Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/529

 FBEDEBIC W. H. MYERS, Human Personality. 515 demonstrated the fact. But so far as I know, no one has under- taken a critical examination of the hypothesis of the " subliminal Self " as it is finally presented by its author. First let us note the important place which this hypothesis was designed by Myers to fill. It was his prime object in writing this book, not merely to detail the evidence for survival, for that had already been done for the most part elsewhere, but to present it in such a way that the new knowledge, as he deemed it, should be in continuity with the old, that it should appear reconciled to, or harmonised with, the general body of accepted scientific truth, and especially with the well-founded conclusions of modern bio- logy and psychology. Now the belief that a man's personality can survive the death of his body implies that that personality is, or is the manifestation of, some entity that is capable of living and manifesting essentially similar forms of activity, namely, thought, feeling and emotion, when its relations with the body are destroyed by the dissolution of the latter. On the other hand, modern biology has taught us to regard the body as an aggregation of individuals and its activities as the resultant of the co-ordination of the activities of these individuals. And many thinkers have felt themselves compelled to assume that each of these units has in some degree its own psychical life, and that the psychical life of man, including all that we mean by personality, by the Self, is but a co-ordination into a systematic whole of these minor psychical lives. This doctrine, whether under the form of " atomistic hylozoism " or " multiple monadism " (to use Prof. James's expressions), Myers accepts, and he rightly points out that the recent demonstrations of divided personalities acting in and through the one body support this view. Myers then believes that both these views must be accepted ; he asserts with M. Eibot that " the Self is a co-ordina- tion," and with Beid that the Ego is a permanent unity, and he sets himself to effect " a reconcilement of the two opposing systems in a profounder synthesis ". The profounder synthesis is to be effected by aid of the hypothesis of the " subliminal Self ". This conception is too unfamiliar, too subtle, and too profound to be set forth concisely in words. Myers, therefore, nowhere attempts this feat, but strives to introduce the conception to our minds by dis- playing in successive chapters what he believes to be the mani- festations of the " subliminal Self ". But it is shadowed forth by the statement that the term subliminal is used to " cover all that takes place beneath the ordinary threshold " 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 ". In passages scattered throughout the book we learn that Myers accepts " the old-world conception of a soul which exercises an