But the psychologist has yet more to tell us about the nature of personality. Although helped to distinctiveness of self-conscious expression by means of its experience of the struggle under present material conditions, it is not the whole of it that can be thus expressed. In fact its present physical embodiment is but partially adequate to the task. In other words, "cerebral life represents only a small part of the mental life." "One of the rôles of the brain is to limit the vision of the mind, to render { 91} its action more efficacious"[7]--more efficacious, that is to say, for such uses as are of value for survival and success under our existing conditions.
It is to Frederick Myers that we have chiefly owed the conception of the subliminal or subconscious mind. The full report of his researches is given in the two volumes of his work on "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death" (1901). He it was who invented the word "telepathy" to express the fact that mental action can be exerted at a distance. And it was he who brought for the first time the phenomena of clairvoyance and apparitions under thorough examination by the employment of the most exacting tests. Along such lines he was led to the conclusion, now largely accepted, that the conscious self is only a fraction of the entire personality, the fraction being greater or less according to the magnitude of the individual.
By means of this subconscious part of our being we are, he held, brought into touch with one another and are capable of attaining a knowledge which may greatly transcend that which comes to us through our ordinary channels of communication. In the case of genius we watch the emergence of exceptional { 92} potentialities, which may serve as the promise and pledge of what the future has in store for us all. One day like some winged insect we shall pass to a condition beyond that of the life we now know, and then we may hope that what we "can regard as larval characters of special service in the present stage of existence," will prove to have been "destined to be discarded, or modified almost out of recognition, in proportion as a higher state is attained."[8]
This recognition of the existence within human nature of such capacities and powers, however imperfectly developed and understood, would greatly help us to deal with many mysteries of experience that have hitherto seemed completely beyond the purview of a strict scientific research. The American psychologist, William James, has done good service to this highest department of critical inquiry in his well-known work on "Varieties of Religious Experience." A single extract may suffice to illustrate his position, and to shew what may yet lie before those who are prepared to press on in the direction in which he was able to point.
