Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/530

 516 CBITICAL NOTICES : imperfect and fluctuating control over the organism " and that he conceives that control to be exercised 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 learn also that by the subliminal channel the soul pours spiritual energy into the body and that it " keeps the body alive by attending to it " (subliminally) ; that the "subliminal Self "is stratified, and that while its strata are of very different degrees of worth, the higher strata are of a nature to deserve our profoundest admiration. It appears that the two series of states of consciousness, together with two continuous chains of memory, and the two forms of activity of the soul which generate them, as it exercises control over the organ- ism through subliminal and supraliminal channels, constitute the subliminal and supraliminal selves respectively. These two selves are separated, not completely, but only partially by an imperfect diaphragm, as it were, of which the permeability varies greatly in different individuals. The two channels through which the soul exercises this dual control seem to be two systems of nerve- centres, and in both systems we must distinguish a hierarchy of lower-, middle-, and upper-level centres. In the glimpses of the " subliminal self " which we most frequently get, it appears strangely limited in intelligence, incoherent and even false, but this is be- cause we are then witnessing the working of the soul through " middle-level subliminal centres only," and in spite of this we must regard the " subliminal self " as on the whole vastly superior to the supraliminal self ; as Sir Oliver Lodge has it, " the subliminal is probably the more real and more noble, more comprehensive, more intelligent self," and above all, as Myers constantly tells us, it is the more profound of the two, higher in the evolutionary scale, and more permanent. In attempting to grasp the meaning of all this and to discover in what way the mass of phenomena described by Myers justify this hypothesis, it is well to have before our minds the various concep- tions of subconscious or unconscious mental factors that are current among ordinary psychologists. The term ' the Unconscious ' made, of course, a considerable figure in metaphysical systems of the earlier part of the last century, and about the middle of that century it appears to have been taken over by the psychologists from the metaphysicians.. For it had by that time become clear that it is impossible to give a complete and connected account of mental life in terms of states of consciousness only. But the conception of the unconscious has assumed very diverse characters and very different degrees of importance in the hands of different psychologists. We may distinguish in the first place (1) physiological processes having no immediate psychical correlate or effect ; (2) physiological pro- cesses with accompanying psychical effects which are states of a secondary or subsidiary consciousness and which remain separate