On this memorial occasion it is from English hearts and tongues
belonging, as I never had the privilege of belonging, to the immediate
environment of our lamented President, that discourse of him as a man and
as a friend must come. It is for those who participated in the endless
drudgery of his labors for our Society to tell of the high powers he
showed there; and it is for those who have something of his burning
interest in the problem of our human destiny to estimate his success in
throwing a little more light into its dark recesses. To me it has been
deemed best to assign a colder task. Frederic Myers was a psychologist
who worked upon lines hardly admitted by the more academic branch of the
profession to be legitimate; and as for some years I bore the title of
"Professor of Psychology," the suggestion has been made (and by me gladly
welcomed) that I should spend my portion of this hour in defining the
exact place and rank which we must accord to him as a cultivator and
promoter of the science of the Mind.
Brought up entirely upon literature and history, and interested at first
in poetry and religion chiefly; never by nature a philosopher in the
technical sense of a man forced to pursue consistency among concepts for
the mere love of the logical occupation; not crammed with science at
college, or trained to scientific method by any passage through a
laboratory, Myers had as it were to recreate his personality before he
became the wary critic of evidence, the skilful handler of hypothesis,
the learned neurologist and omnivorous reader of biological and
cosmological matter, with whom in later years we were acquainted. The
transformation came about because he needed to be all these things in
order to work successfully at the problem that lay near his heart; and
the ardor of his will and the richness of his intellect are proved by the
success with which he underwent so unusual a transformation.
The problem, as you know, was that of seeking evidence for human
immortality. His contributions to psychology were incidental to that
research, and would probably never have been made had he not entered on
it. But they have a value for Science entirely independent of the light
they shed upon that problem; and it is quite apart from it that I shall
venture to consider them.
If we look at the history of mental science we are immediately struck by
diverse tendencies among its several cultivators, the consequence being a
certain opposition of schools and some repugnance among their disciples.
Apart from the great contrasts between minds that are teleological or
biological and minds that are mechanical, between the animists and the
associationists in psychology, there is the entirely different contrast
between what I will call the classic-academic and the romantic type of
imagination. The former has a fondness for clean pure lines and noble
simplicity in its constructions. It explains things by as few principles
as possible and is intolerant of either nondescript facts or clumsy
formulas. The facts must lie in a neat assemblage, and the psychologist
must be enabled to cover them and "tuck them in" as safely under his
system as a mother tucks her babe in under the down coverlet on a winter
night. Until quite recently all psychology, whether animistic or
associationistic, was written on classic-academic lines. The consequence
was that the human mind, as it is figured in this literature, was largely
an abstraction. Its normal adult traits were recognized. A sort of
sun-lit terrace was exhibited on which it took its exercise. But where
that terrace stopped, the mind stopped; and there was nothing farther
left to tell of in this kind of philosophy but the brain and the other
physical facts of nature on the one hand, and the absolute metaphysical
ground of the universe on the other.
But of late years the terrace has been overrun by romantic improvers, and
to pass to their work is like going from classic to gothic architecture,
where few outlines are pure and where uncouth forms lurk in the shadows.
A mass of mental phenomena are now seen in the shrubbery beyond the
parapet. Fantastic, ignoble, hardly human, or frankly non-human are some
of these new candidates for psychological description. The menagerie and
the madhouse, the nursery, the prison, and the hospital, have been made
to deliver up their material. The world of mind is shown as something
infinitely more complex than was suspected; and whatever beauties it may
still possess, it has lost at any rate the beauty of academic neatness.
But despite the triumph of romanticism, psychologists as a rule have
still some lingering prejudice in favor of the nobler simplicities.
