The late Mr. F. W. H. Myers for many years made a careful study of hypnotism from a psychical point of view, and his researches on the subconscious self, or subliminal consciousness, are embodied in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, and in his great posthumous work, 'Human Personality: its Survival after Death.'

He was invited to address the members of the British Medical Association at Edinburgh in 1898, in the section of Psychological Medicine, and he there briefly expounded his theory, which is this: Ordinary consciousness makes up but a small part of a man's personality. ' Beneath the threshold of working consciousness there lies, not merely an unconscious complex of organic processes, but an intelligent vital control.' He supposes that this subliminal consciousness is evoked by the hypnotist, who is thus enabled, as it were, to tap a deeper stratum of being, which is more independent of passing impressions and environment than the ordinary strata of consciousness. In hysteria with anaesthesia, restricted field of vision, and blunted muscular sense, we see a curtailment or submergence of the normal self; whereas in the manifestations of genius we have its enlargement or emergence.

It is this higher level which is spoken of as inspiration, and which is developed in all great poets, artists, and teachers who are illuminated by the flash of genius, or an emergence of faculty from the subconscious strata.

Myers was a poet as well as a psychologist, and might, I suppose, be called a pantheist. He believed in a 'world-soul,' with which our higher nature is in communion, more or less. This, however, is not the place to expound the depths of his philosophy, or to praise the beauty of the language in which his ideas are expressed.