interpretation of
telepathic experiment which must be noticed thus early in our discussion,
because, if true, it may conceivably connect our groping work with more
advanced departments of science, while, if seen to be inadequate, it may bid
us turn our inquiry in some other direction. I refer to the suggestion that
telepathy is propagated by "brain-waves"; or, as Sir W. Crookes has more
exactly expressed it, by ether-waves of even smaller amplitude and greater
frequency than those which carry the X rays. These waves are conceived as
passing from one brain to another, and arousing in the second brain an
excitation or image similar to the excitation or image from which they start
in the first. The hypothesis is an attractive one; because it fits an agency

which certainly exists, but whose effect is unknown, to an effect which
certainly exists, but whose agency is unknown.
In this world of vibrations it may seem at first the simplest plan to invoke
a vibration the more. It would be rash, indeed, to affirm that any
phenomenon perceptible by men may not be expressible, in part at least, in
terms of ethereal undulations. But in the case of telepathy the analogy
which suggests this explanation, the obvious likeness between the picture
emitted (so to say) by the agent and the picture received by the percipient—
as when I fix my mind on the two of diamonds, and he sees a mental picture
of that card—goes but a very short way. One has very soon to begin
assuming that the percipient's mind modifies the picture despatched from
the agent: until the likeness between the two pictures becomes a quite
symbolical affair. We have seen that there is a continuous transition from
experimental to spontaneous telepathy; from our transferred pictures of
cards to monitions of a friend's death at a distance. These monitions may
indeed be pictures of the dying friend, but they are seldom such pictures as
the decedent's brain seems likely to project in the form in which they reach
the percipient. Mr. L.—to take a well-known case in our collection
(Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 210)—dies of heart disease when in the
act of lying down undressed, in bed. At or about the same moment Mr. N. J.
S. sees Mr. L. standing beside him with a cheerful air, dressed for walking
and with a cane in his hand. One does not see how a system of undulations
could have transmuted the physical facts in this way.
A still greater difficulty for the vibration-theory is presented by collective
telepathic hallucinations. It is hard to understand how A can emit a pattern
of vibrations which, radiating equally in all directions, shall affect not only
his distant friend B, but also the strangers C and D, who happen to be
standing near B;—and affect no other persons, so far as we know, in the
world.
The above points have been fair matter of argument almost since our
research began. But as our evidence has developed, our conception of
telepathy has needed to be more and more generalised in other and new
directions,—still less compatible with the vibration theory. Three such
directions may be briefly specified here—namely, the relation of telepathy
(a) to telæsthesia or clairvoyance, (b) to time, and (c) to disembodied
spirits. (a) It is increasingly hard to refer all the scenes of which percipients
become aware to the action of any given mind which is perceiving those

distant scenes. This is especially noticeable in crystal-gazing experiments.
(b) And these crystal visions also show what, from the strict telepathic point
of view, we should call a great laxity of time relations. The scryer chooses
his own time to look in the ball;—and though sometimes he sees events
which are taking place at the moment, he may also see past events,—and
even, as it seems, future events. I at least cannot deny precognition, nor can
I draw a definite line amid these complex visions which may separate
precognition from telepathy (see Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xi. pp. 408-593).
(c) Precognition itself may be explained, if you will, as telepathy from
disembodied spirits;—and this would at any rate bring it under a class of
phenomena which I think all students of our subject must before long admit.
Admitting here, for argument's sake, that we do receive communications
from the dead which we should term telepathic if we received them from
the living, it is of course open to us to conjecture that these messages also
are conveyed on ether-waves. But since those waves do not at any rate
emanate from material brains, we shall by this time have got so far from the
original brain-wave hypothesis that few will care still to defend it.
I doubt, indeed, whether we can safely say of telepathy anything more
definite than this: Life has the power of manifesting itself to life. The laws
of life, as we have thus far known them, have been only laws of life when
already associated with matter. Thus limited, we have learnt little as to
Life's true nature. We know not even whether Life be only a directive
Force, or, on the other hand, an effective Energy. We know not in what way
it operates on matter. We can in no way define the connection between our
own consciousness and our organisms. Just here it is, I should say, that
telepathic observations ought to supply us with some hint. From the mode
in which some element of one individual life,—apart from material impact,
—gets hold of another organism, we may in time learn something of the
way in which our own life gets hold of our own organism,—and maintains,
intermits, or abandons its organic sway.[108]
The hypothesis which I suggested in Phantasms of the Living itself, in my
"Note on a possible mode of psychical interaction," seems to me to have
been rendered increasingly plausible by evidence of many kinds since
received; evidence of which the larger part falls outside the limits of this
present work. I still believe—and more confidently than in 1886—that a
"psychical invasion" does take place; that a "phantasmogenetic centre" is
actually established in the percipient's surroundings; that some movement