Moreover, there are social prejudices which scientific men themselves
obey. The word "hypnotism" has been trailed about in the newspapers so
that even we ourselves rather wince at it, and avoid occasions of its
use. "Mesmerism," "clairvoyance," "medium,"--_horrescimus
referentes_!--and with all these things, infected by their previous
mystery-mongering discoverers, even our best friends had rather avoid
complicity. For instance, I invite eight of my scientific colleagues
severally to come to my house at their own time, and sit with a medium
for whom the evidence already published in our "Proceedings" had been
most noteworthy. Although it means at worst the waste of the hour for
each, five of them decline the adventure. I then beg the "Commission"
connected with the chair of a certain learned psychologist in a
neighboring university to examine the same medium, whom Mr. Hodgson and I
offer at our own expense to send and leave with them. They also have to
be excused from any such entanglement. I advise another psychological
friend to look into this medium's case, but he replies that it is
useless; for if he should get such results as I report, he would (being
suggestible) simply believe himself hallucinated. When I propose as a
remedy that he should remain in the background and take notes, whilst his
wife has the sitting, he explains that he can never consent to his wife's
presence at such performances. This friend of mine writes _ex cathedra_
on the subject of psychical research, declaring (I need hardly add) that
there is nothing in it; the chair of the psychologist with the Commission
was founded by a spiritist, partly with a view to investigate mediums;
and one of the five colleagues who declined my invitation is widely
quoted as an effective critic of our evidence. So runs the world away!
I should not indulge in the personality and triviality of such anecdotes,
were it not that they paint the temper of our time, a temper which,
thanks to Frederic Myers more than to any one, will certainly be
impossible after this generation. Myers was, I think, decidedly
exclusive and intolerant by nature. But his keenness for truth carried
him into regions where either intellectual or social squeamishness would
have been fatal, so he "mortified" his _amour propre_, unclubbed himself
completely, and became a model of patience, tact and humility wherever
investigation required it. Both his example and his body of doctrine
will make this temper the only one henceforward scientifically
respectable.
If you ask me how his doctrine has this effect, I answer: By
co-ordinating! For Myers' great principle of research was that in order
to understand any one species of fact we ought to have all the species of
the same general class of fact before us. So he took a lot of scattered
phenomena, some of them recognized as reputable, others outlawed from
science, or treated as isolated curiosities; he made series of them,
filled in the transitions by delicate hypotheses or analogies; and bound
them together in a system by his bold inclusive conception of the
Subliminal Self, so that no one can now touch one part of the fabric
without finding the rest entangled with it. Such vague terms of
apperception as psychologists have hitherto been satisfied with using for
most of these phenomena, as "fraud," "rot," "rubbish," will no more be
possible hereafter than "dirt" is possible as a head of classification in
chemistry, or "vermin" in zoology. Whatever they are, they are things
with a right to definite description and to careful observation.
I cannot but account this as a great service rendered to Psychology. I
expect that Myers will ere long distinctly figure in mental science as
the radical leader in what I have called the romantic movement. Through
him for the first time, psychologists are in possession of their full
material, and mental phenomena are set down in an adequate inventory. To
bring unlike things thus together by forming series of which the
intermediary terms connect the extremes, is a procedure much in use by
scientific men. It is a first step made towards securing their interest
in the romantic facts, that Myers should have shown how easily this
familiar method can be applied to their study.
Myers' conception of the extensiveness of the Subliminal Self quite
overturns the classic notion of what the human mind consists in. The
supraliminal region, as Myers calls it, the classic-academic
consciousness, which was once alone considered either by associationists
or animists, figures in his theory as only a small segment of the psychic
spectrum. It is a special phase of mentality, teleologically evolved for
adaptation to our natural environment, and forms only what he calls a
"privileged case" of personality. The out-lying Subliminal, according to
him, represents more fully our central and abiding being.
I think the words subliminal and supraliminal unfortunate, but they were
probably unavoidable. I think, too, that Myers' belief in the ubiquity
and great extent of the Subliminal will demand a far larger number of
facts than sufficed to persuade him, before the next generation of
psychologists shall become persuaded. He regards the Subliminal as the
enveloping mother-consciousness in each of us, from which the
consciousness we wot of is precipitated like a crystal. But whether this
view get confirmed or get overthrown by future inquiry, the definite way
in which Myers has thrown it down is a new and specific challenge to
inquiry. For half a century now, psychologists have fully admitted the
existence of a subliminal mental region, under the name either of
unconscious cerebration or of the involuntary life; but they have never
definitely taken up the question of the extent of this region, never
sought explicitly to map it out. Myers definitely attacks this problem,
which, after him, it will be impossible to ignore.
