Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/243

 230 E. GUKNEY: This argument naturally applies equally to both the ideas which we have supposed to obtain a lodgment in the ' sub- ject's ' mind the idea of trance, and the idea of the distant hypnotiser. But as regards this latter idea, there is a further difficulty. For it may be said, and probably with justice in most cases, that the mind of the hypnotiser himself is not con- sciously occupied with the idea of himself ; he is concentrat- ing his thoughts on the ' subject ' and on the effect which he desires to produce, not on his own personality, or his own unique relation to the ' subject ' as the source of the effect. And we cannot at once answer this objection by the assump- tion that ideas may be telepathically propagated from an unconscious part of the transmitter's mind, just as they may take effect in an unconscious part of the recipient's mind. For supposing the transmitter's mind to include an ' uncon- scious part ' which is more than a mere general name for the legion of past ideas that are now all alike latent and revivable an ' unconscious part ' where positive activities are possible, and one idea can take precedence of others, just as in the conscious part, we still need some reason for the activity and prominence assumed, seemingly, by this particular idea of himself, just at the moment when it suits our theory that it should come to the front. Headers of Phantasms of the Living may recall that the same problem presented itself in respect of a large number of the cases of ' spontaneous telepathy ' there recorded, where an idea of the ' agent ' was most vividly presented to the ' percipient ' (often even externalising itself as a hallucination of the senses), while yet the 'agent's' mind at the time was pre- sumably not dwelling on himself or his appearance, and indeed was sometimes not ostensibly dwelling on anything at all, being in a state of lethargy or coma. This fact may seem clearly to separate such spontaneous cases from the other class, including the majority of cases of experimental thought-transference, where the definite idea on which one mind is concentrated is reproduced in the other ; and in a criticism of the telepathic theory which appeared in MIND ix. 607, it was not unreasonably suggested that the differ- therefore, I am, for coiiveniehce, confining the meaning of 'conscious' to the mode or plane of ordinary human experience in which we may sur- mise the true consciousness of the individual to be only partially manifested. The facts of telepathy drive us, I think, to conceive a segregation of conscious states more pronounced than that which examples of double or alternating 1 consciousness ' had previously suggested ; and before long philosophy may probably find one of its chief battle-grounds in questions as to the existence and nature of their underlying unity.