III. GENIUS

Igneus est ollis vigor et coelestis origo Seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant Terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra.

--VIRGIL.

In my second chapter I made no formal attempt to define that human personality which is to form the main subject of this book. I was content to take the conception roughly for granted, and to enter at once on the study of the lapses of personality into abnormal conditions,--short of the lowest depths of idiocy or madness. From that survey it appeared that these degenerations could be traced to some defect in that central control which ought to clasp and integrate into steady manhood the hierarchies of living cells which compose the human organism. This insight into the Self's decay was the needed prerequisite to our present task--that of apprehending its true normality, and thereafter of analysing certain obscurer faculties which indicate the line of its evolution during and after the life of earth.

Strength and concentration of the inward unifying control--that must be the true normality which we seek; and in seeking it we must remember how much of psychical operation goes on below the conscious threshold, imperfectly obedient to any supraliminal appeal. What advance can we make in inward mastery? how far extend our grasp over the whole range of faculty with which we are obscurely endowed?

"Human perfectibility" has been the theme of many enthusiasts; and many utopian schemes of society have been and still are suggested, which postulate in the men and women of the future an increase in moral and physical health and vigour. And it is plain that in a broad and general way natural selection, sexual selection, and the advance of science are working together towards improvements of these kinds. But it is plain also that these onward tendencies, at least in comparison with our desires and ideals, are slow and uncertain; and it is possible to argue that the apparent advance in our race is due merely to the improvement which science has affected in its material environment, and not to any real development, during the historical period, in the character or faculties of man himself. Nay, since we have no means of knowing to what extent any genus has an inward potentiality of improvement, it is possible for the pessimist to argue that the genus homo has reached its fore-ordained evolutionary limit; so that it cannot be pushed further in any direction without risk of nervous instability, sterility, and ultimate extinction. Some dim apprehension of this kind lends plausibility to many popular diatribes. Dr. Max Nordau's works afford a well-known example of this line of protest against the present age as an age of overwork and of nervous exhaustion. And narrowing the vague discussion to a somewhat more definite test, Professor Lombroso and other anthropologists have discussed the characteristics of the "man of genius"; with the result of showing (as they believe) that this apparently highest product of the race is in reality not a culminant but an aberrant manifestation; and that men of genius must be classed with criminals and lunatics, as persons in whom a want of balance or completeness of organisation has led on to an over-development of one side of the nature;--helpful or injurious to other men as accident may decide.

On this point I shall join issue; and I shall suggest, on the other hand, that Genius--if that vaguely used word is to receive anything like a psychological definition--should rather be regarded as a power of utilising a wider range than other men can utilise of faculties in some degree innate in all;--a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought;--so that an "inspiration of Genius" will be in truth a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being. I shall urge that there is here no real departure from normality; no abnormality, at least in the sense of degeneration; but rather a fulfilment of the true norm of man, with suggestions, it may be, of something supernormal;--of something which transcends existing normality as an advanced stage of evolutionary progress transcends an earlier stage.

But before proceeding further I wish to guard against a possible misapprehension. I shall be obliged in this chapter to dwell on valuable aid rendered by subliminal mentation; but I do not mean to imply that such mentation is ipso facto superior to supraliminal, or even that it covers a large proportion of practically useful human achievement. When I say "The differentia of genius lies in an increased control over subliminal mentation," I express, I think, a well-evidenced thesis, and I suggest an important inference,--namely, that the man of genius is for us the best type of the normal man, in so far as he effects a successful co-operation of an unusually large number of elements of his personality--reaching a stage of integration slightly in advance of our own. Thus much I wish to say: but my thesis is not to be pushed further:--as though I claimed that all our best thought was subliminal, or that all that was subliminal was potentially "inspiration."

It is true, however, that the range of our subliminal mentation is more extended than the range of our supraliminal. At one end of the scale we find dreams,--a normal subliminal product, but of less practical value than any form of sane supraliminal thought. At the other end of the scale we find that the rarest, most precious knowledge comes to us from outside the ordinary field,--through the eminently subliminal processes of telepathy, telæsthesia, ecstasy. And between these two extremes lie many subliminal products, varying in value according to the dignity and trustworthiness of the subliminal mentation concerned.

This last phrase--inevitably obscure--may be illustrated by reference to that hierarchical arrangement of supraliminal action and perception which Dr. Hughlings Jackson has so used as to clear up much previous confusion of thought. Following him, we now speak of highest-level nerve-centres, governing our highest, most complex thought and will; of middle-level centres, governing movements of voluntary muscles, and the like; and of lowest-level centres (which from my point of view are purely subliminal), governing those automatic processes, as respiration and circulation, which are independent of conscious rule, but necessary to the maintenance of life. We can roughly judge from the nature of any observed action whether the highest-level centres are directing it, or whether they are for the time inhibited, so that middle-level centres operate uncontrolled.

Thus ordinary speech and writing are ruled by highest-level centres. But when an epileptic discharge of nervous energy has exhausted the highest-level centres, we see the middle-level centres operating unchecked, and producing the convulsive movements of arms and legs in the "fit." As these centres in their turn become exhausted, the patient is left to the guidance of lowest-level centres alone;--that is to say, he becomes comatose, though he continues to breathe as regularly as usual.

Now this series of phenomena,--descending in coherence and coordination from an active consensus of the whole organism to a mere automatic maintenance of its most stably organised processes,--may be pretty closely paralleled by the series of subliminal phenomena also.

Sometimes we seem to see our subliminal perceptions and faculties acting truly in unity, truly as a Self;--co-ordinated into some harmonious "inspiration of genius," or some profound and reasonable hypnotic self-reformation, or some far-reaching supernormal achievement of clairvoyant vision or of self-projection into a spiritual world. Whatever of subliminal personality is thus acting corresponds with the highest-level centres of supraliminal life. At such moments the subliminal represents (as I believe) most nearly what will become the surviving Self.

But it seems that this degree of clarity, of integration, cannot be long preserved. Much oftener we find the subliminal perceptions and faculties acting in less co-ordinated, less coherent ways. We have products which, while containing traces of some faculty beyond our common scope, involve, nevertheless, something as random and meaningless as the discharge of the uncontrolled middle-level centres of arms and legs in the epileptic fit. We get, in short, a series of phenomena which the term dream-like seems best to describe.

In the realm of genius,--of uprushes of thought and feeling fused beneath the conscious threshold into artistic shape,--we get no longer masterpieces but half-insanities,--not the Sistine Madonna, but Wiertz's Vision of the Guillotined Head; not Kubla Khan, but the disordered opium dream. Throughout all the work of William Blake (I should say) we see the subliminal self flashing for moments into unity, then smouldering again in a lurid and scattered glow.

In the realm of hypnotism, again, we sink from the reasonable self-suggestion to the "platform experiments,"--the smelling of ammonia, the eating of tallow candles;--all the tricks which show a profound control, but not a wise control, over the arcana of organic life. I speak, of course, of the subject's own control over his organism; for in the last resort it is he and not his hypnotiser who really exercises that directive power. And I compare these tricks of middle-level subliminal centres to the powerful yet irrational control which the middle-level centres ruling the epileptic's arms and legs exercise over his muscles in the violence of the epileptic attack.

And so again with the automatisms which are, one may say, the subliminal self's peculiar province. Automatic script, for instance, may represent highest-level subliminal centres, even when no extraneous spirit, but the automatist's own mind alone, is concerned. It will then give us true telepathic messages, or perhaps messages of high moral import, surpassing the automatist's conscious powers. But much oftener the automatic script is regulated by what I have called middle-level subliminal centres only;--and then, though we may have scraps of supernormal intelligence, we have confusion and incoherence as well. We have the falsity which the disgusted automatist is sometimes fain to ascribe to a devil; though it is in reality not a devil, but a dream.

And hence again, just as the epileptic sinks lower and lower in the fit,--from the incoordinated movements of the limbs down to the mere stertorous breathing of coma,--so do these incoherent automatisms sink down at last, through the utterances and drawings of the degenerate and the paranoiac,--through mere fragmentary dreams, or vague impersonal bewilderment,--into the minimum psychical concomitant, whatever that be, which must coexist with brain-circulation.

Such is the apparent parallelism; but of course no knowledge of a hierarchy of the familiar forms of nervous action can really explain to us the mysterious fluctuations of subliminal power.

When we speak of the highest-level and other centres which govern our supraliminal being, and which are fitted to direct this planetary life in a material world, we can to some extent point out actual brain-centres whose action enables us to meet those needs. What are the needs of our cosmic life we do not know; nor can we indicate any point in our organism (as in the "solar plexus," or the like), which is adapted to meet them. We cannot even either affirm or deny that such spiritual life as we maintain while incarnated in this material envelope involves any physical concomitants at all.

For my part, I feel forced to fall back upon the old-world conception of a soul which exercises an imperfect and fluctuating control over the organism; and exercises that control, I would add, along two main channels, only partly coincident--that of ordinary consciousness, adapted to the maintenance and guidance of earth-life; and that of subliminal consciousness, adapted to the maintenance of our larger spiritual life during our confinement in the flesh.

We men, therefore, clausi tenebris et carcere cæco, can sometimes widen, as we must sometimes narrow, our outlook on the reality of things. In mania or epilepsy we lose control even of those highest-level supraliminal centres on which our rational earth-life depends. But through automatism and in trance and allied states we draw into supraliminal life some rivulet from the undercurrent stream. If the subliminal centres which we thus impress into our waking service correspond to the middle-level only, they may bring to us merely error and confusion; if they correspond to the highest-level, they may introduce us to previously unimagined truth.

It is to work done by the aid of some such subliminal uprush, I say once more, that the word "genius" may be most fitly applied. "A work of genius," indeed, in common parlance, means a work which satisfies two quite distinct requirements. It must involve something original, spontaneous, unteachable, unexpected; and it must also in some way win for itself the admiration of mankind. Now, psychologically speaking, the first of these requirements corresponds to a real class, the second to a purely accidental one. What the poet feels while he writes his poem is the psychological fact in his history; what his friends feel while they read it may be a psychological fact in their history, but does not alter the poet's creative effort, which was what it was, whether any one but himself ever reads his poem or no.

And popular phraseology justifies our insistence upon this subjective side of genius. Thus it is common to say that "Hartley Coleridge" (for example) "was a genius, although he never produced anything worth speaking of." Men recognise, that is to say, from descriptions of Hartley Coleridge, and from the fragments which he has left, that ideas came to him with what I have termed a sense of subliminal uprush,--with an authentic, although not to us an instructive, inspiration.

As psychologists, I maintain, we are bound to base our definition of genius upon some criterion of this strictly psychological kind, rather than on the external tests which as artists or men of letters we should employ;--and which consider mainly the degree of delight which any given achievement can bestow upon other men. The artist will speak of the pictorial genius of Raphael, but not of Haydon; of the dramatic genius of Corneille, but not of Voltaire. Yet Haydon's Autobiography--a record of tragic intensity, and closing in suicide--shows that the tame yet contorted figures of his "Raising of Lazarus" flashed upon him with an overmastering sense of direct inspiration. Voltaire, again, writes to the president Hénault of his unreadable tragedy Catilina: "Five acts in a week! I know that this sounds ridiculous; but if men could guess what enthusiasm can do,--how a poet in spite of himself, idolising his subject, devoured by his genius, can accomplish in a few days a task for which without that genius a year would not suffice;--in a word, si scirent donum Dei,--if they knew the gift of God,--their astonishment might be less than it must be now." I do not shrink from these extreme instances. It would be absurd, of course, to place Haydon's "Raising of Lazarus" in the same artistic class as Raphael's "Madonna di San Sisto." But in the same psychological class I maintain that both works must be placed. For each painter, after his several kind, there was the same inward process,--the same sense of subliminal uprush;--that extension, in other words, of mental concentration which draws into immediate cognisance some workings or elements of the hidden self.

Let me illustrate this conception by a return to the metaphor of the "conscious spectrum" to which I introduced my reader in the first chapter. I there described our conscious spectrum as representing but a small fraction of the aurai simplicis ignis, or individual psychical ray;--just as our visible solar spectrum represents but a small fraction of the solar ray. And even as many waves of ether lie beyond the red end, and many beyond the violet end, of that visible spectrum, so have I urged that much of unrecognised or subliminal faculty lies beyond the red (or organic) end, and much beyond the violet (or intellectual) end of my imaginary spectrum. My main task in this book will be to prolong the psychical spectrum beyond either limit, by collecting traces of latent faculties, organic or transcendental:--just as by the bolometer, by fluorescence, by other artifices, physicists have prolonged the solar spectrum far beyond either limit of ordinary visibility.

But at present, and before entering on that task of rendering manifest supernormal faculty, I am considering what we ought to regard as the normal range of faculty from which we start;--what, in relation to man, the words norm and normal should most reasonably mean.

The word normal in common speech is used almost indifferently to imply either of two things, which may be very different from each other--conformity to a standard and position as an average between extremes. Often indeed the average constitutes the standard--as when a gas is of normal density; or is practically equivalent to the standard--as when a sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come to living organisms a new factor is introduced. Life is change; each living organism changes; each generation differs from its predecessor. To assign a fixed norm to a changing species is to shoot point-blank at a flying bird. The actual average at any given moment is no ideal standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary stage now reached is tending, given stability in the environment, to become the average of the future. Human evolution is not so simple or so conspicuous a thing as the evolution of the pouter pigeon. But it would be rash to affirm that it is not even swifter than any variation among domesticated animals. Not a hundred generations separate us from the dawn of history;--about as many generations as some microbes can traverse in a month;--about as many as separate the modern Derby-winner from the war-horse of Gustavus Adolphus. Man's change has been less than the horse's change in physical contour,--probably only because man has not been specially bred with that view;--but taking as a test the power of self-adaptation to environment, man has traversed in these thirty centuries a wider arc of evolution than separates the racehorse from the eohippus. Or if we go back further, and to the primal germ, we see that man's ancestors must have varied faster than any animal's, since they have travelled farthest in the same time. They have varied also in the greatest number of directions; they have evoked in greatest multiplicity the unnumbered faculties latent in the irritability of a speck of slime. Of all creatures man has gone furthest both in differentiation and in integration; he has called into activity the greatest number of those faculties which lay potential in the primal germ,--and he has established over those faculties the strongest central control. The process still continues. Civilisation adds to the complexity of his faculties; education helps him to their concentration. It is in the direction of a still wider range, a still firmer hold, that his evolution now must lie. I shall maintain that this ideal is best attained by the man of genius.

Let us consider the way in which the maximum of faculty is habitually manifested; the circumstances in which a man does what he has never supposed himself able to do before. We may take an instance where the faculty drawn upon lies only a little way beneath the surface. A man, we say, outdoes himself in a great emergency. If his house is on fire, let us suppose, he carries his children out over the roof with a strength and agility which seem beyond his own. That effective impulse seems more akin to instinct than to calculation. We hardly know whether to call the act reflex or voluntary. It is performed with almost no conscious intervention of thought or judgment, but it involves a new and complex adaptation of voluntary muscles such as would need habitually the man's most careful thought to plan and execute. From the point of view here taken the action will appear to have been neither reflex nor voluntary in the ordinary sense, but subliminal;--a subliminal uprush, an emergence of hidden faculty,--of nerve co-ordinations potential in his organism but till now unused,--which takes command of the man and guides his action at the moment when his being is deeply stirred.