bearing some relation to space as we know it is actually accomplished; and
some presence is transferred, and may or may not be discerned by the
invaded person; some perception of the distant scene in itself is acquired,
and may or may not be remembered by the invader.
But the words which I am here beginning to use carry with them
associations from which the scientific reader may well shrink. Fully
realising the offence which such expressions may give, I see no better line
of excuse than simply to recount the way in which the gradual accretion of
evidence has obliged me, for the mere sake of covering all the phenomena,
to use phrases and assumptions which go far beyond those which Edmund
Gurney and I employed in our first papers on this inquiry in 1883.
When in 1882 our small group began the collection of evidence bearing
upon "veridical hallucinations"—or apparitions which coincided with other
events in such a way as to suggest a causal connection—we found scattered
among the cases from the first certain types which were with difficulty
reducible under the conception of telepathy pure and simple—even if such a
conception could be distinctly formed. Sometimes the apparition was seen
by more than one percipient at once—a result which we could hardly have
expected if all that had passed were the transference of an impression from
the agent's mind to another mind, which then bodied forth that impression
in externalised shape according to laws of its own structure. There were
instances, too, where the percipient seemed to be the agent also—in so far
that it was he who had an impression of having somehow visited and noted
a distant scene, whose occupant was not necessarily conscious of any
immediate relation with him. Or sometimes this "telepathic clairvoyance"
developed into "reciprocity," and each of the two persons concerned was
conscious of the other;—the scene of their encounter being the same in the
vision of each, or at least the experience being in some way common to
both. These and cognate difficulties were present to my mind from the first;
and in the above-mentioned "Note on a suggested mode of psychical
interaction," included in vol. ii of Phantasms of the Living, I indicated
briefly the extension of the telepathic theory to which they seemed to me to
point.
Meantime cases of certain other definite types continued to come steadily
to hand, although in lesser numbers than the cases of apparition at death. To
mention two important types only—there were apparitions of the so-called
dead, and there were cases of precognition. With regard to each of these

classes, it seemed reasonable to defer belief until time should have shown
whether the influx of first-hand cases was likely to be permanent; whether
independent witnesses continued to testify to incidents which could be
better explained on these hypotheses than on any other. Before Edmund
Gurney's death in 1888 our cases of apparitions and other manifestations of
the dead had reached a degree of weight and consistency which, as his last
paper showed, was beginning to convince him of their veridical character;
and since that date these have been much further increased; and especially
have drawn from Mrs. Piper's and other trance-phenomena an unexpected
enlargement and corroboration. The evidence for communication from the
departed is now in my personal estimate quite as strong as that for
telepathic communication between the living; and it is moreover evidence
which inevitably alters and widens our conception of telepathy between
living men.
The evidence for precognition, again, was from the first scantier, and has
advanced at a slower rate. It has increased steadily enough to lead me to
feel confident that it will have to be seriously reckoned with; but I cannot
yet say—as I do say with reference to the evidence for messages from the
departed—that almost every one who accepts our evidence for telepathy at
all, must ultimately accept this evidence also. It must run on at any rate for
some years longer before it shall have accreted a convincing weight.
But at whatever point one or another inquirer may happen at present to
stand, I urge that this is the reasonable course for conviction to follow. First
analyse the miscellaneous stream of evidence into definite types; then
observe the frequency with which these types recur, and let your sense of
their importance gradually grow, if the evidence grows also.
Now this mode of procedure evidently excludes all definite a priori views,
and compels one's conceptions to be little more than the mere grouping to
which the facts thus far known have to be subjected in order that they may
be realised in their ensemble.
"What definite reason do I know why this should not be true?"—this is the
question which needs to be pushed home again and again if one is to realise
—and not in the ordinary paths of scientific speculation alone—how
profound our ignorance of the Universe really is.
My own ignorance, at any rate, I recognise to be such that my notions of
the probable or improbable in the Universe are not of weight enough to lead

