Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/533

FEEDEEIC w. H. MYEES, Human Personality. 519 well developed, may surpass the normal self in arithmetical power, in retentiveness, in histrionic capacity and in cunning. In discuss- ing the secondary consciousness of hysterics Myers gives us one of his brilliant analogies which does more than any other passage of the book to illuminate the conception of the " subliminal self," but carries no more evidential weight than analogies are wont to do. The hysteric differs from the ordinary man in that his ordinary consciousness is narrowed and mutilated through the subtraction from it of those elements which have become split off to form a secondary consciousness or consciousnesses then " much as the hysteric stands in comparison with us ordinary men, so perhaps do we ordinary men stand in comparison with a not impossible ideal of faculty and of self-control". Of the other conceptions of the first of our three classes, I need touch on one only, that of the psychical activity which is assumed to bring our presentations " before the footlights of consciousness " (von Hartmann's " absolutely unconscious "). And the consideration of this leads us at once to the second class of evidence for the existence of the " subliminal Self ". This consists in certain states of ordinary or supraliminal consciousness which are conceived of by Myers as having been generated in the first place by the workings of the soul in subliminal channels, and as having subsequently burst through the diaphragm that divides the two selves, to take their place in the stream of states of con- sciousness of the supraliminal self. Among the states of supraliminal consciousness specified by Myers as being of this peculiar origin, we find the states of consciousness accompanying impulsive and instinctive action and bodily activity during moments of excitement, hallucinations, dream- images, the images of reverie, such memory-images as surge up into our minds with vividness, after-images, recurrent sensations, marginal sensations, and lastly the great conceptions of men of genius. When we seek the criterion, the distinguishing mark by which we are to recognise the members of this somewhat mixed society as being products of the soul's subliminal activity, and which gives them an indisputable claim to rank as such, it appears to be that they are all alike " projected ready-made into ordinary consciousness ". But if we accept this criterion we shall have to extend still furthe v Myers' list of subliminal products. Let us, in order to simplify the argument, admit, with the metaphysical psy- chologists, that in the case of states of consciousness accompanying voluntary effort, whether of thought or bodily movement, the self is aware of its own activity, that the dynamical factors enter to some extent at least into consciousness ; there still remains a very large proportion of the ordinary states of consciousness of the ordinary man of which this cannot be made to appear true by any fiction, e.g., the great mass of his sensations and sensory percepts and all images forming parts of simple trains of association ; for the activities which determine the appearance of these contents of