This stock instance of a man's possible behaviour in moments of great physical risk does but illustrate in a gross and obvious manner, and in the motor region, a phenomenon which, as I hold, is constantly occurring on a smaller scale in the inner life of most of us. We identify ourselves for the most part with a stream of voluntary, fully conscious ideas,--cerebral movements connected and purposive as the movement of the hand which records them. Meantime we are aware also of a substratum of fragmentary automatic, liminal ideas, of which we take small account. These are bubbles that break on the surface; but every now and then there is a stir among them. There is a rush upwards as of a subaqueous spring; an inspiration flashes into the mind for which our conscious effort has not prepared us. This so-called inspiration may in itself be trivial or worthless; but it is the initial stage of a phenomenon to which, when certain rare attributes are also present, the name of genius will be naturally given.

I am urging, then, that where life is concerned, and where, therefore, change is normality, we ought to place our norm somewhat ahead of the average man, though on the evolutionary track which our race is pursuing. I have suggested that that evolutionary track is at present leading him in the direction of greater complexity in the perceptions which he forms of things without, and of greater concentration in his own will and thought,--in that response to perceptions which he makes from within. Lastly I have argued that men of genius, whose perceptions are presumably more vivid and complex than those of average men, are also the men who carry the power of concentration furthest;--reaching downwards, by some self-suggestion which they no more than we can explain, to treasures of latent faculty in the hidden Self.

I am not indeed here assuming that the faculty which is at the service of the man of genius is of a kind different from that of common men, in such a sense that it would need to be represented by a prolongation of either end of the conscious spectrum. Rather it will be represented by such a brightening of the familiar spectrum as may follow upon an intensification of the central light. For the spectrum of man's conscious faculty, like the solar spectrum, is not continuous but banded. There are groups of the dark lines of obstruction and incapacity, and even in the best of us a dim unequal glow.

It will, then, be the special characteristic of genius that its uprushes of subliminal faculty will make the bright parts of the habitual spectrum more brilliant, will kindle the dim absorption-bands to fuller brightness, and will even raise quite dark lines into an occasional glimmer.

But, if, as I believe, we can best give to the idea of genius some useful distinctness by regarding it in some such way as this, we shall find also that genius will fall into line with many other sensory and motor automatisms to which the word could not naturally be applied. Genius represents a narrow selection among a great many cognate phenomena;--among a great many uprushes or emergences of subliminal faculty both within and beyond the limits of the ordinary conscious spectrum.

It will be more convenient to study all these together, under the heading of sensory or of motor automatism. It will then be seen that there is no kind of perception which may not emerge from beneath the threshold in an indefinitely heightened form, with just that convincing suddenness of impression which is described by men of genius as characteristic of their highest flights. Even with so simple a range of sensation as that which records the lapse of time there are subliminal uprushes of this type, and we shall see that a man may have a sudden and accurate inspiration of what o'clock it is, in just the same way as Virgil might have an inspiration of the second half of a difficult hexameter.

For the purpose of present illustration of the workings of genius it seems well to choose a kind of ability which is quite indisputable, and which also admits of some degree of quantitative measurement. I would choose the higher mathematical processes, were data available; and I may say in passing how grateful I should be to receive from mathematicians any account of the mental processes of which they are conscious during the attainment of their highest results. Meantime there is a lower class of mathematical gift which by its very specialisation and isolation seems likely to throw light on our present inquiry.

During the course of the present century,--and alas! the scientific observation of unusual specimens of humanity hardly runs back further, or so far,--the public of great cities has been from time to time surprised and diverted by some so-called "calculating boy," or "arithmetical prodigy," generally of tender years, and capable of performing "in his head," and almost instantaneously, problems for which ordinary workers would require pencil and paper and a much longer time. In some few cases, indeed, the ordinary student would have no means whatever of solving the problem which the calculating boy unriddled with ease and exactness.

The especial advantage of the study of arithmetical prodigies is that in their case the subjective impression coincides closely with the objective result. The subliminal computator feels that the sum is right, and it is right. Forms of real or supposed genius which are more interesting are apt to be less undeniable.

An American and a French psychologist[28] have collected such hints and explanations as these prodigies have given of their methods of working; methods which one might naturally hope to find useful in ordinary education. The result, however, has been very meagre, and the records left to us, imperfect as they are, are enough to show that the main and primary achievement has in fact been subliminal, while conscious or supraliminal effort has sometimes been wholly absent, sometimes has supervened only after the gift has been so long exercised that the accesses between different strata have become easy by frequent traversing. The prodigy grown to manhood, who now recognises the arithmetical artifices which he used unconsciously as a boy, resembles the hypnotic subject trained by suggestion to remember in waking hours the events of the trance.

In almost every point, indeed, where comparison is possible, we shall find this computative gift resembling other manifestations of subliminal faculty,--such as the power of seeing hallucinatory figures,--rather than the results of steady supraliminal effort, such as the power of logical analysis. In the first place, this faculty, in spite of its obvious connection with general mathematical grasp and insight, is found almost at random,--among non-mathematical and even quite stupid persons, as well as among mathematicians of mark. In the second place, it shows itself mostly in early childhood, and tends to disappear in later life;--in this resembling visualising power in general, and the power of seeing hallucinatory figures in particular; which powers, as both Mr. Galton's inquiries and our own tend to show, are habitually stronger in childhood and youth than in later years. Again, it is noticeable that when the power disappears early in life it is apt to leave behind it no memory whatever of the processes involved. And even when, by long persistence in a reflective mind, the power has become, so to say, adopted into the supraliminal consciousness, there nevertheless may still be flashes of pure "inspiration," when the answer "comes into the mind" with absolutely no perception of intermediate steps.

I subjoin a table, compiled by the help of Dr. Scripture's collection, which will broadly illustrate the main points above mentioned. Some more detailed remarks may then follow.

TABLE OF PRINCIPAL ARITHMETICAL PRODIGIES.

Now among these thirteen names we have two men of transcendent, and three of high ability. What accounts have they given us of their methods?

Of the gift of Gauss and Ampère we know nothing except a few striking anecdotes. After manifesting itself at an age when there is usually no continuous supraliminal mental effort worth speaking of, it appears to have been soon merged in the general blaze of their genius. With Bidder the gift persisted through life, but grew weaker as he grew older. His paper in Vol. XV. of the Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers, while furnishing a number of practical hints to the calculator, indicates also a singular readiness of communication between different mental strata. "Whenever," he says (p. 255) "I feel called upon to make use of the stores of my mind, they seem to rise with the rapidity of lightning." And in Vol. CIII. of the same Proceedings, Mr. W. Pole, F.R.S., in describing how Mr. Bidder could determine mentally the logarithm of any number to 7 or 8 places, says (p. 252): "He had an almost miraculous power of seeing, as it were, intuitively what factors would divide any large number, not a prime. Thus, if he were given the number 17,861, he would instantly remark it was 337×53.... He could not, he said, explain how he did this; it seemed a natural instinct to him."

Passing on to the two other men of high ability known to have possessed this gift, Professor Safford and Archbishop Whately, we are struck with the evanescence of the power after early youth,--or even before the end of childhood. I quote from Dr. Scripture Archbishop Whately's account of his powers.

There was certainly something peculiar in my calculating faculty. It began to show itself at between five and six, and lasted about three years.... I soon got to do the most difficult sums, always in my head, for I knew nothing of figures beyond numeration. I did these sums much quicker than any one could upon paper, and I never remember committing the smallest error. When I went to school, at which time the passion wore off, I was a perfect dunce at ciphering, and have continued so ever since.

Still more remarkable, perhaps, was Professor Safford's loss of power. Professor Safford's whole bent was mathematical; his boyish gift of calculation raised him into notice; and he is now a Professor of Astronomy. He had therefore every motive and every opportunity to retain the gift, if thought and practice could have retained it. But whereas at ten years old he worked correctly in his head, in one minute, a multiplication sum whose answer consisted of 36 figures, he is now, I believe, neither more nor less capable of such calculation than his neighbours.

Similar was the fate of a personage who never rises above initials, and of whose general capacity we know nothing.

"Mr. Van R., of Utica," says Dr. Scripture on the authority of Gall, "at the age of six years distinguished himself by a singular faculty for calculating in his head. At eight he entirely lost this faculty, and after that time he could calculate neither better nor faster than any other person. He did not retain the slightest idea of the manner in which he performed his calculations in childhood."

Turning now to the stupid or uneducated prodigies, Dase alone seems to have retained his power through life. Colburn and Mondeux, and apparently Prolongeau and Mangiamele, lost their gift after childhood.

On the whole the ignorant prodigies seldom appear to have been conscious of any continuous logical process, while in some cases the separation of the supraliminal and subliminal trains of thought must have been very complete. "Buxton would talk freely whilst doing his questions, that being no molestation or hindrance to him."[29] Fixity and clearness of inward visualisation seems to have been the leading necessity in all these achievements; and it apparently mattered little whether the mental blackboard (so to say) on which the steps of the calculation were recorded were or were not visible to the mind's eye of the supraliminal self.

I have been speaking only of visualisation; but it would be interesting if we could discover how much actual mathematical insight or inventiveness can be subliminally exercised. Here, however, our materials are very imperfect. From Gauss and Ampère we have, so far as I know, no record. At the other end of the scale, we know that Dase (perhaps the most successful of all these prodigies) was singularly devoid of mathematical grasp. "On one occasion Petersen tried in vain for six weeks to get the first elements of mathematics into his head." "He could not be made to have the least idea of a proposition in Euclid. Of any language but his own he could never master a word." Yet Dase received a grant from the Academy of Sciences at Hamburg, on the recommendation of Gauss, for mathematical work; and actually in twelve years made tables of factors and prime numbers for the seventh and nearly the whole of the eighth million,--a task which probably few men could have accomplished, without mechanical aid, in an ordinary lifetime. He may thus be ranked as the only man who has ever done valuable service to Mathematics without being able to cross the Ass's Bridge.

No support is given by what we know of this group to the theory which regards subliminal mentation as necessarily a sign of some morbid dissociation of physical elements. Is there, on the other hand, anything to confirm a suggestion which will occur in some similar cases, namely, that,--inasmuch as the addition of subliminal to supraliminal mentation may often be a completion and integration rather than a fractionation or disintegration of the total individuality,--we are likely sometimes to find traces of a more than common activity of the right or less used cerebral hemisphere? Finding no mention of ambidexterity in the meagre notices which have come down to us of the greater "prodigies," I begged the late Mr. Bidder, Q.C., and Mr. Blyth, of Edinburgh (the well-known civil engineer and perhaps the best living English representative of what we may call the calculating diathesis), to tell me whether their left hands possessed more than usual power. And I find that in these--the only two cases in which I have been able to make inquiry--there is somewhat more of dextro-cerebral capacity than in the mass of mankind.

We may now pass on to review some further instances of subliminal co-operation with conscious thought;--first looking about us for any cases comparable in definiteness with the preceding; and then extending our view over the wider and vaguer realm of creative and artistic work.

But before we proceed to the highly-specialised senses of hearing and sight, we must note the fact that there are cases of subliminal intensification of those perceptions of a less specialised kind which underlie our more elaborate modes of cognising the world around us. The sense of the efflux of time, and the sense of weight, or of muscular resistance, are amongst the profoundest elements in our organic being. And the sense of time is indicated in several ways as a largely subliminal faculty. There is much evidence to show that it is often more exact in men sleeping than in men awake, and in men hypnotised than in men sleeping. The records of spontaneous somnambulism are full of predictions made by the subject as to his own case, and accomplished, presumably by self-suggestion, but without help from clocks, at the precise minute foretold. Or this hidden knowledge may take shape in the imagery of dream, as in a case published by Professor Royce, of Harvard,[30] where his correspondent describes "a dream in which I saw an enormous flaming clock-dial with the hands standing at 2.20. Awaking immediately, I struck a match, and upon looking at my watch found it was a few seconds past 2.20."

Similarly we find cases where the uprush of subliminal faculty is concerned with the deep organic sensation of muscular resistance. We need not postulate any direct or supernormal knowledge,--but merely a subliminal calculation, such as we see in the case of "arithmetical prodigies," expressing itself supraliminally, sometimes in a phantasmal picture, sometimes as a mere "conviction," without sensory clothing.[31]

Passing on here to subliminal products of visual type, I am glad to be able to quote the following passage which seems to me to give in germ the very theory for which I am now contending on the authority of one of the most lucid thinkers of the last generation.

The passage occurs in an article by Sir John Herschel on "Sensorial Vision," in his Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 1816. Sir John describes some experiences of his own, "which consist in the involuntary production of visual impressions, into which geometrical regularity of form enters as the leading character, and that, under circumstances which altogether preclude any explanation drawn from a possible regularity of structure in the retina or the optic nerve."[32] Twice these patterns appeared in waking daylight hours,--with no illness or discomfort at the time or afterwards. More frequently they appeared in darkness; but still while Sir John was fully awake. They appeared also twice when he was placed under chloroform; "and I should observe that I never lost my consciousness of being awake and in full possession of my mind, though quite insensible to what was going on.... Now the question at once presents itself--What are these Geometrical Spectres? and how, and in what department of the bodily or mental economy do they originate? They are evidently not dreams. The mind is not dormant, but active and conscious of the direction of its thoughts; while these things obtrude themselves on notice, and by calling attention to them, direct the train of thought into a channel it would not have taken of itself.... If it be true that the conception of a regular geometrical pattern implies the exercise of thought and intelligence, it would almost seem that in such cases as those above adduced we have evidence of a thought, an intelligence, working within our own organisation distinct from that of our own personality." And Sir John further suggests that these complex figures, entering the mind in this apparently arbitrary fashion, throw light upon "the suggestive principle" to which "we must look for much that is determinant and decisive of our volition when carried into action." "It strikes me as not by any means devoid of interest to contemplate cases where, in a matter so entirely abstract, so completely devoid of any moral or emotional bearing, as the production of a geometrical figure, we, as it were, seize upon that principle in the very act, and in the performance of its office."

From my point of view, of course, I can but admire the acumen which enabled this great thinker to pierce to the root of the matter by the aid of so few observations. He does not seem to have perceived the connection between these "schematic phantasms," to borrow a phrase from Professor Ladd,[33] and the hallucinatory figures of men or animals seen in health or in disease. But even from his scanty data his inference seems to me irresistible;--"we have evidence of a thought, an intelligence, working within our own organisation, distinct from that of our own personality." I shall venture to claim him as the first originator of the theory to which the far fuller evidence now accessible had independently led myself.