me to set aside any facts which seem to me well attested, and which are not
shown by experts actually to conflict with any better-established facts or
generalisations. Wide though the range of established science may be, it
represents, as its most far-sighted prophets are the first to admit, a narrow
glance only into the unknown and infinite realm of law.
The evidence, then, leading me thus unresisting along, has led me to this
main difference from our early treatment of veridical phantasms. Instead of
starting from a root-conception of a telepathic impulse merely passing from
mind to mind, I now start from a root-conception of the dissociability of the
self, of the possibility that different fractions of the personality can act so
far independently of each other that the one is not conscious of the other's
action.
Naturally the two conceptions coincide over much of the ground. Where
experimental thought-transference is concerned—even where the
commoner types of coincidental phantasms are concerned—the second
formula seems a needless and unprovable variation on the first. But as soon
as we get among the difficult types—reciprocal cases, clairvoyant cases,
collective cases, above all, manifestations of the dead—we find that the
conception of a telepathic impulse as a message despatched and then left
alone, as it were, to effect its purpose needs more and more of straining, of
manipulation, to fit it to the evidence. On the other hand, it is just in those
difficult regions that the analogies of other splits of personality recur, and
that phantasmal or automatic behaviour recalls to us the behaviour of
segments of personality detached from primary personality, but operating
through the organism which is common to both.
The innovation which we are here called upon to make is to suppose that
segments of the personality can operate in apparent separation from the
organism. Such a supposition, of course, could not have been started
without proof of telepathy, and could with difficulty be sustained without
proof of survival of death. But, given telepathy, we have some psychical
agency connected with man operating apart from his organism. Given
survival, we have an element of his personality—to say the least of it—
operating when his organism is destroyed. There is therefore no very great
additional burden in supposing that an element of his personality may
operate apart from his organism, while that organism still exists.

Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte. If we have once got a man's thought
operating apart from his body—if my fixation of attention on the two of
diamonds does somehow so modify another man's brain a few yards off that
he seems to see the two of diamonds floating before him—there is no
obvious halting-place on his side till we come to "possession" by a departed
spirit, and there is no obvious halting-place on my side till we come to
"travelling clairvoyance," with a corresponding visibility of my own
phantasm to other persons in the scenes which I spiritually visit. No obvious
halting-place, I say; for the point which at first seems abruptly transitional
has been already shown to be only the critical point of a continuous curve. I
mean, of course, the point where consciousness is duplicated—where each
segment of the personality begins to possess a separate and definite, but
contemporaneous stream of memory and perception. That these can exist
concurrently in the same organism our study of hypnotism has already
shown, and our study of motor automatisms will still further prove to us.
Dissociation of personality, combined with activity in the metetherial
environment; such, in the phraseology used in this book, will be the formula
which will most easily cover those actually observed facts of veridical
apparition on which we must now enter at considerable length. And after
this preliminary explanation I shall ask leave to use for clearness in my
argument such words as are simplest and shortest, however vague or
disputable their connotation may be. I must needs, for instance, use the
word "spirit," when I speak of that unknown fraction of a man's personality
—not the supraliminal fraction—which we discern as operating before or
after death in the metetherial environment. For this conception I can find no
other term, but by the word spirit I wish to imply nothing more definite than
this. Of the spirit's relation to space, or (which is a part of the same
problem) to its own spatial manifestation in definite form, something has
already been said, and there will be more to say hereafter. And similarly
those terms, invader or invaded, from whose strangeness and barbarity our
immediate discussion began, will depend for their meaning upon
conceptions which the evidence itself must gradually supply.
That evidence, as it now lies before us, is perplexingly various both in
content and quality. For some of the canons needed in its analysis I have
already referred the reader to extracts from Edmund Gurney's writings.
Certain points must still be mentioned here before the narrative begins.

It must be remembered, in the first place, that all these veridical or
coincidental cases stand out together as a single group from a background
of hallucinations which involve no coincidence, which have no claim to
veridicality. If purely subjective hallucinations of the senses affected insane
or disordered brains alone,—as was pretty generally the assumption, even
in scientific circles, when our inquiry began,—our task would have been
much easier than it is. But while there can be no question as to the sound
and healthy condition of the great majority of our percipients, Edmund
Gurney's "Census of Hallucinations" of 1884, confirmed and extended by
the wider inquiry of 1889-1892, showed a frequency, previously
unsuspected, of scattered hallucinations among sane and healthy persons,
the experience being often unique in a lifetime, and in no apparent
connection with any other circumstance whatever.[109]
Since casual hallucinations of the sane, then, are thus frequent, we can
hardly venture to assume that they are all veridical. And the existence of all
these perhaps merely subjective hallucinations greatly complicates our
investigation of veridical hallucinations. It prevents the mere existence of
the hallucinations, however strangely interposed in ordinary life, from
having any evidential value, and throws us upon evidence afforded by
external coincidence;—on the mere fact, to put such a coincidence in its
simplest form, that I see a phantom of my friend Smith at the moment when
Smith is unexpectedly dying at a distance. A coincidence of this general
type, if it occurs, need not be difficult to substantiate, and we have in fact
substantiated it with more or less completeness in several hundred cases.
The primâ facie conclusion will obviously be that there is a causal
connection between the death and the apparition. To overcome this
presumption it would be necessary either to impugn the accuracy of the
informant's testimony, or to show that chance alone might have brought
about the observed coincidences.
On both of these questions there have been full and repeated discussions
elsewhere. I need not re-argue them at length here, but will refer the reader
to the "Report on the Census of Hallucinations," Proceedings S.P.R., vol. x.,
where every source of error as yet discovered has been pretty fully
considered.
To that volume also I must refer him for a thorough discussion of the
arguments for and against chance-coincidence. The conclusion to which the

