Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/272

266 special forms of such closely systematized—self-contained—individual—psychic systems.

It appears possible then to conceive that in this universe there are innumerable grades of consciousnesses, other than human consciousnesses. At times human consciousnesses may become inherent parts of such other forms of consciousness: and their existence might affect us by resulting in an alteration of what James might call our 'feel'

We often seem to appreciate that we are swayed by some far-reaching but ill-defined influence of this nature, the effects of which we experience mainly in a negative way when we break away from it.

Lowell has expressed this experience in some beautiful lines in his 'Under the Willows':

 My soul was lost, Gone from me like an ache, and what remained Became a part of the universal joy. My soul went forth, and, mingling with the tree, Danced in the leaves; or, floating in the cloud, Saw its white double in the stream below; Or else, sublimed to purer ecstasy, Dilated in the broad blue over all. I was the wind that dappled the lush grass, The tide that crept with coolness to its roots, The thin-winged swallow skating on the air; The life that gladdened everything was mine.

But suddenly the sound of human voice Or footfall, like the drop a chemist pours, Doth in opacious cloud precipitate The consciousness that seemed but now dissolved Into an essence rarer than its own:— And I am narrowed to myself once more.

If such other forms of consciousness exist in the universe, not only may we at times, as we have just seen, become inherent parts of some of those of higher grade than ours; but it is also possible that at other times such diverse consciousnesses may merely attach themselves to ours, as it were, leaving our own consciousnesses essentially intact; but in such cases the other consciousnesses may serve to produce noticeable modifications in our own consciousnesses, which may point to influences from outside of such human consciousnesses as are familiar to us.

All readers of this article are familiar with the voluminous records of facts made by Hodgson and others in connection with the Society of Psychical Research, and brought into prominence in Frederick Myers's lately published work; facts which are more or less mysterious, and which not a few people think of as corroborative of that most vague of hypotheses, the spiritualistic, or spiritistic, hypothesis as it is now called.

Had these records been made twenty-five years ago they would have been immensely more voluminous, because they would have included accounts of what were then the most convincing pieces of