Cases observed as definitely as those just quoted are few in number; and I must pass on into a much trodden--even a confusedly trampled--field;--the records, namely, left by eminent men as to the element of subconscious mentation, which was involved in their best work. Most of these stories have been again and again repeated;--and they have been collected on a large scale in a celebrated work,--to me especially distasteful, as containing what seems to me the loose and extravagant parody of important truth. It is not my business here to criticise Dr. Von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious in detail; but I prefer to direct my readers' attention to a much more modest volume, in which a young physician has put together the results of a direct inquiry addressed to some Frenchmen of distinction as to their methods especially of imaginative work.[34] I quote a few of the replies addressed to him, beginning with some words from M. Sully Prudhomme,--at once psychologist and poet,--who is here speaking of the subconscious clarification of a chain of abstract reasoning. "I have sometimes suddenly understood a geometrical demonstration made to me a year previously without having in any way directed thereto my attention or will. It seemed that the mere spontaneous ripening of the conceptions which the lectures had implanted in my brain had brought about within me this novel grasp of the proof."

With this we may compare a statement of Arago's--"Instead of obstinately endeavouring to understand a proposition at once, I would admit its truth provisionally;--and next day I would be astonished at understanding thoroughly that which seemed all dark before."

Condillac similarly speaks of finding an incomplete piece of work finished next day in his head.

Somewhat similarly, though in another field, M. Retté, a poet, tells Dr. Chabaneix that he falls asleep in the middle of an unfinished stanza, and when thinking of it again in the morning finds it completed. And M. Vincent d'Indy, a musical composer, says that he often has on waking a fugitive glimpse of a musical effect which (like the memory of a dream) needs a strong immediate concentration of mind to keep it from vanishing.

De Musset writes, "On ne travaille pas, on écoute, c'est comme un inconnu qui vous parle à l'oreille."

Lamartine says, "Ce n'est pas moi qui pense; ce sont mes idées qui pensent pour moi."

Rémy de Gourmont: "My conceptions rise into the field of consciousness like a flash of lightning or like the flight of a bird."

M. S. writes: "In writing these dramas I seemed to be a spectator at the play; I gazed at what was passing on the scene in an eager, wondering expectation of what was to follow. And yet I felt that all this came from the depth of my own being."

Saint-Saens had only to listen, as Socrates to his Dæmon; and M. Ribot, summing up a number of similar cases, says: "It is the unconscious which produces what is vulgarly called inspiration. This condition is a positive fact, accompanied with physical and psychical characteristics peculiar to itself. Above all, it is impersonal and involuntary, it acts like an instinct, when and how it chooses; it may be wooed, but cannot be compelled. Neither reflection nor will can supply its place in original creation.... The bizarre habits of artists when composing tend to create a special physiological condition,--to augment the cerebral circulation in order to provoke or to maintain the unconscious activity."

In what precise way the cerebral circulation is altered we can hardly at present hope to know. Meantime a few psychological remarks fall more easily within our reach.

In the first place, we note that a very brief and shallow submergence beneath the conscious level is enough to infuse fresh vigour into supraliminal trains of thought. Ideas left to mature unnoticed for a few days, or for a single night, seem to pass but a very little way beneath the threshold. They represent, one may say, the first stage of a process which, although often inconspicuous, is not likely to be discontinuous,--the sustenance, namely, of the supraliminal life by impulse or guidance from below.

In the second place, we see in some of these cases of deep and fruitful abstraction a slight approach to duplication of personality. John Stuart Mill, intent on his Principles of Logic, as he threaded the crowds of Leadenhall Street, recalls certain morbid cases of hysterical distraction;--only that with Mill the process was an integrative one and not a dissolutive one--a gain and not a loss of power over the organism.

And thirdly, in some of these instances we see the man of genius achieving spontaneously, and unawares, much the same result as that which is achieved for the hypnotic subject by deliberate artifice. For he is in fact co-ordinating the waking and the sleeping phases of his existence. He is carrying into sleep the knowledge and the purpose of waking hours;--and he is carrying back into waking hours again the benefit of those profound assimilations which are the privilege of sleep. Hypnotic suggestion aims at co-operations of just this kind between the waking state in which the suggestion, say, of some functional change, is planned and the sleeping state in which that change is carried out,--with benefit persisting anew into waking life. The hypnotic trance, which is a developed sleep, thus accomplishes for the ordinary man what ordinary sleep accomplishes for the man of genius.

The coming chapters on Sleep and Hypnotism will illustrate this point more fully. But I may here anticipate my discussion of dreams by quoting one instance where dreams, self-suggested by waking will, formed, as one may say, an integral element in distinguished genius.

The late Robert Louis Stevenson, being in many ways a typical man of genius, was in no way more markedly gifted with that integrating faculty--that increased power over all strata of the personality--which I have ascribed to genius, than in his relation to his dreams (see "A Chapter on Dreams" in his volume Across the Plains). Seldom has the essential analogy between dreams and inspiration been exhibited in such a striking way. His dreams had always (he tells us) been of great vividness, and often of markedly recurrent type. But the point of interest is that, when he began to write stories for publication, the "little people who managed man's internal theatre" understood the change as well as he.

When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off in his box-seat, his little people continued their evolutions with the same mercantile designs.... For the most part, whether awake or asleep, he is simply occupied--he or his little people--in consciously making stories for the market....

The more I think of it, the more I am moved to press upon the world my question: "Who are the Little People?" They are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bank book; they share plainly in his training; ... they have plainly learned like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt,--they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim....

That part [of my work] which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.

Slight and imperfect as the above statistics and observations admittedly are, they seem to me to point in a more useful direction than do some of the facts collected by that modern group of anthropologists who hold that genius is in itself a kind of nervous malady, a disturbance of mental balance, akin to criminality or even to madness.

It is certainly not true, as I hold, either that the human race in general is nervously degenerating, or that nervous degeneration tends to a maximum in its most eminent members. But it can be plausibly maintained that the proportion of nervous to other disorders tends to increase. And it is certain that not nervous degeneration but nervous change or development is now proceeding among civilised peoples more rapidly than ever before, and that this self-adaptation to wider environments must inevitably be accompanied in the more marked cases by something of nervous instability. And it is true also that from one point of view these changes might form matter for regret; and that in order to discern what I take to be their true meaning we have to regard the problem of human evolution from a somewhat unfamiliar standpoint.

The nervous system is probably tending in each generation to become more complex and more delicately ramified. As is usual when any part of an organism is undergoing rapid evolutive changes, this nervous progress is accompanied with some instability. Those individuals in whom the hereditary or the acquired change is the most rapid are likely also to suffer most from a perturbation which masks evolution--an occasional appearance of what may be termed "nervous sports" of a useless or even injurious type. Such are the fancies and fanaticisms, the bizarre likes and dislikes, the excessive or aberrant sensibilities, which have been observed in some of the eminent men whom Lombroso discusses in his book on the Man of Genius. Their truest analogue, as we shall presently see more fully, lies in the oddities or morbidities of sentiment or sensation which so often accompany the development of the human organism into its full potencies, or precede the crowning effort by which a fresh organism is introduced into the world.

Such at least is my view; but the full acceptance of this view must depend upon some very remote and very speculative considerations bearing upon the nature and purport of the whole existence and evolution of man. Yet however remote and speculative the thesis which I defend may be, it is not one whit remoter or more speculative than the view which, faute de mieux, is often tacitly assumed by scientific writers.

In our absolute ignorance of the source from whence life came, we have no ground for assuming that it was a purely planetary product, or that its unknown potentialities are concerned with purely planetary ends. It would be as rash for the biologist to assume that life on earth can only point to generations of further life on earth as it would have been for some cosmic geologist to assume--before the appearance of life on earth--that geological forces must needs constitute all the activity which could take place on this planet.

Since the germ of life appeared on earth, its history has been a history not only of gradual self-adaptation to a known environment, but of gradual discovery of an environment, always there, but unknown. What we call its primitive simple irritability was in fact a dim panæsthesia; a potential faculty, as yet unconscious of all the stimuli to which it had not yet learnt to respond. As these powers of sensation and of response have developed, they have gradually revealed to the living germ environments of which at first it could have no conception.

It is probable, to begin with, that the only environment which the vast majority of our ancestors knew was simply hot water. For the greater part of the time during which life has existed on earth it would have been thought chimerical to suggest that we could live in anything else. It was a great day for us when an ancestor crawled up out of the slowly-cooling sea;--or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for directly breathing air gradually revealed the fact that we had for long been breathing air in the water;--and that we were living in the midst of a vastly extended environment,--the atmosphere of the earth. It was a great day again when another ancestor felt on his pigment-spot the solar ray;--or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for perceiving light revealed the fact that we had for long been acted upon by light as well as by heat; and that we were living in the midst of a vastly extended environment,--namely, the illumined Universe that stretches to the Milky Way. It was a great day when the first skate (if skate he were) felt an unknown virtue go out from him towards some worm or mudfish;--or say rather when a previously unsuspected capacity for electrical excitation demonstrated the fact that we had long been acted upon by electricity as well as by heat and by light; and that we were living in an inconceivable and limitless environment,--namely, an ether charged with infinite energy, overpassing and interpenetrating alike the last gulf of darkness and the extremest star. All this,--phrased perhaps in some other fashion,--all men admit as true. May we not then suppose that there are yet other environments, other interpretations, which a further awakening of faculty still subliminal is yet fated by its own nascent response to discover? Will it be alien to the past history of evolution if I add: It was a great day when the first thought or feeling flashed into some mind of beast or man from a mind distant from his own?--when a previously unsuspected capacity of telepathic percipience revealed the fact that we had long been acted upon by telepathic as well as by sensory stimuli; and that we were living in an inconceivable and limitless environment,--a thought-world or spiritual universe charged with infinite life, and interpenetrating and overpassing all human spirits,--up to what some have called World-Soul, and some God?

And now it will be easily understood that one of the corollaries from the conception of a constantly widening and deepening perception of an environment infinite in infinite ways, will be that the faculties which befit the material environment have absolutely no primacy, unless it be of the merely chronological kind, over those faculties which science has often called by-products, because they have no manifest tendency to aid their possessor in the struggle for existence in a material world. The higher gifts of genius--poetry, the plastic arts, music, philosophy, pure mathematics--all of these are precisely as much in the central stream of evolution--are perceptions of new truth and powers of new action just as decisively predestined for the race of man--as the aboriginal Australian's faculty for throwing a boomerang or for swarming up a tree for grubs. There is, then, about those loftier interests nothing exotic, nothing accidental; they are an intrinsic part of that ever-evolving response to our surroundings which forms not only the planetary but the cosmic history of all our race.

What inconsistencies, what absurdities, underlie that assumption that evolution means nothing more than the survival of animals fittest to conquer enemies and to overrun the earth. On that bare hypothesis the genus homo is impossible to explain. No one really attempts to explain him except on the tacit supposition that Nature somehow tended to evolve intelligence--somehow needed to evolve joy; was not satisfied with such an earth-over-runner as the rabbit, or such an invincible conqueror as the influenza microbe. But how much intelligence, what kind of joy Nature aimed at--is this to be left to be settled by the instinct of l'homme sensuel moyen? or ought we not rather to ask of the best specimens of our race what it is that they live for?--whether they labour for the meat that perisheth, or for Love and Wisdom? To more and more among mankind the need of food is supplied with as little conscious effort as the need of air; yet these are often the very men through whom evolution is going on most unmistakably--who are becoming the typical figures of the swiftly-changing race.

Once more. If this point of view be steadily maintained, we shall gain further light on some of those strangenesses and irregularities of genius which have led to its paradoxical juxtaposition with insanity as a divergence from the accepted human type. The distinctive characteristic of genius is the large infusion of the subliminal in its mental output; and one characteristic of the subliminal in my view is that it is in closer relation than the supraliminal to the spiritual world, and is thus nearer to the primitive source and extra-terrene initiation of life. And earthly Life itself--embodied as it is in psycho-physically individualised forms--is, on the theory advanced in these pages, a product or characteristic of the etherial or metetherial and not of the gross material world. Thence in some unknown fashion it came; there in some unknown fashion it subsists even throughout its earthly manifestation; thither in some unknown fashion it must after earthly death return. If indeed the inspirations of genius spring from a source one step nearer to primitive reality than is that specialised consensus of faculties which natural selection has lifted above the threshold for the purposes of working-day existence, then surely we need not wonder if the mind and frame of man should not always suffice for smooth and complete amalgamation; if some prefiguration of faculties adapted to a later stage of being should mar the symmetry of the life of earth.

And thus there may really be something at times incommensurable between the inspirations of genius and the results of conscious logical thought. Just as the calculating boy solves his problems by methods which differ from the methods of the trained mathematician, so in artistic matters also that "something of strangeness" which is in "all excellent beauty," may be the expression of a real difference between subliminal and supraliminal modes of perception. I cannot help thinking that such a difference is perceptible in subliminal relations to speech; that the subliminal self will sometimes surpass conscious effort, if it is treating speech as a branch of Art, in Poetry;--or else in some sense will fall short of conscious effort, when it is merely using words as an unavoidable medium to express ideas which common speech was hardly designed to convey.

Thus, on the one hand, when in presence of one of the great verbal achievements of the race--say the Agamemnon of Æschylus--it is hard to resist the obscure impression that some form of intelligence other than supraliminal reason or conscious selection has been at work. The result less resembles the perfection of rational choice among known data than the imperfect presentation of some scheme based on perceptions which we cannot entirely follow.

But, on the other hand, even though words may thus be used by genius with something of the mysterious remoteness of music itself, it seems to me that our subliminal mentation is less closely bound to the faculty of speech than is our supraliminal. There is a phrase in common use which involves perhaps more of psychological significance than has yet been brought out. Of all which we can call genius, or which we can ally with genius--of art, of love, of religious emotion--it is common to hear men say that they transcend the scope of speech. Nor have we any reason for regarding this as a mere vague sentimental expression.

There is no a priori ground for supposing that language will have the power to express all the thoughts and emotions of man. It may indeed be maintained that the inevitable course of its development tends to exhibit more and more clearly its inherent limitations. "Every language," it has been said, "begins as poetry and ends as algebra." To use the terms employed in this work, every language begins as a subliminal uprush and ends as a supraliminal artifice. Organic instincts impel to primitive ejaculation; unconscious laws of mind shape early grammar. But even in our own day--and we are still in the earth's infancy--this naïveté of language is fast disappearing. The needs of science and of commerce have become dominant, and although our vocabulary, based as it is on concrete objects and direct sensations, is refined for the expression of philosophic thought, still we cannot wonder if our supraliminal manipulation leaves us with an instrument less and less capable of expressing the growing complexity of our whole psychical being.

What then, we may ask, is the attitude and habit of the subliminal self likely to be with regard to language? Is it not probable that other forms of symbolism may retain a greater proportional importance among those submerged mental operations which have not been systematised for the convenience of communication with other men?