_What is the precise constitution of the Subliminal_--such is the problem
which deserves to figure in our Science hereafter as the _problem of
Myers_; and willy-nilly, inquiry must follow on the path which it has
opened up. But Myers has not only propounded the Problem definitely, he
has also invented definite methods for its solution. Posthypnotic
suggestion, crystal-gazing, automatic writing and trance-speech, the
willing-game, etc., are now, thanks to him, instruments of research,
reagents like litmus paper or the galvanometer, for revealing what would
otherwise be hidden. These are so many ways of putting the Subliminal on
tap. Of course without the simultaneous work on hypnotism and hysteria
independently begun by others, he could not have pushed his own work so
far. But he is so far the only generalizer of the problem and the only
user of all the methods; and even though his theory of the extent of the
Subliminal should have to be subverted in the end, its formulation will,
I am sure, figure always as a rather momentous event in the history of
our Science.
Any psychologist who should wish to read Myers out of the profession--and
there are probably still some who would be glad to do so to-day--is
committed to a definite alternative. Either he must say that we knew all
about the subliminal region before Myers took it up, or he must say that
it is certain that states of super-normal cognition form no part of its
content. The first contention would be too absurd. The second one
remains more plausible. There are many first hand investigators into the
Subliminal who, not having themselves met with anything super-normal,
would probably not hesitate to call all the reports of it erroneous, and
who would limit the Subliminal to dissolutive phenomena of consciousness
exclusively, to lapsed memories, subconscious sensations, impulses and
_phobias_, and the like. Messrs. Janet and Binet, for aught I know, may
hold some such position as this. Against it Myers' thesis would stand
sharply out. Of the Subliminal, he would say, we can give no
ultra-simple account: there are discreet regions in it, levels separated
by critical points of transition, and no one formula holds true of them
all. And any conscientious psychologist ought, it seems to me, to see
that, since these multiple modifications of personality are only
beginning to be reported and observed with care, it is obvious that a
dogmatically negative treatment of them must be premature and that the
problem of Myers still awaits us as the problem of far the deepest moment
for our actual psychology, whether his own tentative solutions of certain
parts of it be correct or not.
Meanwhile, descending to detail, one cannot help admiring the great
originality with which Myers wove such an extraordinarily detached and
discontinuous series of phenomena together. Unconscious cerebration,
dreams, hypnotism, hysteria, inspirations of genius, the willing-game,
planchette, crystal-gazing, hallucinatory voices, apparitions of the
dying, medium-trances, demoniacal possession, clairvoyance,
thought-transference, even ghosts and other facts more doubtful; these
things form a chaos at first sight most discouraging. No wonder that
scientists can think of no other principle of unity among them than their
common appeal to men's perverse propensity to superstition. Yet Myers
has actually made a system of them, stringing them continuously upon a
perfectly legitimate objective hypothesis, verified in some cases and
extended to others by analogy. Taking the name "automatism" from the
phenomenon of automatic writing--I am not sure that he may not himself
have been the first so to baptize this latter phenomenon--he made one
great simplification at a stroke by treating hallucinations and active
impulses under a common head, as _sensory_ and _motor automatisms_.
Automatism he then conceived broadly as a message of any kind from the
Subliminal to the Supraliminal. And he went a step farther in his
hypothetic interpretation, when he insisted on "symbolism" as one of the
ways in which one stratum of our personality will often interpret the
influences of another. Obsessive thoughts and delusions, as well as
voices, visions, and impulses, thus fall subject to one mode of
treatment. To explain them, we must explore the Subliminal; to cure them
we must practically influence it.
Myers' work on automatism led to his brilliant conception, in 1891, of
hysteria. He defined it, with good reasons given, as "a disease of the
hypnotic stratum." Hardly had he done so when the wonderfully ingenious
observations of Binet, and especially of Janet in France, gave to this
view the completest of corroborations. These observations have been
extended in Germany, America, and elsewhere; and although Binet and Janet
worked independently of Myers, and did work far more objective, he
nevertheless will stand as the original announcer of a theory which, in
my opinion, makes an epoch, not only in medical but in psychological
science, because it brings in an entirely new conception of our mental
possibilities.
