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526 CEITICAL NOTICES: if it does so, it is in a hardly appreciable degree. We have seen that Myers held up, as the principal difficulty in the way of belief in the survival of personality, the opposition between the views of the Self as co-ordination and the Self as permanent unity. Let us grant (again for the purpose of discussion only), that the hypothesis does reconcile these two views. It will remain true that this opposition was only one, and that not the greatest, of many diffi- culties. The main difficulty is not in any way touched by the hypothesis. It is this : Our sensations are caused by changes in the brain-matter, and there are irresistibly strong reasons for believing that similar material changes, or transformations of physical energy in the brain, are essential conditions of all our states of conscious- ness ; and there is equally good reason to believe that memory is conditioned, in part at least, by changes produced in the disposition of the matter, or in the state of the matter, of parts of the brain. How then can the procession of states of consciousness continue and the store of memory-images persist undisturbed when the matter of which the brain was composed has been scattered to the four winds of heaven ? Myers admits these facts, yet he has not realised the difficulty presented by them for survival (as is proved by his statement that there is no great step from telepathy to possession, i., p. 250) and his hypothesis of the " subliminal self " does not attempt to deal with it. These considerations forbid me to agree with the estimate of the conception of the subliminal self" expressed by Prof . James and Sir Oliver Lodge, and I confess that if any man should tell me that this hypothesis is no great conception and effects no profounder synthesis but is an elaborate and gratuitous mystification, a monstrous confusion of things that are by nature disparate and distinct, the creation of a mind too passionately centred upon the establishment of one great thesis, I should be at a loss to answer him. I have no space to touch upon a hundred difficulties over which Myers lightly strode. I have space only to say that, like Prof. Flournoy, I have enjoyed Myers' magnificent disdain for the problems of modern philosophy and the splendid independence that led him to proclaim the palaeolithic thinkers as his sole fore- runners ; that I have been filled with admiration for the literary grace, the brilliant use of analogy, the subtlety of exposition, the lofty and eloquent speculation that adorn every chapter ; for the true openness of mind, and the critical attitude well sustained in the face of the greater part of the masses of evidence, and lastly and mostly for the fine enthusiasm for man's future life upon this earth. That future generations will accord to Myers a place in the history of the intellectual development of mankind I have no doubt, but I do not think that they will remember the hypothesis of the " subliminal self " as a part of his achievement. W. McDouGALL.