I think that an intelligent study of visual and motor automatism will afford us sufficient proof that symbolism, at any rate pictorial symbolism, becomes increasingly important as we get at the contents of those hidden strata. Telepathic messages, especially, which form, as we shall see, the special prerogative or characteristic of subliminal communication, seem to be conveyed by vague impression or by inward or externalised picture oftener than by articulate speech. And I may so far anticipate later discussion of automatic writings (whether self-inspired or telepathic) as to point out a curious linguistic quality which almost all such writings share. The "messages" of a number of automatists, taken at random, will be sure to resemble each other much more closely than do the supraliminal writings of the same persons. Quite apart from their general correspondence in ideas--which belongs to another branch of our subject--there is among the automatic writings of quite independent automatists a remarkable correspondence of literary style. There is a certain quality which reminds one of a translation, or of the compositions of a person writing in a language which he is not accustomed to talk. These characteristics appear at once in automatic script, even of the incoherent kind; they persist when there is no longer any dream-like incoherence; they are equally marked, even when, as often happens, the automatic script surpasses in intelligence, and even in its own kind of eloquence, the products of the waking or supraliminal mind.

And side by side and intercurrent with these written messages come those strange meaningless arabesques which have been baptized as "spirit-drawings"--though they rarely show any clear trace of the operation of an external intelligence.[35] These complex and fanciful compositions--often absolutely automatic--appear to me like a stammering or rudimentary symbolism; as though the subliminal intelligence were striving to express itself through a vehicle perhaps more congenial to its habits than articulate language.

Returning, then, from these illustrations drawn from actual automatism to our proper subject of genius,--that happy mixture of subliminal with supraliminal faculty,--we may ask ourselves in what kind of subliminal uprush this hidden habit of wider symbolism, of self-communion beyond the limits of speech, will be likely to manifest itself above the conscious threshold.

The obvious answer to this question lies in the one word Art. The inspiration of Art of all kinds consists in the invention of precisely such a wider symbolism as has been above adumbrated. I am not speaking, of course, of symbolism of a forced and mechanical kind--symbolism designed and elaborated as such--but rather of that pre-existent but hidden concordance between visible and invisible things, between matter and thought, between thought and emotion, which the plastic arts, and music, and poetry, do each in their own special field discover and manifest for human wisdom and joy.

In using these words, I must repeat, I am far from adopting the formulæ of any special school. The symbolism of which I speak implies nothing of mysticism. Nor indeed, in my view, can there be any real gulf or deep division between so-called realistic and idealistic schools. All that exists is continuous; nor can Art symbolise any one aspect of the universe without also implicitly symbolising aspects which lie beyond.

And thus in the Arts we have symbolism at every stage of transparency and obscurity; from symbolisms which merely summarise speech to symbolisms which transcend it. Sometimes, as with Music, it is worse than useless to press for too close an interpretation. Music marches, and will march for ever, through an ideal and unimaginable world. Her melody may be a mighty symbolism, but it is a symbolism to which man has lost the key. Poetry's material, on the other hand, is the very language which she would fain transcend. But her utterance must be subliminal and symbolic, if it is to be poetry indeed; it must rise (as has been already hinted) from a realm profounder than deliberate speech; it must come charged, as Tennyson has it, with that "charm in words, a charm no words can give."

Here, too, we must dwell for a moment upon another and higher kind of internal visualisation. I have spoken of the arithmetical prodigy as possessing a kind of internal blackboard, on which he inscribes with ease and permanence his imaginary memoranda. But blackboards are not the only surfaces on which inscriptions can be made. There are other men--prodigies of a different order--whose internal tabula is not of blackened wood, but of canvas or of marble; whose inscriptions are not rows of Arabic numerals but living lines of colour, or curves of breathing stone. Even the most realistic art is something more than transcript and calculation; and for art's higher imaginative achievements there must needs be moments of inward idealisation when visible beauty seems but the token and symbol of beauty unrevealed; when Praxiteles must "draw from his own heart the archetype of the Eros that he made;" when Tintoret must feel with Heraclitus that "whatsoever we see waking is but deadness, and whatsoever sleeping, is but dream."

But when we reach this point we have begun (as I say) to transcend the special province to which, in Chapter I, I assigned the title of genius. I there pointed out that the influence of the subliminal on the supraliminal might conveniently be divided under three main heads. When the subliminal mentation co-operates with and supplements the supraliminal, without changing the apparent phase of personality, we have genius. When subliminal operations change the apparent phase of personality from the state of waking in the direction of trance, we have hypnotism. When the subliminal mentation forces itself up through the supraliminal, without amalgamation, as in crystal-vision, automatic writing, etc., we have sensory or motor automatism. In accordance with this definition, the content of the inspirations of genius is supposed to be of the same general type as the content of ordinary thought. We have regarded genius as crystallising fluid ideas; or, if you will, as concentrating and throwing upwards in its clear fountain a maze of subterranean streams. But we have not regarded it as modifying, in such operation, the ordinary alert wakefulness of the thinker, nor as providing bun with any fresh knowledge, obtainable by supernormal methods alone.

It is plain, however, that such distinctions as those which I have drawn between genius, trance, automatism, cannot possibly be rigid or absolute. They are distinctions made for convenience between different phases of what must really be a continuous process--namely, the influence of the Self below the threshold upon the Self above it. Between each of these definite phases all kinds of connections and intermediate stages must surely exist.

Connections between trance and automatism, indeed, are obvious enough. The difficulty has rather lain in their clear separation. Trance, when habitual, is pretty sure to lead to automatic speech or writing. Automatism, when prolonged, is similarly apt to induce a state of trance.

The links between Genius and these cognate states are of a less conspicuous kind. They do, however, exist in such variety as to confirm in marked fashion the analogies suggested above.

And first, as to the connection between genius and automatism, one may say that just as anger is a brief madness, so the flash of Genius is essentially a brief automatism.

Wordsworth's moments of inspiration, when, as he says,

"Some lovely image in the song rose up Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea,"

were in effect moments of automatic utterance; albeit of utterance held fast in immediate co-operation with the simultaneous workings of the supraliminal self. Such a sudden poetic creation, like the calculating boy's announcement of the product of two numbers, resembles the sudden rush of planchette or pencil, in haste to scrawl some long-wished-for word.

Now extend this momentary automatism a little further. We come then to what is called the faculty of improvisation. How much is meant by this term? Is the extempore oration, "the unpremeditated lay," in truth a subliminal product? or have we to do merely with the rapid exercise of ordinary powers?

In the first place, it is clear that much of what is called improvisation is a matter of memory. The so-called secondary automatism which enables the pianist to play a known piece without conscious attention passes easily into improvisations which the player himself may genuinely accept as original; but which really consist of remembered fragments united by conventional links of connection. Thus also the orator, "thinking on his legs," trusts himself at first to the automatic repetition of a few stock phrases, but gradually finds that long periods flow unforeseen and unremembered from his tongue.

We thus get beyond the range of stereotyped synergies, of habituations of particular groups of nerve-centres to common action. There is some adaptability and invention; some new paths are traversed; adjustments are made for which no mere recurrence to old precedents will suffice.

The problem here resembles that well-known difficulty of explaining what goes on during the restoration or "substitution" of function after an injury to the brain. In that case, the brain-elements which remain uninjured slowly assume functions which they apparently never exercised before,--rearranging paths of cerebral communication in order to get the old efficiency out of the damaged and diminished brain-material. This recovery is not rapid like an extemporisation, but gradual, like a healing or re-growth, and it therefore does not suggest an intelligent control so much as a physiological process, like the re-budding on a certain pre-ordained pattern of the severed claw of a crab. Of course this restoration of brain-functions is inexplicable, as all growth is at present inexplicable. We may call it indeed with some reason the highest process of human growth. So viewed, it forms a kind of middle term between ordinary growth of bone or muscle, always on a predetermined plan, and that sudden creation of new cerebral connections or pathways which is implied in an inspiration of genius. Such a juxtaposition need not weaken my claim that the inspirations of genius represent a co-operant stream of submerged mentation, fully as developed in its own way as the mentation of which we are conscious above the threshold. The nature and degree of subliminal faculty must of course be judged by its highest manifestations. And this analogy between the hidden operations of genius and of growth would rather support me in regarding organic growth also as controlled by something of intelligence or memory, which under fitting conditions--as in the hypnotic trance--may be induced to co-operate with the waking will.

Moreover, the talent of improvisation, which suggested these analogies, will sometimes act much more persistently than in the case of the orator or the musician. There is reason to believe (both from internal style and from actual statements) that it plays a large part in imaginative literature. Various passages from George Sand's life-history, corroborated by the statements of other persons familiar with her methods of working, reveal in her an unusual vigour and fertility of literary outflow going on in an almost dream-like condition; a condition midway between the actual inventive dreams of R. L. Stevenson and the conscious labour of an ordinary man's composition.

What George Sand felt in the act of writing was a continuous and effortless flow of ideas, sometimes with and sometimes without an apparent externalisation of the characters who spoke in her romances. And turning to another author, as sane and almost as potent as George Sand herself, we find a phenomenon which would have suggested to us actual insanity if observed in a mind less robust and efficient. If the allusions to the apparent independence of Dickens's characters which are scattered through his letters be read with our related facts in view, it will no longer be thought that they are intended as a mystification. Mrs. Gamp, his greatest creation, spoke to him, he tells us (generally in church) as with an inward monitory voice.

And note further that as scientific introspection develops we are likely to receive fuller accounts of these concurrent mental processes, these partial externalisations of the creatures of the romancer's brain. One such account, both definite and elaborate, has been published by M. Binet in L'Année Psychologique for 1894.[36]

This account,--contributed as serious evidence, as M. Binet's long article shows,--is thoroughly concordant with several other cases already known to us. It comes midway between Stevenson's dreams and the hysteric's idées fixes.

I have thus far endeavoured to show that Genius represents not only the crystallisation of ideas already existing in floating form in the supraliminal intelligence, but also an independent, although concurrent, stream of mentation, spreading often to wider range, although still concerned with matters in themselves cognisable by the normal intelligence.

Let us proceed to push the inquiry a step further. It has been claimed in this work for subliminal uprushes generally that they often contain knowledge which no ordinary method of research could acquire. Is this supernormal knowledge--we ought now to ask--ever represented in the uprushes to which we give the name of Genius?

What is the relation, in short, of the man of Genius to the sensitive?

If the man of Genius be, as I have urged, on the whole the completest type of humanity, and if the sensitive's special gift be in itself one of the most advanced forms of human faculty, ought not the inspirations of genius to bring with them flashes of supernormal knowledge as intimate as those which the sensitive--perhaps in other respects a commonplace person--from time to time is privileged to receive?

Some remarkable instances of this kind undoubtedly do exist. The most conspicuous and most important of all cannot, from motives of reverence, be here discussed. Nor will I dwell upon other founders of religions, or on certain traditional saints or sages. But among historical characters of the first mark the names of Socrates and of Joan of Arc are enough to cite. I believe that the monitions of the Dæmon of Socrates--the subliminal self of a man of transcendent genius--have in all probability been described to us with literal truth: and did in fact convey to that great philosopher precisely the kind of telæsthetic or precognitive information which forms the sensitive's privilege to-day. We have thus in Socrates the ideal unification of human powers.

It must, however, be admitted that such complete unification is not the general rule for men of genius; that their inspirations generally stop short of telepathy or of telæsthesia. I think we may explain this limitation somewhat as follows. The man of genius is what he is by virtue of possessing a readier communication than most men possess between his supraliminal and his subliminal self. From his subliminal self, he can only draw what it already possesses; and we must not assume as a matter of course that the subliminal region of any one of us possesses that particular sensitivity--that specific transparency--which can receive and register definite facts from the unseen. That may be a gift which stands as much alone--in independence of other gifts or faculties--in the subliminal region as, say, a perfect musical ear in the supraliminal. The man of genius may draw much from those hidden wells of being without seeing reflected therein any actual physical scene in the universe beyond his ordinary ken.

And yet neither must we hastily assume that because the man of genius gets no definite impression of a world beyond our senses he does not therefore get any true impression, which is all his own.

I believe, on the contrary, that true, though vague, impressions of a world beyond the range of sense are actually received--I do not say by all men of genius, but by men of genius of certain types.[37]

A dim but genuine consciousness of the spiritual environment; that (it seems) is the degree of revelation which artistic or philosophic genius is capable of conferring. Subliminal uprushes, in other words, so far as they are intellectual, tend to become telæsthetic. They bring with them indefinite intimations of what I hold to be the great truth that the human spirit is essentially capable of a deeper than sensorial perception, of a direct knowledge of facts of the universe outside the range of any specialised organ or of any planetary view.

But this conclusion points the way to a speculation more important still. Telæsthesia is not the only spiritual law, nor are subliminal uprushes affairs of the intellect alone. Beyond and above man's innate power of world-wide perception, there exists also that universal link of spirit with spirit which in its minor earthly manifestations we call telepathy. Our submerged faculty--the subliminal uprushes of genius--can expand in that direction as well as in the direction of telæsthesia. The emotional content, indeed, of those uprushes is even profounder and more important than the intellectual;--in proportion as Love and Religion are profounder and more important than Science or Art.

That primary passion, I repeat, which binds life to life, which links us both to life near and visible and to life imagined but unseen;--that is no mere organic, no mere planetary impulse, but the inward aspect of the telepathic law. Love and religion are thus continuous; they represent different phases of one all-pervading mutual gravitation of souls. The flesh does not conjoin, but dissever; although through its very severance it suggests a shadow of the union which it cannot bestow. We have to do here neither with a corporeal nor with a purely human emotion. Love is the energy of integration which makes a Cosmos of the Sum of Things.

But here there is something of controversy to traverse before a revived Platonic conception of love can hope to be treated by the physiologist as more than a pedantic jest. And naturally so; since there is no emotion subliminal over so wide a range of origin,--fed so obscurely by "all thoughts, all passions, all delights,"--and consequently so mysterious even to the percipient himself. At one end of its scale love is based upon an instinct as primitive as the need of nutrition; even if at the other end it becomes, as Plato has it, the [Greek: hermêneuon kai] "the Interpreter and Mediator between God and Man." The controversy as to the planetary or cosmical scope of the passion of Love is in fact central to our whole subject.

It will give clearness to the question in dispute if I quote here a strong expression of each view in turn. For the physiological or materialist conception of the passion of love,--where love's subliminal element is held to be of the organic type,--set forth in no light or cynical spirit, but with the moral earnestness of a modern Lucretius, I can turn to no better authority than Professor Pierre Janet. The passage which follows is no mere boutade or paradox; it is a kind of culminating expression of the theory which regards the supraliminal man as the normal man, and distrusts all deep disturbance of his accustomed psychical routine.

It is commonly said that love is a passion to which man is always liable, and which may surprise him at any moment of his life from 15 to 75. This does not seem to me accurate; and a man is not throughout all his life and at every moment susceptible of falling in love (de devenir amoureux). When a man is in good physical and moral health, when he has easy and complete command of all his ideas, he may expose himself to circumstances the most capable of giving rise to a passion, but he will not feel it. His desires will be reasonable and obedient to his will, leading the man only so far as he wishes to go, and disappearing when he wishes to be rid of them. On the other hand, if a man is morally below the mark (malade au moral),--if in consequence of physical fatigue or excessive intellectual work, or of violent shocks and prolonged sorrow, he is exhausted, melancholy, distracted, timid, incapable of controlling his ideas,--in a word, depressed,--then he will fall in love, or receive the germ of some kind of passion, on the first and most trivial occasion.... The least thing is then enough; the sight of some face, a gesture, a word, which previously would have left us altogether indifferent, strikes us, and becomes the starting point of a long amorous malady. Or more than this, an object which had made no impression on us, at a moment when our mind was healthier and not capable of inoculation, may have left in us some insignificant memory which reappears in a moment of morbid receptivity. That is enough; the germ is sown in a favourable soil; it will develop itself and grow.

