Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/532

 518 CRITICAL NOTICES I kind. These processes we must regard either as purely physio- logical, or as associated with states of secondary consciousness only. (6) We have the undiscriminated or marginal sensations which are sometimes spoken of as subconscious states. All these are legitimate and defensible conceptions, but they are distinct from one another, and seem to be to some extent incom- patibles. Yet, as might be shown by a series of quotations, each one of these (with the exception possibly of the first) is in turn accepted and presented as an aspect or mode of the " subliminal self ". They form together one of three classes into which we may divide the numerous conceptions which Myers' hypothesis claims to bring together in a profounder synthesis. For the sake of clearness and brevity let me examine this first class at once before going on to the others, merely premising that I reserve consideration of all the " supernormal phenomena " which I group together to form the third class. Of all these conceptions that of the secondary or subsidiary consciousness plays the largest part. In the chapters on " Disintegrations of Personality " and on "Hypnotism" Myers exhibits the evidence for the existence of such secondary consciousness, and while he agrees with M. Janet in regarding them as fragments snatched or lapsed from the supra- liminal consciousness, he differs from him in this that while Janet regards them as isolated fragments only, Myers regards them as having become fragmentary parts of a larger whole, the " subliminal self " ; they are a multiplicity in unity. The concep- tion is to my mind equally obscure with the Christian Trinity and Janet's conception is by comparison clear and simple. Yet if the " subliminal self " be otherwise justified one may perhaps waive this objection. Now the activity which underlies such secondary con- sciousnesses seems to surpass the powers of the ordinary self in two ways ; in the first place it seems to be capable of exerting a greater influence upon the visceral or organic functions, especially upon secretion and nutrition. This fact, together with the unfounded assertion that sleep effects a degree of recuperation of bodily and mental powers greater than can be attributed to simple rest with predominance of the anabolic processes, is regarded by Myers as evidence that the soul can draw into the animal body through sub- liminal channels drafts of " metetherial energy," converting it pre- sumably into stores of chemical energy, just as chlorophyl converts etherial energy into potential chemical energy in the bodies of green plants. Yet, as we have seen, it is the supraliminal channels which are especially " adapted to the maintenance and guidance of earth- life ". And Myers' other suggestion, that in this psychical control of metabolism we see a " recovery of primitive plasticity," seems to be preferable, unless we find other and better evidence of the existence of the soul, of subliminal channels and of stores of " met- etherial energy" upon which the soul can draw. In the second place, there is evidence that a secondary consciousness or self, when