Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/538

 524 CEITICAL NOTICES: as well as animals and lifeless objects, proves that if any mind is the agency it is not always or necessarily the mind belonging to the body which appears in the picture, and the agent may there- fore be any one or more of the countless spirits of the universe. And that the phantom may be perceived optically, and not by means of any obscure faculty postulated ad hoc, is indicated by a large group of cases of the type of the ordinary ghost of fiction (para- graphs 744, 745). In such cases we have careful descriptions of the fact that the figure seen prevents vision of objects behind it, and that the figure itself becomes invisible when other objects intervene, and in fact the perception would seem to obey so exactly the laws of optical perception that, if we assume with Myers non- optical perception, we shall have to exercise our inventive faculties still further to explain this simulation. The other supernormal phenomena fall under the heads of tel- .aesthesia, heteraesthesia, telekinesis and possession. In the case of the first three I cannot see that Myers has discovered any considerations that might lead us to ascribe them to the " subliminal self". Heteraesthesia Myers is inclined to regard as a case of telaesthesia or clairvoyance and the problem of clairvoyance, in so far as it is not explicable telepathically, he does not claim to explain, contenting himself with the suggestion that " All matter may, for aught we know, exist as an idea in some cosmic mind, with which mind each individual^ spirit may be in relation, as fully as with individual minds ". With telekinesis Myers does not deal except to accept its reality in passing. We come then to the culminating phenomenon of possession, the evidence of which constitutes the main strength of the evidence of survival of the personality after death. Now it was, as we have seen, in order to harmonise the evidence of survival with the general body of accepted scientific belief that the hypothesis of the " subliminal self " was excogitated, It is therefore with no little astonishment that the reader discovers in the chapter on possession that the " subliminal self " has nothing to do with the case. The evidence of possession consists in the messages written or spoken automatically by entranced " mediums," in answer for the most part to spoken questions and revealing the personality of deceased persons. And Myers' explanation of the phenomenon is simply the old old theory of possession of the body by the spirit of the dead. The spirit of the medium withdraws wholly or partially from his body or brain and the nervous mechanism is operated by one or more disembodied spirits. I have reached the end of my review of the phenomena to the explanation of which the hypothesis of the " subliminal self " is applied and I do not think that any important group of the phenomena has been omitted from this review. I have for con- venience of treatment divided the phenomena into three groups, (1) states and processes which are not present to ordinary con- sciousness ; (2) states of ordinary or supraliminal consciousness