There is at first, as in every virulent malady, a period of incubation; the new idea passes and repasses in the vague reveries of the enfeebled consciousness; then seems for a few days to have disappeared and to leave the mind to recover from its passing trouble. But the idea has done its work below the surface; it has become strong enough to shake the body; and to provoke movements whose origin lies outside the primary consciousness. What is the surprise of a sensible man when he finds himself piteously returning beneath the windows of his charmer, whither his wandering feet have taken him without his knowledge;--or when in the midst of his daily work he hears his lips murmuring perpetually the well-known name!... Such is passion in its reality; not as idealised by fantastic description, but reduced to its essential psychological characteristics. (L'Automatisme Psychologique, p. 466.)

On the other side I will appeal to Plato himself, giving a brief sketch merely of one of the leading passages (Symposium, 192-212) where the Platonic conception of love is set forth.[38]

Plato begins by recognising, as fully as pessimist or cynic could do, the absolute inadequacy of what is called on earth the satisfaction of this profound desire. Lovers who love aright will feel that no physical nearness can content them, but what will content them they cannot say. "Their soul," says Plato, "is manifestly desiring something else; and what it is she cannot tell, only she darkly prophesies thereof and guesses it from afar. But if Hephæstus with his forging fire were to stand beside that pair and say: 'Is this what ye desire--to be wholly one? to be together by night and day?--for I am ready to melt you together and to make you grow in one, so that from two ye shall become one only, and in this life shall be undivided, and dying shall die together, and in the underworld shall be a single soul';--there is no lover who would not eagerly accept the offer, and acknowledge it as the expression of the unknown yearning and the fulfilment of the ancient need." And through the mouth of Diotima, Plato insists that it is an unfailing sign of true love that its desires are for ever; nay, that love may be even defined as the desire of the everlasting possession of the good. And in all love's acts he finds the impress of man's craving for immortality,--for immortality whose only visible image for us on earth is the birth of children to us as we ourselves decay,--so that when the slow self-renewal of our own everchanging bodies has worn out and ceased, we may be renewed in brighter, younger bodies which we desire to be born to us from whomsoever we find most fair. "And then," says Plato, rising, as ever, from visible to invisible things, "if active bodies have so strong a yearning that an endless series of lovely images of themselves may constitute, as it were, an earthly immortality for them when they have worn away, how greatly must creative souls desire that partnership and close communion with other souls as fair as they may bring to birth a brood of lofty thoughts, poems, statues, institutions, laws,--the fitting progeny of the soul?

"And he who in his youth hath the need of these things in him, and grows to be a godlike man, wanders about in search of a noble and well-nurtured soul; and finding it, and in presence of that beauty which he forgets not night or day, brings forth the beautiful which he conceived long ago; and the twain together tend that which he hath brought forth, and are bound by a far closer bond than that of earthly children, since the children which are born to them are fairer and more immortal far. Who would not choose to have Homer's offspring rather than any sons or daughters of men? Who would not choose the offspring which Lycurgus left behind him, to be the very salvation of Lacedæmon and of Greece? or the children of Solon, whom we call Father of our Laws? or of other men like these, whether Greeks or barbarians, who by great deeds that they have done have become the begetters of every kind of virtue?--ay, and to these men's children have temples been set up, and never to any other progeny of man...."

"He, then, who to this end would strive aright, must begin in youth to seek fair forms, and should learn first to love one fair form only, and therein to engender noble thoughts. And then he will perceive that the beauty of one fair form is to the beauty of another near akin; and that if it be Beauty's self he seek, it were madness not to account the beauty of all forms as one same thing; and considering this, he will be the lover of all lovely shapes, and will abate his passion for one shape alone, despising and deeming it but a little thing. And this will lead him on to see that the beauty of the soul is far more precious than any beauty of outward form, so that if he find a fair soul, though it be in a body which hath but little charm, he will be constant thereunto, and bring to birth such thoughts as teach and strengthen, till he lead that soul on to see the beauty of actions and of laws, and how all beauty is in truth akin, and the body's beauty is but a little matter; and from actions he will lead him on to sciences, that he may see how sciences are fair; and looking on the abundance of beauty may no longer be as the slave or bondman of one beauty or of one law; but setting sail into the ocean of beauty, and creating and beholding many fair and glorious thoughts and images in a philosophy without stint or stay, he may thus at last wax strong and grow, and may perceive that there is one science only, the science of infinite beauty.

"For he who hath thus far had intelligence of love, and hath beheld all fair things in order and aright,--he drawing near to the end of things lovable shall behold a BEING marvellously fair; for whose sake in truth it is that all the previous labours have been undergone: One who is from everlasting, and neither is born nor perisheth, nor can wax nor wane, nor hath change or turning or alteration of foul and fair; nor can that beauty be imagined after the fashion of face or hands or bodily parts and members, nor in any form of speech or knowledge, nor as dwelling in aught but in itself; neither in beast nor man nor earth nor heaven nor any other creature; but Beauty only and alone and separate and eternal, which, albeit all other fair things partake thereof and grow and perish, itself without change or increase or diminution endures for everlasting. And whoso being led on and upward by human loves begins to see that Beauty, he is not far, I say, from reaching the end of all. And surely then, O Socrates (said that guest from Mantinea), man's life is worth the living, when he beholds that Primal Fair; which when thou seest it shall not seem to thee to be made after the fashion of gold or raiment or those forms of earth,--whom now beholding thou art stricken dumb, and fain, if it were possible, without thought of meat or drink, wouldst look and love for ever. What would it be, then, were it granted to any man to see Very Beauty clear;--incorruptible and undefiled, not mingled with colour or flesh of man, or with aught that can consume away, but single and divine? Could man's life, in that vision and beatitude, be poor or low? or deemest thou not (said she), that then alone it will be possible for this man, discerning spiritual beauty with those eyes by which it is spiritually discerned, to beget no shadows of virtue, since that is no shadow to which he clings, but virtue in very truth, since he hath the very Truth in his embrace? and begetting and rearing Virtue as his child, he must needs become the friend of God; and if there be any man who is immortal, that man is he."

Between the aspects of love here expressed in extreme terms,--the planetary aspect, if I may so term it, and the cosmical,--the choice is momentous. I do not indeed say that in our estimate of love is involved our estimate of Religion; for Religion should mean the sane response of the spirit to all that is known of Cosmic Law. But Religion in the sense in which it is often used,--our emotional and ethical attitude towards Life Unseen;--this is in reality too closely parallel to Platonic Love to allow the psychologist who denies reality in the one to assume reality in the other. For the Platonic lover the image of the Beloved one--no longer a matter of conscious summons and imagination--has become the indwelling and instinctive impulse to noble thought and deed. Even such to a Francis or to a Theresa is the image of the Divinity whom they adore; and if they claim that sometimes in moments of crisis they feel a sway, a guidance, a communicatio idiomatum with the Divine, we may point in reply to the humbler, but more tangible, evidence which assures us that even between souls still inhabiting and souls who have quitted the flesh there may exist a telepathic intercommunication and an impalpable confluence from afar.

Brief as this survey has been, it has served to indicate that the psychical type to which we have applied the name of genius may be recognized in every region of thought and emotion, as in each direction a man's every-day self may be more or less permeable to subliminal impulses. Coming, then, to the question, "What is the origin of genius?" I cannot accept the ordinary explanation that it is a mere "sport" or mental by-product, occurring as physical "sports" do in the course of evolution. The view which I hold,--the view which I am here suggesting, is in some sort a renewal of the old Platonic "reminiscence," in the light of that fuller knowledge which is common property to-day. I hold that in the protoplasm or primary basis of all organic life there must have been an inherent adaptability to the manifestation of all faculties which organic life has in fact manifested. I hold, of course, that "sports" or variations occur, which are at present unpredictable, and which reveal in occasional offspring faculties which their parents showed no signs of possessing. But I differ from those who hold that the faculty itself thus manifested is now for the first time initiated in that stock by some chance combination of hereditary elements. I hold that it is not initiated, but only revealed; that the "sport" has not called a new faculty into being, but has merely raised an existing faculty above the threshold of supraliminal consciousness.

This view, if pushed back far enough, is no doubt inconsistent with the way in which evolution is generally conceived. For it denies that all human faculties must have been evoked by terrene experience. It assumes a subliminal self, with unknown faculties, originated in some unknown way, and not merely by contact with the needs which the terrene organism has had to meet. It thus seems at first sight to be introducing a new mystery, and to be introducing it in a gratuitous way.

To this I reply in the first place that so far as the origin of man's known powers is concerned, no fresh mystery is in fact introduced. All human powers, to put the thing broadly, have somehow or other to be got into protoplasm and then got out again. You have to explain first how they became implicit in the earliest and lowest living thing, and then how they have become thus far explicit in the latest and highest. All the faculties of that highest being, I repeat, existed virtually in the lowest, and in so far as the admitted faculties are concerned, the difference between my view and the ordinary view may be said to be little more than a difference as to the sense which that word virtually is here to assume.

The real difference between the two views appears when the faculties which I have called unknown come to be considered. If they are held to be real, my view is certainly the better able to embrace them. I hold that telepathy and telæsthesia do in fact exist--telepathy, a communication between incarnate mind and incarnate mind, and perhaps between incarnate minds and minds unembodied; telæsthesia, a knowledge of things terrene which overpasses the limits of ordinary perception, and which perhaps also achieves an insight into some other than terrene world. And these faculties, I say, cannot have been acquired by natural selection, for the preservation of the race, during the process of terrene evolution; they were (as we may phrase it) the products of extra-terrene evolution. And if they were so, man's other powers may well have been so also. The specialised forms of terrene perception were not real novelties in the universe, but imperfect adaptations of protoplasm to the manifestation of the indwelling general perceptive power. The mathematical faculty, for instance (we may, perhaps, say with Plato), pre-existed. When Dase solved all those sums in his head, his power of solving them was not a fresh development in his ancestral stock, but depended on the accidental adaptation of his organism to the manifestation of the indwelling computative power. I do not indeed venture to follow Plato in his ontogenetic argument--his claim that the individual computator has had already an individual training in computation. I do not say that Dase himself learnt or divined the multiplication-table in some ideal world. I only say that Dase and all the rest of us are the spawn or output of some unseen world in which the multiplication-table is, so to speak, in the air. Dase trailed it after him, as the poet says of the clouds of glory, when he "descended into generation" in a humble position at Hamburg.

In him and in his ancestors were many faculties which were called out by the struggle for existence, and became supraliminal. But there were many faculties also which were not thus called out, and which consequently remained subliminal. To these faculties, as a rule, his supraliminal self could get no access. But by some chance of evolution--some sport--a vent-hole was opened at this one point between the different strata of his being, and a subliminal uprush carried his computative faculty into the open day.

Two things, of course, are assumed in this argument for which Science offers no guarantee. I assume in the man a soul which can draw strength and grace from a spiritual Universe, and conversely I assume in the Universe a Spirit accessible and responsive to the soul of man. These are familiar postulates. Every religion has claimed them in turn; although every religion in turn has so narrowed their application as grievously to narrow the evidence available for their support. But that which religions have claimed for their Founders or for their Saints--and what is sanctity but the genius of the ethical realm?--Psychology must claim for every form of spiritual indrawing, every form of spiritual response; for sleeping vision, for hypnotic rejuvenation, for sensory and motor automatisms, for trance, for ecstasy. The philosopher who has cried with Marcus Aurelius "Either Providence or atoms!"--who has declared that without this basis in the Unseen, "the moral Cosmos would be reduced to a Chaos";--should he not welcome even the humblest line of research which fain would gather from every unsolved problem some hint as to the spiritual law unknown which in time may give the solution of all?

We know not in what directions--directions how definitely predetermined--even physical organisms can vary from the common type. We know not what amount of energy any given plant or animal can absorb and incorporate from earth and air and sun. Still less can we predict or limit the possible variations of the soul, the fulness which it may receive from the World-Soul, its possible heritage of grace and truth. But in genius we can watch at each stage the processes of this celestial nurture. We can imagine the outlook of joyous trustfulness; we can almost seem, with Wordsworth, to remember the child's soul entering into the Kingdom of Heaven. Childhood is genius without capacity; it makes for most of us our best memory of inspiration, and our truest outlook upon the real, which is the ideal, world.

From a greater distance we can watch the inward stir of mighty thought, the same for Æschylus, for Newton, for Virgil;--a stir independent of worldly agitation; like the swing and libration of the tide-wave across the ocean, which takes no note of billow or of storm.

Nay, we can see against the sun "the eagle soaring above the tomb of Plato," and in Paul, as in Plotinus, we can catch that sense of self-fulfilment in self-absorption, of rapture, of deliverance, which the highest minds have bequeathed to us as the heritage of their highest hours.

These our spiritual ancestors are no eccentrics nor degenerates; they have made for us the sanest and most fruitful experiment yet made by man; they have endeavoured to exalt the human race in a way in which it can in truth be exalted; they have drawn on forces which exist, and on a Soul which answers; they have dwelt on those things "by dwelling on which it is," as Plato has it, "that even God is divine."

IV. SLEEP

[Greek: olbia d' hapantes aisa lysiponon metanissontai teleutan. kai sôma men pantôn hepetai thanatô peristhenei, zôon d' eti leipetai aiônos eidôlon; to gar esti monon ek theôn; heudei de prassontôn meleôn, atar heudontessin en pollois oneirois deiknysi terpnôn epserpoisan chalepôn te krisin.]

--PINDAR.

The preceding chapters have carried us two steps upon our way. In Chapter II. we gained some insight into the structure of human personality by analysing some of the accidents to which it is subject; in the third chapter we viewed this personality in its normal waking state, and considered how that norm should be defined, and in what manner certain fortunate persons had integrated the personality still further by utilising uprushes of subliminal faculty to supplement or to crystallise the products of supraliminal thought.

The review of these two chapters indicates clearly enough what my next step must be. It is obvious that in my review of phases or alternations of personality I have left out of sight the most constant, the most important alternation of all. I have thus far said nothing of sleep. Yet that change of personality, at least, has been borne in on every one's notice;--not, certainly, as a morbid curiosity, but as an essential part of life.

Let us then consider the specific characteristics of sleep. The definition of sleep is an acknowledged crux in physiology. And I would point out that the increased experience of hypnotic sleep which recent years have afforded has made this difficulty even more striking than before. A physiological explanation must needs assume that some special bodily condition,--such, for instance, as the clogging of the brain by waste-products,--is at least the usual antecedent of sound sleep. But it is certain, on the other hand, that with a large percentage of persons profound and prolonged sleep can be induced, in any bodily condition, by simple suggestion. Hypnosis, indeed (as Wetterstrand and others have shown) may be prolonged, with actual benefit to the sleeper, far beyond the point which the spontaneous sleep of a healthy subject ever reaches. A good subject can be awakened and thrown into hypnosis again almost at pleasure, and independently of any state either of nutrition or of fatigue. Such sleep belongs to those phenomena which we may call nervous if we will, but which we can observe or influence from the psychological side alone.

