Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/534

516 subserve that end have been discriminated from the others under the stress of natural selection and organized into a conscious system. The others have either been forced out, as their places were needed by more important elements, or have never got in, because they could not compete with the others in point of utility.

Among those which have been forced out, their functions being relegated to the nervous mechanism, are the powers of voluntarily controlling the involuntary muscles, the processes of secretion, absorption, assimilation, excretion. In many persons all vivid imagery has in like manner been lost. Among those which have never been received into the normal consciousness are those which we vaguely term genius, and also telepathy, clairvoyance, and probably an infinity of other modes of cognizing reality.

For all this infinite wealth of thought and experience which Mr. Myers believes to exist outside the narrow bounds of the upper consciousness he proposes the term "subliminal states." They embrace every type of consciousness known to us, from the most filmy and incoherent of dreams to the most sublime flights of genius, and many more of which we have never framed a conception. Sometimes they flow along in distinct streams, each with its own memory and desires; at others they blend into more complex wholes.

In the curious phenomena which I have been studying, and in many more which I have not taken into consideration, Mr. Myers believes we have manifestations of one or more of these hidden streams. In all forms of automatism the subliminal material is forced into the upper consciousness much as a stream of lava is forced through the earth's crust. The material itself may be nonsense or a revelation, but the mechanism is in all cases the same. In sleep, dream, hypnosis, trance, and ecstasy we see a temporary subsidence of the upper consciousness and the upheaval of a subliminal stratum.

We need not suppose that our selves are always to consist of this conglomerate of disorganized material. We may believe that in some future life harmony will succeed discord; all the scattered portions of our psychical selves will be reunited into a new and higher synthesis—a self more rich in memories, more alive to its environment, more strong in action than any we can now imagine.

Of all the theories developed from the point of view of the doctrine of independence, Mr. Myers's is the most comprehensive in its scope, is kept in most constant touch with what the author regards as the facts, and displays the greatest philosophic insight; but its very comprehensiveness may well make us hesitate. We must make theories—they are the very eyes of the student—but