Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/534

 520 CRITICAL NOTICES : consciousness are completely outside consciousness, whether we regard them as purely physiological activities or, with von Hart- mann, as in part purely psychical activities obeying purely psy- chical laws. Of the phenomena of this class Myers is principally concerned with the conceptions of men of genius and with hallu- cinations. Now it is probably true that the ideas of men of genius flow more freely, i.e., rise to consciousness with less of voluntary self-conscious effort, than the ideas of ordinary men, but that peculiarity they share with the more ordinary states of conscious- ness of Mrs. Jones the washerwoman, whose conversation reveals an undue preponderance of simple associative (but entirely unconscious) processes. Myers in fact laboured under the not uncommon mis- conception that the ordinary idea or percept of the ordinary man is constructed from discrete psychical elements by a series of voluntary efforts, much as one might construct a mosaic or paint a picture ; and this unfortunate error, which Myers might perhaps have avoided if he had devoted a part of his energies to the study of " ordinary psych- ology," is the principal ground for the assumed connexion between the "subliminal self " and genius, sleep and "sensory automatisms ". These simple considerations seem to me to forbid us to regard the ideas of men of genius, hallucinations (such at least as are not verid- ical and therefore supernormal), after-images and all the rest of Myers' list of subliminally generated contents of ordinary conscious- ness as states of consciousness produced by a mental activity different in kind to that which produces our most commonplace states and demanding, for the explanation of their genesis, a conscious activity of the soul in special subliminal channels, followed by irruptions through the diaphragm which divides the ordinary from the " sub- liminal self". Before leaving this subject and passing on to the supernormal phenomena let us note that Myers chooses, as the clearest instance of this class of subliminal products, the right answers to difficult arithmetical problems found by " calculating boys " and that in the only instance in which we are furnished with any details of the mode of working of the problems, that namely of young Blyth, we have clear proof that steps of the calculation were present to the ordinary consciousness of the boy ; for when his father worked out the same problem, the calculation of the number of seconds since the boy's birth and found a different number, the boy at once replied that the father had " left out two days for the leap-years 1820 and 1824 ". Myers' general treatment of genius would only be justified if it could be shown that the works of genius, the writings, the sculptures, the paintings and so forth are commonly, or in any considerable number of cases, produced by automatic movements of the hand or organs of speech. But of this we have no evidence if we put aside Kubla Khan as produced under the influence of opium. Myers does not venture to apply the word automatic to the intellectual activities of men of genius, but he does class all hallucinations as " sensory automatisms," and in so doing seeks to compel the assent