We can hardly hope, from the ordinary data, to arrive at a definition of sleep more satisfactory than others have reached. We must defer that attempt until we have collected something more than the ordinary evidence as to what occurs or does not occur during the abeyance of waking life. One point, however, is plain at once. We cannot treat sleep,--as it has generally been treated,--in its purely negative aspect. We cannot be content merely to dwell, with the common text-books, on the mere absence of waking faculties;--on the diminution of external perception, the absence of controlling intelligence. We must treat sleep positively, so far as we can, as a definite phase of our personality, co-ordinate with the waking phase. Each phase, as I believe, has been differentiated alike from a primitive indifference;--from a condition of lowly organisms which merited the name neither of sleep nor of waking. Nay, if there were to be a contest as to which state should be deemed primary and which secondary, sleep might put forward its claim to be regarded as the more primitive phase. It is sleep rather than vigilance which prenatal and infantile life suggest; and even for us adults, however much we may associate ourselves in thought with the waking state alone, that state has at least thus much of secondary and adventitious that it is maintained for short periods only, which we cannot artificially lengthen, being plainly unable to sustain itself without frequent recourse to that fuller influx of vitality which slumber brings.

Out of slumber proceeds each fresh arousal and initiation of waking activities. What other activities may in slumber be aroused and initiated the evidence to be set forth in this chapter should help us to say. To some extent at least the abeyance of the supraliminal life must be the liberation of the subliminal. To some extent the obscuration of the noonday glare of man's waking consciousness must reveal the far-reaching faint corona of his unsuspected and impalpable powers.

Entering, then, upon a review of sleeping faculty, thus inevitably imperfect, we may best begin from the red end of our spectrum of consciousness;--the red end which represents the deepest power which waking effort can exert upon our physical organism.

Our survey of the efficacy of sleep, indeed, must make its beginning beyond that limit. For assuredly in sleep some agency is at work which far surpasses waking efficacy in this respect. It is a fully admitted, although an absolutely unexplained fact, that the regenerative quality of healthy sleep is something sui generis, which no completeness of waking quiescence can rival or approach. A few moments of sleep--a mere blur across the field of consciousness--will sometimes bring a renovation which hours of lying down in darkness and silence would not yield. A mere bowing of the head on the breast, if consciousness ceases for a second or two, may change a man's outlook on the world. At such moments,--and many persons, like myself, can fully vouch for their reality,--one feels that what has occurred in one's organism,--alteration of blood-pressure, or whatever it be,--has been in some sense discontinuous; that there has been a break in the inward régime, amounting to much more than a mere brief ignoring of stimuli from without. The break of consciousness is associated in some way with a potent physiological change. That is to say, even in the case of a moment of ordinary sleep we already note the appearance of that special recuperative energy which is familiar in longer periods of sleep, and which, as we shall presently see, reaches a still higher level in hypnotic trance.

This recuperative power, then, lies just beyond the red end of our spectrum of waking faculty. In that obscure region we note only added power; an increased control over organic functions at the foundation of bodily life. But when we pass on within the limits of our spectrum of waking consciousness;--when we come to control over voluntary muscles, or to sensory capacity, we find that our comparison between sleeping and waking faculty is no longer a simple one. On the one hand, there is of course a general blank and abeyance of control over the realm of waking energies;--or in partial sleep a mere fantastic parody of those energies in incoherent dream. On the other hand, we find that sleep is capable of strange developments,--and that night can sometimes suddenly outdo the most complex achievements of day.

Take first the degree of control over the voluntary muscles. In ordinary sleep this is neither possessed nor desired; in nightmare its loss is exaggerated, in quasi-hysterical fashion, into an appalling fear; while in somnambulism,--a kind of new personality developed ad hoc,--the sleeper (as we shall see later on) walks on perilous ridges with steady feet. I have already said that morbid somnambulism bears to sound sleep a relation something like that which hysteria bears to normal life. But between the healthy somnambulist and the subject of nightmare we find from another point of view a contrast resembling that between the man of genius and the hysteric. The somnambulist, like the man of genius, brings into play resources which are beyond ordinary reach. On the other hand, just as in many hysterics certain ordinary powers of movement have lapsed below voluntary control, so also the dreamer who dimly wishes to move a constrained limb is often unable to send thither a sufficient current of motor energy to effect the desired change of position. That nightmare inability to move, which we thus feel in dream,--"when neither he that fleeth can flee, nor he that pursueth pursue,"--that sensation which both Homer and Virgil have selected as the type of paralysing bewilderment,[39]--this is just the aboulia of the hysteric;--the condition when it takes a man half an hour to put on his hat, or when a woman sits all the morning looking at her knitting, but unable to add a stitch.

"Somnambulism," however, is too vague and undefined a term for our present discussion. It will only be by a comparison with hypnotism, in the next chapter, that we can hope to get some clearer notion of "sleep-waking" states.

Let us pass on to consider entencephalic sensory faculty,--"mind's eye" faculty,--as shown in sleep or dream. Here too we shall find the same rule to prevail as with motor faculty. That is to say, on the whole the sensory faculty is of course dimmed and inhibited by sleep; but there are nevertheless indications of a power subsisting as vividly as ever, or with even added acuteness.

Baillarger in France and Griesinger in Germany (both about 1845) were among the first to call attention to the vivid images which rise before the internal vision of many persons, between sleep and waking. M. Alfred Maury, the well-known Greek scholar and antiquary, gave to these images a few years later the title of illusions hypnagogiques, and published a remarkable series of observations upon himself. Mr. Galton has further treated of them in his Inquiry into Human Faculty; and cases will be found in Phantasms of the Living, vol. i, pp. 390, 473, etc.

These visions may be hypnopompic as well as hypnagogic;--may appear, that is to say, at the moment when slumber is departing as well as at the moment when it is coming on;--and in either case they are closely related to dreams; the "hypnagogic illusions" or pictures being sometimes repeated in dream (as with Maury), and the hypnopompic pictures consisting generally in the persistence of some dream-image into the first moments of waking. In either case they testify to an intensified power of inward visualisation at a very significant moment;--a moment which is actually or virtually one of sleep, but which yet admits of definite comparison with adjacent moments of waking. We may call the condition one of cerebral or "mind's eye" hyperæsthesia,--an exalted sensibility of special brain-centres in response to those unknown internal stimuli which are always giving rise to similar but fainter inward visions even in broadly waking hours.

For those who are already good visualisers such phenomena as these, though striking enough, present no quite unique experience. For bad visualisers, on the other hand, the vividness of these hypnagogic pictures may be absolutely a revelation.

The degree of acuteness, not of the visualising faculty alone, but of all the senses in dream, is a subject for direct observation, and even--for persons who can at all control their dreams--for direct experiment. Some correspondents report a considerable apparent accession of sensory power in dream. Others again speak of the increased vividness of dramatic conception, or of what has been called in a hypnotic subject "objectivation of types." "In each of these dreams," writes one lady, "I was a man;--in one of them a low brute, in the other a dipsomaniac. I never had the slightest conception of how such persons felt or thought until these experiences." Another correspondent speaks of dreaming two disconnected dreams,--one emotional and one geometrical,--simultaneously, and of consequent sense of confusion and fatigue.

The "Chapter on Dreams," in R. L. Stevenson's volume, Across the Plains (already referred to in the last chapter), contains a description of the most successful dream-experiments thus far recorded. By self-suggestion before sleep Stevenson could secure a visual and dramatic intensity of dream-representation which furnished him with the motives for some of his most striking romances. His account, written with admirable psychological insight, is indispensable to students of this subject. I am mentioning these well-known phenomena, as the reader will understand, with a somewhat novel purpose--to show, namely, that the internal sensory perceptions or imaginative faculty of sleep may exceed that of vigilance in something the same way as the recuperative agency of sleep surpasses the vis medicatrix of waking hours.

I pass on to a less frequent phenomenon, which shows us at once intense imagination during sleep, and a lasting imprint left by these imaginations upon the waking organism;--an unintended self-suggestion which we may compare with Stevenson's voluntary self-suggestion mentioned just above.

The permanent result of a dream, I say, is sometimes such as to show that the dream has not been a mere superficial confusion of past waking experiences, but has had an unexplained potency of its own,--drawn, like the potency of hypnotic suggestion, from some depth in our being which the waking self cannot reach. Two main classes of this kind are conspicuous enough to be easily recognised--those, namely, where the dream has led to a "conversion" or marked religious change, and those where it has been the starting-point of an "insistent idea" or of a fit of actual insanity.[40] The dreams which convert, reform, change character and creed, have of course a primâ facie claim to be considered as something other than ordinary dreams; and their discussion may be deferred till a later stage of our inquiry. Those, on the other hand, which suddenly generate an insistent idea of an irrational type are closely and obviously analogous to post-hypnotic self-suggestions, which the self that inspired them cannot be induced to countermand. Such is the dream related by M. Taine,[41] where a gendarme, impressed by an execution at which he has assisted, dreams that he himself is to be guillotined, and is afterwards so influenced by the dream that he attempts suicide. Several cases of this kind have been collected by Dr. Faure;[42] and Dr. Tissié, in his interesting little work, Les Rêves, has added some curious instances from his own observation.

A striking illustration may be drawn from the following incident in the story of Krafft-Ebing's patient,[43] Ilma S., the genuineness of whose stigmata seems proved by that physician's care in observation, and by the painfulness of certain experiments performed upon her by students as practical jokes and against her will:--

May 6th, 1888.--The patient is disturbed to-day. She complains to the sister of severe pain under the left breast, thinks that the professor has burnt her in the night, and begs the sister to obtain a retreat for her in a convent, where she will be secure against such attacks. The sister's refusal causes a hystero-epileptic attack. [At length, in the hypnotic trance] the patient gives the following explanation of the origin of the pain: "Last night an old man came to me; he looked like a priest and came in company with a Sister of Charity, on whose collet there was a large golden B. I was afraid of her. The old man was amiable and friendly. He dipped a pen in the sister's pocket, and with it wrote a W and B on my skin under the left breast. Once he dipped his pen badly and made a blot in the middle of the figure. This spot and the B pain me severely, but the W does not. The man explained the W as meaning that I should go to the M church and confess at the W confessional."

After this account the patient cried out and said, "There stands the man again. Now he has chains on his hands."

When the patient woke into ordinary life she was suffering pain in the place indicated, where there were "superficial losses of substance, penetrating to the corium, which have a resemblance to a reversed W and B," with "a hyperæmic raised spot between the two." Nowhere in this peculiar neurotrophic alteration of the skin, which is identical with those previously produced experimentally, are there traces of inflammation. The pain and the memory of the dream were removed by the doctor's suggestion; but the dream self-suggestion to confess at the M church persisted; and the patient, without knowing why, did actually go and confess to the priest of her vision.

In this last case we have a dream playing the part of a powerful post-hypnotic suggestion. The meaning of this vague term "suggestion" we shall have to discuss in a later chapter. It is enough to notice here the great power of a subliminal suggestion which can make an impression so much stronger not only than the usual evanescent touch of dream, but than the actual experiences of waking day.

But this case may also serve to lead us on to further reflections as to the connection between dream-memory and hypnotic memory, a connection which points, as we shall presently see, towards the existence of some subliminal continuity of memory, lying deeper down than the evocable memory of common life--the stock of conscious reminiscences on which we can draw at will.

With regard to memory, as with regard to sensation, we seem in waking life to be dealing with a selection made for purposes of earthly use. From the pre-conscious unselective memory which depends on the mere organisation of living matter, it is the task of consciousness, as it dawns in each higher organism, to make its own appropriate selection and to develop into distinctness certain helpful lines of reminiscence. The question of self-preservation--What must I needs be aware of in order to escape my foes?--involves the question, What must I needs remember in order to act upon the facts of which I am aware? The selected currents of memory follow the selected avenues of sensation; what by disuse I lose the power of noticing at the time, I also lose the power of recalling afterwards.

For simpler organisms this rule may perhaps suffice. Man needs a more complex formula. For it may happen, as we have already seen, that two or more phases of personality in one man may each select from the mass of potential reminiscences a special group of memories of its own. These special groups, moreover, may bear to one another all kinds of relations; one may include another, or they may alternate and may be apparently co-exclusive.

From these dissociations and alternations of memory there will be many lessons to learn. The lesson which here presents itself is not the least important. What is the relation of the sleeping state to these dissociated, these parallel or concentric memories? Is it the case that when one memory includes another it is the waking memory--as one might expect from that state's apparently superior vividness--which shows itself the deeper, the more comprehensive record?

The answer of actual experience to these questions is unexpectedly direct and clear. In every recorded instance--so far at least as my memory serves me, where there has been any unification between alternating states, so as to make comparison possible--it is the memory furthest from waking life whose span is the widest, whose grasp of the organism's upstored impressions is the most profound. Inexplicable as this phenomenon has been to observers who have encountered it without the needed key, the independent observations of hundreds of physicians and hypnotists have united in affirming its reality. The commonest instance, of course, is furnished by the ordinary hypnotic trance. The degree of intelligence, indeed, which finds its way to expression in that trance or slumber varies greatly in different subjects and at different times. But whensoever there is enough of alertness to admit of our forming a judgment, we find that in the hypnotic state there is a considerable memory--though not necessarily a complete or a reasoned memory--of the waking state; whereas with most subjects in the waking state--unless some special command be imposed upon the hypnotic self--there is no memory whatever of the hypnotic state. In many hysterical conditions also the same general rule subsists; namely, that the further we get from the surface the wider is the expanse of memory which we encounter.

If all this be true, there are several points on which we may form expectations definite enough to suggest inquiry. Ordinary sleep is roughly intermediate between waking life and deep hypnotic trance; and it seems a priori probable that its memory will have links of almost equal strength with the memory which belongs to waking life and the memory which belongs to the hypnotic trance. And this is in fact the case; the fragments of dream-memory are interlinked with both these other chains. Thus, for example, without any suggestion to that effect, acts accomplished in the hypnotic trance may be remembered in dream; and remembered under the illusion which was thrown round them by the hypnotiser. Thus Dr. Auguste Voisin suggested to a hypnotised subject to stab a patient--really a stuffed figure--in the neighbouring bed.[44] The subject did so; and of course knew nothing of it on waking. But three days afterwards he returned to the hospital complaining that his dreams were haunted by the figure of a woman, who accused him of having stabbed and killed her. Appropriate suggestion laid this ghost of a doll.

Conversely, dreams forgotten in waking life may be remembered in the hypnotic trance. Thus Dr. Tissié's patient, Albert, dreamt that he was about to set out on one of his somnambulic "fugues," or aimless journeys, and when hypnotised mentioned to the physician this dream, which in his waking state he had forgotten.[45] The probable truth of this statement was shown by the fact that he did actually set out on the journey thus dreamt of, and that his journeys were usually preceded and incited by remembered dreams.