Myers' manner of apprehending the problem of the Subliminal shows itself
fruitful in every possible direction. While official science practically
refuses to attend to Subliminal phenomena, the circles which do attend to
them treat them with a respect altogether too undiscriminating,--every
Subliminal deliverance must be an oracle. The result is that there is no
basis of intercourse between those who best know the facts and those who
are most competent to discuss them. Myers immediately establishes a
basis by his remark that in so far as they have to use the same organism,
with its preformed avenues of expression--what may be very different
strata of the Subliminal are condemned in advance to manifest themselves
in similar ways. This might account for the great generic likeness of so
many automatic performances, while their different starting-points behind
the threshold might account for certain differences in them. Some of
them, namely, seem to include elements of super-normal knowledge; others
to show a curious subconscious mania for personation and deception;
others again to be mere drivel. But Myers' conception of various strata
or levels in the Subliminal sets us to analyzing them all from a new
point of view. The word Subliminal for him denotes only a region, with
possibly the most heterogeneous contents. Much of the content is
certainly rubbish, matter that Myers calls dissolutive, stuff that dreams
are made of, fragments of lapsed memory, mechanical effects of habit and
ordinary suggestion; some belongs to a middle region where a strange
manufacture of inner romances perpetually goes on; finally, some of the
content appears superiorly and subtly perceptive. But each has to appeal
to us by the same channels and to use organs partly trained to their
performance by messages from the other levels. Under these conditions
what could be more natural to expect than a confusion which Myers'
suggestion would then have been the first indispensable step towards
finally clearing away.
Once more, then, whatever be the upshot of the patient work required
here, Myers' resourceful intellect has certainly done a service to
psychology.
I said a while ago that his intellect was not by nature philosophic in
the narrower sense of being that of a logician. In the broader sense of
being a man of wide scientific imagination, Myers was most eminently a
philosopher. He has shown this by his unusually daring grasp of the
principle of evolution, and by the wonderful way in which he has worked
out suggestions of mental evolution by means of biological analogies.
These analogies are, if anything, too profuse and dazzling in his pages;
but his conception of mental evolution is more radical than anything yet
considered by psychologists as possible. It is absolutely original; and,
being so radical, it becomes one of those hypotheses which, once
propounded, can never be forgotten, but sooner or later have to be worked
out and submitted in every way to criticism and verification.
The corner-stone of his conception is the fact that consciousness has no
essential unity. It aggregates and dissipates, and what we call normal
consciousness,--the "Human Mind" of classic psychology,--is not even
typical, but only one case out of thousands. Slight organic alterations,
intoxications, and auto-intoxications, give supraliminal forms completely
different, and the subliminal region seems to have laws in many respects
peculiar. Myers thereupon makes the suggestion that the whole system of
consciousness studied by the classic psychology is only an extract from a
larger total, being a part told-off, as it were, to do service in the
adjustments of our physical organism to the world of nature. This
extract, aggregated and personified for this particular purpose, has,
like all evolving things, a variety of peculiarities. Having evolved, it
may also dissolve, and in dreams, hysteria, and divers forms of
degeneration it seems to do so. This is a retrograde process of
separation in a consciousness of which the unity was once effected. But
again the consciousness may follow the opposite course and integrate
still farther, or evolve by growing into yet untried directions. In
veridical automatisms it actually seems to do so. It drops some of its
usual modes of increase, its ordinary use of the senses, for example, and
lays hold of bits of information which, in ways that we cannot even
follow conjecturally, leak into it by way of the Subliminal. The
ulterior source of a certain part of this information (limited and
perverted as it always is by the organism's idiosyncrasies in the way of
transmission and expression) Myers thought he could reasonably trace to
departed human intelligence, or its existing equivalent. I pretend to no
opinion on this point, for I have as yet studied the evidence with so
little critical care that Myers was always surprised at my negligence. I
can therefore speak with detachment from this question and, as a mere
empirical psychologist, of Myers' general evolutionary conception. As
such a psychologist I feel sure that the latter is a hypothesis of
first-rate philosophic importance. It is based, of course, on his
conviction of the extent of the Subliminal, and will stand or fall as
that is verified or not; but whether it stand or fall, it looks to me
like one of those sweeping ideas by which the scientific researches of an
entire generation are often moulded. It would not be surprising if it
proved such a leading idea in the investigation of the near future; for
in one shape or another, the Subliminal has come to stay with us, and the
only possible course to take henceforth is radically and thoroughly to
explore its significance.