Committee unanimously came is expressed in the closing words: "Between
deaths and apparitions of the dying person a connection exists which is not
due to chance alone."
We have a right, I think, to say that only by another census of
hallucinations, equally careful, more extensive, and yielding absolutely
different results, could this conclusion be overthrown.
In forming this conclusion, apparitions at death are of course selected,
because, death being an unique event in man's earthly existence, the
coincidences between death and apparitions afford a favourable case for
statistical treatment. But the coincidences between apparitions and crises
other than death, although not susceptible of the same arithmetical precision
of estimate, are, as will be seen, quite equally convincing. To this great
mass of spontaneous cases we must now turn.
The arrangement of these cases is not easy; nor are they capable of being
presented in one logically consequent series.
But the conception of psychical invasion or excursion on which I have
already dwelt has at any rate this advantage, that it is sufficiently
fundamental to allow of our arrangement of all our recorded cases—
perhaps of all possible cases of apparition—in accordance with its own
lines.
Our scheme will include all observable telepathic action, from the faint
currents which we may imagine to be continually passing between man and
man, up to the point—reserved for the following chapter—where one of the
parties to the telepathic intercourse has definitely quitted the flesh. The first
term in our series must be conveniently vague: the last must lead us to the
threshold of the spiritual world.
I must begin with cases where the action of the excursive fragment of the
personality is of the weakest kind—the least capable of affecting other
observers, or of being recalled into the agent's own waking memory.
Such cases, naturally enough, will be hard to bring up to evidential level.
It must depend on mere chance whether these weak and aimless psychical
excursions are observed at all; or are observed in such a way as to lead us to
attribute them to anything more than the subjective fancy of the observers.
How can a casual vision—say, of a lady sitting in her drawing-room,—of
a man returning home at six o'clock—be distinguished from memory-
images on the one hand and from what I may term "expectation-images" on

the other? The picture of the lady may be a slightly modified and
externalised reminiscence; the picture of the man walking up to the door
may be a mere projection of what the observer was hoping to see.
I have assumed that these phantoms coincided with no marked event. The
lady may have been thinking of going to her drawing-room; the man may
have been in the act of walking home;—but these are trivial circumstances
which might be repeated any day.
Yet, however trivial, almost any set of human circumstances are
sufficiently complex to leave room for coincidence. If the sitter in the
drawing-room is wearing a distinctive article of dress, never seen by the
percipient until it is seen in the hallucination;—if the phantasmal homeward
traveller is carrying a parcel of unusual shape, which the real man does
afterwards unexpectedly bring home with him;—there may be reason to
think that there is a causal connection between the apparent agent's
condition at the moment, and the apparition.
In Appendix VI. A, I quote one of these "arrival-cases," so to term them,
where the peculiarity of dress was such as to make the coincidence between
vision and reality well worth attention. The case is interesting also as one of
our earliest examples of a psychical incident carefully recorded at the time;
so that after the lapse of nearly forty years it was possible to correct the
percipient's surviving recollection by his contemporary written statement.
In these arrival cases, there is, I say, a certain likelihood that the man's
mind may be fixed on his return home, so that his phantasm is seen in what
might seem both to himself and to others the most probable place.[110] But
there are other cases where a man's phantasm is seen, in a place where there
is no special reason for his appearing, although these places seem always to
lie within the beat and circuit of his habitual thought.
In such cases there are still possible circumstances which may give reason
to think that the apparition is causally connected with the apparent agent.
The phantasm of a given person may be seen repeatedly by different
percipients, or it may be seen collectively by several persons at a time; or it
may combine both these evidential characteristics, and may be seen several
times and by several persons together.
Now considering the rarity of phantasmal appearances, considering that
not one person in (say) five thousand is ever phantasmally seen at all; the
mere fact that a given person's phantasm is seen even twice, by different