I need not dwell on the existence, but at the same time the incompleteness, of our dream-memory of waking life; nor on the occasional formation of a separate chain of memory, constructed from successive and cohering dreams. It should be added that we do not really know how far our memory in dream of waking life may have extended; since we can only infer this from our notoriously imperfect waking memory of past dreams.

A cognate anticipation to which our theory will point will be that dream-memory will occasionally be found to fill up gaps in waking memory, other than those due to hypnotic trance; such so-called "ecmnesic" periods, for instance, as sometimes succeed a violent shock to the system, and may even embrace some space of time anterior to the shock. These periods themselves resemble prolonged and unremembered dreams. Such accidents, however, are so rare, and such dream-memory so hard to detect, that I mention the point mainly for the sake of theoretical completeness; and must think myself fortunate in being able to refer the reader to a recent case of M. Charcot's which affords an interesting confirmation of the suggested view.[46]

I pass on to the still more novel and curious questions involved in the apparent existence of a dream-memory which, while accompanying the memory of ordinary life, seems also to have a wider purview, and to indicate that the record of external events which is kept within us is far fuller than we know.

Let us consider what stages such a memory may show.

I. It may include events once known to the waking self, but now definitely forgotten.

II. It may include facts which have fallen within the sensory field, but which have never been supraliminally "apperceived" or cognised in any way. And thus also it may indicate that from this wider range of remembered facts dream-inferences have been drawn;--which inferences may be retrospective, prospective, or,--if I may use a word of Pope's with a new meaning, circumspective,--that is to say, relating not to the past or to the future, but to the present condition of matters beyond the range of ordinary perception. It is plain that inferences of this kind (if they exist) will be liable to be mistaken for direct retrocognition, direct premonition, direct clairvoyance; while yet they need not actually prove anything more than a perception on the part of the subliminal self more far-reaching,--a memory more stable,--than is the perception or the memory of the supraliminal self which we know.

These hypermnesic dreams, then, may afford a means of drawing our lines of evidence more exactly; of relegating some marvellous narratives to a realm of lesser marvel, and at the same time of realising more clearly what it is in the most advanced cases which ordinary theories are really powerless to explain.

As to the first of the above-mentioned categories no one will raise any doubt. It is a familiar fact--or a fact only sufficiently unfamiliar to be noted with slight surprise--that we occasionally recover in sleep a memory which has wholly dropped out of waking consciousness.

In such cases the original piece of knowledge has at the time made a definite impress on the mind,--has come well within the span of apprehension of the supraliminal consciousness. Its reappearance after however long an interval is a fact to which there are already plenty of parallels. But the conclusion to which some cases seem to me to point is one of a much stranger character. I think that there is evidence to show that many facts or pictures which have never even for a moment come within the apprehension of the supraliminal consciousness are nevertheless retained by the subliminal memory, and are occasionally presented in dreams with what seems a definite purpose. I quote an interesting case in Appendix IV. A.[47]

The same point, as we shall hereafter see, is illustrated by the phenomena of crystal-vision. Miss Goodrich-Freer,[48] for example, saw in the crystal the announcement of the death of a friend;--a piece of news which certainly had never been apprehended by her ordinary conscious self. On referring to the Times, it was found that an announcement of the death of some one of the same unusual name was contained in a sheet with which she had screened her face from the fire;--so that the words may have fallen within her range of vision, although they had not reached what we broadly call her waking mind.

This instance was of value from the strong probability that the news could never have been supraliminally known at all;--since it was too important to have been merely glanced at and forgotten.

In these cases the dream-self has presented a significant scene,--has chosen, so to say, from its gallery of photographs the special picture which the waking mind desired,--but has not needed to draw any more complex inference from the facts presumably at its disposal. I have now to deal with a small group of dreams which reason as well as remember;--if indeed in some of them there be not something more than mere reasoning on facts already in some way acquired,--something which overpasses the scheme prescribed for the present chapter.

In the first place we cannot doubt that definite data already known may sometimes be treated in somnambulism or ordinary dream with more than waking intelligence. Such are the cases of mathematical problems solved in somnambulism, or of the skeletal arrangement discovered by Agassiz in common sleep for scattered bones which had baffled his waking skill. I give in Appendix IV. B. the striking case of Professor Hilprecht where dream-intelligence is carried to its highest point. Professor Romaine Newbold (who records the case) is well versed in the analysis of evidence making for supernormal powers, and his explanation of the vision as the result of "processes of associative reasoning analogous to those of the upper consciousness" must, I think, be taken as correct. But had the incident occurred in a less critical age of the world,--in any generation, one may say, but this,--how majestic a proof would the phantasmal Babylonian's message be held to have afforded of his veritable co-operation with the modern savant in the reconstruction of his remote past!

I repeat that with this case of Professor Hilprecht's we seem to have reached the utmost intensity of sleep faculty within the limits of our ordinary spectrum. In almost every region of that spectrum we have found that the sleeper's faculty, under its narrow conditions, shows scattered signs of at least a potential equality with the faculty of waking hours.

We have already seen this as regards muscular movements, as regards inward vision and audition, and as regards memory; and these last records complete the series by showing us the achievement in sleep of intellectual work of the severest order. Coleridge's Kubla Khan had long ago shown the world that a great poet might owe his masterpiece to the obscuration of waking sense.[49] And the very imperfection of Kubla Khan--the memory truncated by an interruption--may again remind us how partial must ever be our waking knowledge of the achievements of sleep.

May I not, then, claim a real analogy between certain of the achievements of sleep and the achievements of genius? In both there is the same triumphant spontaneity, the same sense of drawing no longer upon the narrow and brief endurance of nerves and brain, but upon some unknown source exempt from those limitations.

Thus far, indeed, the sleep-faculties which we have been considering, however strangely intensified, have belonged to the same class as the normal faculties of waking life. We have now to consider whether we can detect in sleep any manifestation of supernormal faculty--any experience which seems to suggest that man is a cosmical spirit as well as a terrestrial organism, and is in some way in relation with a spiritual as well as with a material world. It will seem, in this view, to be natural that this commerce with a spiritual environment should be more perceptible in sleep than in waking. The dogma which my point of view thus renders probable is perhaps, as a mere matter of history, the dogma of all dogmas which has been most universally believed by mankind.

"Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus"--for how many narrow theological propositions have we not heard this proud claim--that they have been believed everywhere, and by everybody, and in every age? Yet what can approach the antiquity, the ubiquity, the unanimity of man's belief in the wanderings of the spirit in dream? In the Stone Age, the sceptic would have been rash indeed who ventured to contradict it. And though I grant that this "palæolithic psychology" has gone out of fashion for the last few centuries, I do not think that (in view of the telæsthetic evidence now collected) we can any longer dismiss as a mere bizarrerie of dream-imagery the constant recurrence of the idea of visiting in sleep some distant scene,--with the acquisition thereby of new facts not otherwise accessible.

Starting, then, not from savage authority, but from the evidential scrutiny of modern facts, we shall find, I think, that there are coincidences of dream with truth which neither pure chance nor any subconscious mentation of an ordinary kind will adequately explain. We shall find that there is a perception of concealed material objects or of distant scenes and also a perception of a communion with the thoughts and emotions of other minds. Both these phenomena have been noted sporadically in many ages and countries, and were observed with serious attention especially by the early French mesmerists. The first group of phenomena was called clairvoyance or lucidité, and the second communication de pensées, or in English, thought-transference. These terms are scarcely comprehensive enough to satisfy a more systematic study. The distant perception is not optical, nor is it confined even to the apparent sense of sight alone. It extends to all the senses, and includes also impressions hardly referable to any special sense. Similarly the communication between distant persons is not a transference of thought alone, but of emotion, of motor impulses, and of many impressions not easy to define. I ventured in 1882 to suggest the wider terms telæsthesia, sensation at a distance, and telepathy, fellow-feeling at a distance, and shall use these words in the present work. But I am far from assuming that these terms correspond with definite and dearly separated groups of phenomena, or comprise the whole field of supernormal faculty. On the contrary, I think it probable that the facts of the metetherial world are far more complex than the facts of the material world; and the ways in which spirits perceive and communicate, apart from fleshly organisms, are subtler and more varied than any perception or communication which we know.

I have halted above at another line of demarcation which the dreamer's own sensations suggest,--the distinction between active psychical excursion or invasion and the passive reception of psychical invasion from without. But even here, as was also hinted, a clear line of division is hard to draw. For whether we are dealing with dream-perceptions of distant material scenes, or of distant living persons, or of discarnate spirits, it is often impossible for the dreamer himself to say either from what point he is himself observing, or where the scene of the vision is laid.

For the present I must confine myself to a brief sketch of some of the main types of supernormal dreams, arranged in a kind of ascending order. I shall begin with such dreams as primarily suggest a kind of heightening or extension of the dreamer's own innate perceptive powers, as exercised on the world around him. And I shall end with dreams which suggest his entrance into a spiritual world, where commerce with incarnate or discarnate spirits is subject no longer to the conditions of earthly thought.

I begin, then, with some dreams which seem to carry perceptive faculty beyond the point at which some unusual form of common vision can be plausibly suggested in explanation. Mr. Lewis's dream of the landing-order (Appendix IV. A) may be taken as an instance of such a dream.[50]

I will next refer to certain cases where the sleeper by clairvoyant vision discerns a scene of direct interest to a mind other than his own;--as the danger or death of some near friend. Sometimes there is a flash of vision, which seems to represent correctly the critical scene. Sometimes there is what seems like a longer gaze, accompanied, perhaps by some sense of communion with the invaded person. And in some few cases--the most interesting of all--the circumstances of a death seem to be symbolically shown to a dreamer, as though by the deceased person, or by some intelligence connected with him. (See Mrs. Storie's narrative p. 109.)

One of the best instances of the flash of vision is Canon Warburton's, which I quote from Phantasms of the Living, vol. i. p. 338--a case whose remoteness is rendered less of a drawback than usual by the character of the narrator and the simplicity and definiteness of the fact attested.

The following is his account:--

THE CLOSE, WINCHESTER, July 16th, 1883.

Somewhere about the year 1848 I went up from Oxford to stay a day or two with my brother, Acton Warburton, then a barrister, living at 10 Fish Street, Lincoln's Inn. When I got to his chambers I found a note on the table apologising for his absence, and saying that he had gone to a dance somewhere in the West End, and intended to be home soon after one o'clock. Instead of going to bed, I dozed in an arm-chair, but started up wide awake exactly at one, ejaculating "By Jove! he's down!" and seeing him coming out of a drawing-room into a brightly illuminated landing, catching his foot in the edge of the top stair, and falling headlong, just saving himself by his elbows and hands. (The house was one which I had never seen, nor did I know where it was.) Thinking very little of the matter, I fell a-doze again for half an hour, and was awakened by my brother suddenly coming in and saying, "Oh, there you are! I have just had as narrow an escape of breaking my neck as I ever had in my life. Coming out of the ballroom, I caught my foot, and tumbled full length down the stairs."

That is all. It may have been "only a dream," but I always thought it must have been something more.

W. WARBURTON.

In a second letter Canon Warburton adds:--

July 20th, 1883.

My brother was hurrying home from his dance, with some little self-reproach in his mind for not having been at his chambers to receive his guest, so the chances are that he was thinking of me. The whole scene was vividly present to me at the moment, but I did not note particulars any more than one would in real life. The general impression was of a narrow landing brilliantly illuminated, and I remember verifying the correctness of this by questions at the time.

This is my sole experience of the kind.

[The last words are in answer to the question whether he had had similar vivid visions which had not corresponded with any real event.]

The impression here produced is as though a jerk were given to some delicate link connecting the two brothers. The brother suffering the crisis thinks vividly of the other; and one can of course explain the incident, as we did on its first publication, as the endangered man's projection of the scene upon his brother's mind. The passive dozing brother, on the other hand, feels as though he were suddenly present in the scene,--say in response to some sudden call from the brother in danger,--and I am here bringing into relief that aspect of the incident, on account of its analogy with cases soon to be quoted. But the main lesson no doubt may be that no hard and fast line can be drawn between the two explanations.[51]

And here I feel bound to introduce a sample of a certain class of dreams,--more interesting, perhaps, and certainly more perplexing than any;--but belonging to a category of phenomena which at present I can make no attempt to explain. I mean precognitive dreams;--pictures or visions in which future events are foretold or depicted, generally with more or less of symbolism,--and generally also in a mode so remote from the previsions of our earthly sagacity that we shall find ourselves driven, in a later discussion, to speak in vague terms of glimpses into a cosmic picture-gallery;--or of scenic representations composed and offered to us by intelligences higher and more distant than any spirit whom we have known. I give in Appendix IV. C, a thoroughly characteristic example;--characteristic alike in its definiteness, its purposelessness, its isolated unintelligibility.

Dr. Bruce's narrative, which I next give in Appendix IV. D, written by an intelligent man, while the facts were yet fresh, seems to me of high importance. If we accept the rest of his story, we must, I think, suppose that the sense of spiritual presence with which the incident began was more than a mere subjective fancy. Shall we refer it to the murdered man's wife;--with whom the dreamer seemed afterwards to be in telepathic relation? Or shall we interpret it as a kind of summons from the dying man, drawing on, as it were, his friend's spirit to witness the actual murder and the subsequent scene? The fact that another friend, in another locality apparently, had a vision of similar nature, tells somewhat in favour of the supposition that the decedent's spirit was operative in both cases; since we very seldom--if ever--find an agent producing an impression in two separate places at once--or nearly so--except at or just after the moment of death.

In this view, the incident resembles a scene passing in a spiritual world. The dying man summons his brother-in-law; the brother-in-law visits the scene of murder, and there spiritually communicates with his sister, the widow, who is corporeally in that scene, and then sees further details of the scene after death, which he does not understand, and which are not explained to him.

Fantastic though this explanation seems, it is not easy to hit on a simpler one which will cover the facts as stated. Could we accept it, we should have a kind of transition between two groups of cases, which although apparently so different may form parts of a continuous series. I mean the cases where the dreamer visits a distant scene, and the cases where another spirit visits the dreamer.

Taking, then, Dr. Bruce's case to bridge the interval between these two groups, I go on to a case which properly belongs to the second, though it still has much in common with the first. I shall quote Mrs. Storie's narrative at full length in the text; because the case is, in my judgment, both evidentially very strong, and also, in the naiveté of its confusion, extremely suggestive of the way in which these psychical communications are made. Mrs. Storie, who is now dead, was, by the testimony of Edmund Gurney, Professor Sidgwick, and others, a witness eminently deserving of trust; and, besides a corroboration from her husband of the manifestation of a troubled dream, before the event was known, we have the actual notes written down by her, as she informed us, the day, or the day after, the news of the fatal accident arrived, solely for her own use, and unmistakably reflecting the incoherent impressiveness of the broken vision. These notes form the narrative given in Phantasms of the Living (vol. i. p. 370) which I reproduce here. The fact that the deceased brother was a twin of Mrs. Storie's adds interest to the case, since one clue (a vague one as yet) to the causes directing and determining telepathic communications lies in what seems their exceptional frequency between twins;--the closest of all relations.