Looking back from Frederic Myers' vision of vastness in the field of
psychological research upon the programme as most academic psychologists
frame it, one must confess that its limitation at their hands seems not
only implausible, but in truth, a little ridiculous. Even with brutes
and madmen, even with hysterics and hypnotics admitted as the academic
psychologists admit them, the official outlines of the subject are far
too neat to stand in the light of analogy with the rest of Nature. The
ultimates of Nature,--her simple elements, it there be such,--may indeed
combine in definite proportions and follow classic laws of architecture;
but her proximates, in her phenomena as we immediately experience them,
Nature is everywhere gothic, not classic. She forms a real jungle, where
all things are provisional, half-fitted to each other, and untidy. When
we add such a complex kind of subliminal region as Myers believed in to
the official region, we restore the analogy; and, though we may be
mistaken in much detail, in a general way, at least, we become plausible.
In comparison with Myers' way of attacking the question of immortality in
particular, the official way is certainly so far from the mark as to be
almost preposterous. It assumes that when our ordinary consciousness
goes out, the only alternative surviving kind of consciousness that could
be possible is abstract mentality, living on spiritual truth, and
communicating ideal wisdom--in short, the whole classic platonizing
Sunday-school conception. Failing to get that sort of thing when it
listens to reports about mediums, it denies that there can be anything.
Myers approaches the subject with no such _a priori_ requirement. If he
finds any positive indication of "spirits," he records it, whatever it
may be, and is willing to fit his conception to the facts, however
grotesque the latter may appear, rather than to blot out the facts to
suit his conception. But, as was long ago said by our collaborator, Mr.
Canning Schiller, in words more effective than any I can write, if any
conception should be blotted out by serious lovers of Nature, it surely
ought to be classic academic Sunday-school conception. If anything is
unlikely in a world like this, it is that the next adjacent thing to the
mere surface-show of our experience should be the realm of eternal
essences, of platonic ideas, of crystal battlements, of absolute
significance. But whether they be animists or associationists, a
supposition something like this is still the assumption of our usual
psychologists. It comes from their being for the most part philosophers,
in the technical sense, and from their showing the weakness of that
profession for logical abstractions. Myers was primarily a lover of life
and not of abstractions. He loved human life, human persons, and their
peculiarities. So he could easily admit the possibility of level beyond
level of perfectly concrete experience, all "queer and cactus-like"
though it might be, before we touch the absolute, or reach the eternal
essences.
Behind the minute anatomists and the physiologists, with their metallic
instruments, there have always stood the out-door naturalists with their
eyes and love of concrete nature. The former call the latter
superficial, but there is something wrong about your laboratory-biologist
who has no sympathy with living animals. In psychology there is a
similar distinction. Some psychologists are fascinated by the varieties
of mind in living action, others by the dissecting out, whether by
logical analysis or by brass instruments, of whatever elementary mental
processes may be there. Myers must decidedly be placed in the former
class, though his powerful use of analogy enabled him also to do work
after the fashion of the latter. He loved human nature as Cuvier and
Agassiz loved animal nature; in his view, as in their view, the subject
formed a vast living picture. Whether his name will have in psychology
as honorable a place as their names have gained in the sister science,
will depend on whether future inquirers shall adopt or reject his
theories; and the rapidity with which their decision shapes itself will
depend largely on the vigor with which this Society continues its labor
in his absence. It is at any rate a possibility, and I am disposed to
think it a probability, that Frederic Myers will always be remembered in
psychology as the pioneer who staked out a vast tract of mental
wilderness and planted the flag of genuine science upon it. He was an
enormous collector. He introduced for the first time comparison,
classification, and serial order into the peculiar kind of fact which he
collected. He was a genius at perceiving analogies; he was fertile in
hypotheses; and as far as conditions allowed it in this meteoric region,
he relied on verification. Such advantages are of no avail, however, if
one has struck into a false road from the outset. But should it turn out
that Frederic Myers has really hit the right road by his divining
instinct, it is certain that, like the names of others who have been
wise, his name will keep an honorable place in scientific history.
[1] Written for a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research held
after the death of Frederic Myers and first published in the Society's
Proceedings, Part XLII, Page 17 (1901).