HOBART TOWN, July 1874.

On the evening of the 18th July, I felt unusually nervous. This seemed to begin [with the occurrence of a small domestic annoyance] about half past eight o'clock. When I went to my room I even felt as if some one was there. I fancied, as I stepped into bed, that some one in thought tried to stop me. At 2 o'clock I woke from the following dream. It seemed like in dissolving views. In a twinkle of light I saw a railway, and the puff of the engine. I thought, "What's going on up there? Travelling? I wonder if any of us are travelling and I dreaming of it." Some one unseen by me answered, "No; something quite different--something wrong." "I don't like to look at these things," I said. Then I saw behind and above my head William's upper half reclining, eyes and mouth half shut; his chest moved forward convulsively, and he raised his right arm. Then he bent forward, saying, "I suppose I should move out of this." Then I saw him lying, eyes shut, on the ground, flat. The chimney of an engine at his head. I called in excitement, "That will strike him!" The some one answered "Yes--well, here's what it was"; and immediately I saw William sitting in the open air--faint moonlight--on a raised place sideways. He raised his right arm, shuddered, and said, "I can't go on, or back, No." Then he seemed lying flat. I cried out, "Oh! Oh!" and others seemed to echo, "Oh! Oh!" He seemed then upon his elbow, saying, "Now it comes." Then as if struggling to rise, turned twice round quickly, saying, "Is it the train? the train, the train," his right shoulder reverberating as if struck from behind. He fell back like fainting; his eyes rolled. A large dark object came between us like panelling of wood, and rather in the dark something rolled over, and like an arm was thrown up, and the whole thing went away with a swish. Close beside me on the ground there seemed a long dark object. I called out, "They've left something behind; it's like a man." It then raised its shoulders and head, and fell down again. The same some one answered, "Yes, sadly." [? "Yes," sadly.] After a moment I seemed called on to look up, and said, "Is that thing not away yet?" Answered, "No." And in front, in light, there was a railway compartment in which sat Rev. Mr. Johnstone, of Echuca. I said, "What's he doing there?" Answered, "He's there." A railway porter went up to the window asking, "Have you seen any of----." I caught no more, but I thought he referred to the thing left behind. Mr. Johnstone seemed to answer "No"; and the man went quickly away--I thought to look for it. After all this the some one said close to me, "Now I'm going." I started, and at once saw {a tall dark figure at my head} {William's back at my side. } He put his right hand (in grief) over his face, and the other almost touching my shoulder, he crossed in front, looking stern and solemn. There was a flash from the eyes, and I caught a glimpse of a fine pale face like ushering him along, and indistinctly another. I felt frightened, and called out, "Is he angry?" "Oh, no." "Is he going away?" Answered, "Yes," by the same some one, and I woke with a loud sigh, which woke my husband, who said, "What is it?" I told him I had been dreaming "something unpleasant"--named a "railway," and dismissed it all from my mind as a dream. As I fell asleep again I fancied the some one said, "It's all gone," and another answered, "I'll come and remind her."

The news reached me one week afterwards. The accident had happened to my brother on the same night about half past 9 o'clock. Rev. Mr. Johnstone and his wife were actually in the train which struck him. He was walking along the line which is raised two feet on a level country. He seemed to have gone 16 miles--must have been tired and sat down to take off his boot, which was beside him, dozed off and was very likely roused by the sound of the train; 76 sheep-trucks had passed without touching him, but some wooden projection, likely the step, had touched the right side of his head, bruised his right shoulder, and killed him instantaneously. The night was very dark. I believe now that the some one was (from something in the way he spoke) William himself. The face with him was white as alabaster and something like this [a small sketch pasted on] in profile. There were many other thoughts or words seemed to pass, but they are too many to write down here.

The voice of the some one unseen seemed always above the figure of William which I saw. And when I was shown the compartment of the carriage with Mr. Johnstone, the some one seemed on a line between me and it--above me.

[In an account-book of Mrs. Storie's, on a page, headed July 1874, we find the 18th day marked, and the words, "Dear Willie died," and "Dreamed, dreamed of it all," appended.

The first letter, from the Rev. J. C. Johnstone to the Rev. John Storie, announcing the news of the accident, is lost. The following are extracts from his second and third letters on the subject:--]

ECHUCA, 10th August 1874.

The place where Hunter was killed is on an open plain, and there was consequently plenty of room for him to escape the train had he been conscious; but I think Meldrum's theory is the correct one, that he had sat down to adjust some bandages on his leg and had thoughtlessly gone off to sleep. There is only one line of rails, and the ground is raised about 2 feet--the ground on which the rails rest. He had probably sat down on the edge, and lain down backwards so as to be within reach of some part of the train. It was not known at the time that an accident had occurred. Mrs. Johnstone and myself were in the train. Meldrum says he was not very much crushed. The top of the skull was struck off, and some ribs were broken under the armpit on one side. His body was found on the Sunday morning by a herd-boy from the adjoining station.

August 29th, 1874.

The exact time at which the train struck poor Hunter must have been about 9.55 P.M., and his death must have been instantaneous.

[The above corresponds with the account of the inquest in the Riverine Herald for July 22nd. The Melbourne Argus also describes the accident as having taken place on the night of Saturday, the 18th.

The following remarks are taken from notes made by Professor Sidgwick, during an interview with Mrs. Storie, in April 1884, and by Mrs. Sidgwick after another interview in September 1885:--]

Mrs. Storie cannot regard the experience exactly as a dream, though she woke up from it. She is sure that it did not grow more definite in recollection afterwards. She never had a series of scenes in a dream at any other time; and she has never had anything like a hallucination. They were introduced by a voice in a whisper, not recognised as her brother's. He had sat on the bank as he appeared in the dream. The engine she saw behind him had a chimney of peculiar shape, such as she had not at that time seen; and she remembers that Mr. Storie thought her foolish about insisting on the chimney--unlike (he said) any which existed; but he informed her when he came back from Victoria, where her brother was, that engines of this kind had just been introduced there. She had no reason to think that any conversation between the porter and the clergyman actually occurred. The persons who seemed to lead her brother away were not recognised by her, and she only saw the face of one of them.

Mr. Storie confirms his wife having said to him at the time of the dream, "What is that light?" Before writing the account first quoted, she had just mentioned the dream to her husband, but had not described it. She desired not to think of it, and also was unwilling to worry him about it because of his Sunday's work. This last point, it will be observed, is a confirmation of the fact that the dream took place on the Saturday night; and "it came out clearly" (Mrs. Sidgwick says) "that her recollection about the Saturday night was an independent recollection, and not read back after the accident was known." The strongly nervous state that preceded the dream was quite unique in Mrs. S.'s experience. But as it appeared that, according to her recollection, it commenced at least an hour before the accident took place, it must be regarded as of no importance evidentially. The feeling of a presence in the room was also quite unique.

"Here," says Gurney, "the difficulty of referring the true elements of the dream to the agent's mind [is very great]. For Mr. Hunter was asleep; and even if we can conceive that the image of the advancing engine may have had some place in his mind, the presence of Mr. Johnstone could not have been perceived by him. But it is possible, of course, to regard this last item of correspondence as accidental, even though the dream was telepathic. It will be observed that the dream followed the accident by about four hours; such deferment is, I think, a strong point in favour of telepathic, as opposed to independent, clairvoyance."

I propose as an alternative explanation,--for reasons which I endeavour to justify in later chapters,--that the deceased brother, aided by some other dimly discerned spirit, was endeavouring to present to Mrs. Storie a series of pictures representing his death--as realised after his death. I add this last clause, because one of the marked points in the dream was the presence in the train of Mr. Johnstone of Echuca--a fact which (as Gurney remarks) the dying man could not possibly know.

I have dwelt on these two cases of Dr. Bruce and Mrs. Storie, because the reader will, I think, come to feel, as our evidence unrolls itself, that he has here complex experiences which are confirmed at various points by simpler experiences, in such a way as to make these stories seem a confused but an intimate transcript of what other narratives show in hints and glimpses alone.

In Mrs. Storie's case the whole experience, as we have seen, presented itself as a dream; yet as a dream of quite unusual type, like a series of pictures presented to the sleeper who was still conscious that she was lying in bed. In other cases the "psychical invasion" of the spirit either of a living or of a deceased person seems to set up a variety of sleep-waking states--both in agent and percipient. In one bizarre narrative a man dreaming that he has returned home is heard in his home calling for hot water--and has himself a singular sense of "bilocation" between the railway carriage and his bedroom.[52] In another curious case is recorded a kind of encounter in dreamland, apparently more or less remembered by both persons.[53]

An invasion of this type coming upon a sleeping person is apt to induce some change in the sleeper's state, which, even if he regards it as a complete awakening, is generally shown not to be so in fact by the dreamlike character of his own recorded feelings and utterances. Gurney called these "Borderland Cases," and the whole collection in Phantasms of the Living will repay perusal. I introduce one such case in Appendix IV. E, as being at once very perplexing and, I think, very strongly attested. I knew Mr. and Mrs. T., who certainly were seriously anxious for complete accuracy, and who had (as the narrative shows) made a brief memorandum and consulted various persons on the incident at the time.

These cases of invasion by the spirits of living persons pass on into cases of invasion by the dying, the impression being generally that of the presence of the visitant in the percipient's surroundings.[54] Sometimes the phantasm is seen as nearly as can be ascertained at the time of death. But there is no perceptible break in the series at this point. Some appear shortly after death, but before the death is known to the percipient. [See Appendix IV. F]. Finally, there are cases when the appearance takes place some time after death, but presents features unknown to the percipient.[55]

We have now briefly reviewed certain phenomena of sleep from a standpoint somewhat differing from that which is commonly taken. We have not (as is usual) fixed our attention primarily on the negative characteristics of sleep, or the extent to which it lacks the capacities of waking hours. On the contrary, we have regarded sleep as an independent phase of personality, existing with as good a right as the waking phase, and dowered with imperfectly expressed faculties of its own. In investigating those faculties we have been in no wise deterred by the fact of the apparent uselessness of some of them for our waking ends. Useless is a pre-scientific, even an anti-scientific term, which has perhaps proved a greater stumbling-block to research in psychology than in any other science. In science the use of phenomena is to prove laws, and the more bizarre and trivial the phenomena, the greater the chance of their directing us to some law which has been overlooked till now. In reviewing the phenomena of sleep, then, we found in the first place that it possesses a specific recuperative energy which the commonly accepted data of physiology and psychology cannot explain. We saw that in sleep there may be an increased co-ordination or centralisation of muscular control, and also an increased vividness of entencephalic perception, indicating a more intimate appreciation of intra-peripheral changes than is manifest in waking life. In accordance with this view, we found that the dreaming self may undergo sensory and emotional experiences apparently more intense than those of vigilance, and may produce thereby lasting effects upon the waking body and mind. Similarly again, we saw that that specific impress on body and mind which we term memory may in sleeping or hypnotic states be both wider in range and fuller in content than the evocable memory of the waking day. Nay, not memory only, but power of inference, of argument, may be thus intensified, as is shown by the solution in sleep of problems which have baffled waking effort.

All these are fragmentary indications,--useless for practical purposes if you will,--of sleeping faculty exercised on the same order of things as waking faculty, and with comparable or even superior power. But we were bound to push our inquiry further still--we were bound to ask whether the self of sleep showed any faculty of a quite different order from that by which waking consciousness maintains the activity of man. We found that this was so indeed; that there was evidence that the sleeping spirit was susceptible of relations unfettered by spatial bonds; of telæsthetic perception of distant scenes; of telepathic communication with distant persons, or even with spirits of whom we can predicate neither distance nor nearness, since they are released from the prison of the flesh.

The inference which all this evidence suggests is entirely in accordance with the hypothesis on which my whole work is based.

I have assumed that man is an organism informed or possessed by a soul. This view obviously involves the hypothesis that we are living a life in two worlds at once; a planetary life in this material world, to which the organism is intended to react; and also a cosmic life in that spiritual or metetherial world, which is the native environment of the soul. From that unseen world the energy of the organism needs to be perpetually replenished. That replenishment we cannot understand: we may figure it to ourselves as a protoplasmic process;--as some relation between protoplasm, ether, and whatever is beyond ether, on which it is at present useless to speculate.

Admitting, for the sake of argument, these vast assumptions, it will be easy to draw the further inference that it may be needful that the soul's attention should be frequently withdrawn from the business of earthly life, so as to pursue with greater intensity what we may call its protoplasmic task,--the maintenance of the fundamental, pervading connection between the organism and the spiritual world. Nay, this profounder condition, as responding to more primitive, more fundamental needs, will itself be more primitive than the waking state. And this is so: sleep is the infant's dominant phase: the pre-natal state resembles sleep rather than waking; and so does the whole life-condition of our lowly ancestors. And as the sleeping state is the more primitive, so also is it the more generalised, and the more plastic. Out of this dreamy abeyance between two worlds, the needs of the material world are constantly developing some form of alert activity, some faculty which was potential only until search for food and the defence against enemies compelled a closer heed to "the life of relation," lest the relation should become only that of victim to devourer.

We shall thus have two phases of personality developing into separate purposes and in separate directions from a parent stem. The waking personality will develop external sense organs and will fit itself progressively for the life of relation to the external world. It will endeavour to attain an ever completer control over the resources of the personality, and it will culminate in what we term genius when it has unified the subliminal as far as possible with the supraliminal in its pursuit of deliberate waking ends.

The sleeping personality will develop in ways less easy to foresee. What, on any theory, will it aim at, beyond the familiar intensification of recuperative power? We can only guess, on my theory, that its development will show some increasing trace of the soul's less exclusive absorption in the activity of the organism. The soul has withdrawn from the specialised material surface of things (to use such poor metaphor as we can) into a realm where the nature of the connection between matter and spirit--whether through the intermediacy of the ether or otherwise--is more profoundly discerned. That same withdrawal from the surface which, while it diminishes power over complex muscular processes, increases power over profound organic processes, may at the same time increase the soul's power of operating in that spiritual world to which sleep has drawn it nearer.

On this view of sleep, be it observed, there will be nothing to surprise us in the possibility of increasing the proportion of the sleeping to the waking phase of life by hypnotic suggestion. All we can say is that, while the soul must insist on at least the minimum quantity of sleep needful to keep the body alive, we can see no superior limit to the quantity of sleep which it may choose to take,--the quantity of attention, that is, which it may choose to give to the special operations of sleep as compared with those of waking life.

At this point we must for the present pause. The suggested hypothesis will indeed cover the actual facts as to sleep adduced in this chapter. But it covers them by virtue of assumptions too vast to be accepted without further confirmation. It must necessarily be our duty in later chapters to trace the development of the sleeping personality in both the directions indicated above;--in the direction of organic recuperation through the hypnotic trance, and in the direction of the soul's independent operation through that form of trance which leads to possession and to ecstasy. We shall begin at once in the next chapter to trace out that great experimental modification of sleep, from which, under the names of mesmerism or of hypnotism, results of such conspicuous practical value have already been won.

III. GENIUS…

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III. GENIUS

IV. SLEEP