(1) Supraliminal Or Empirical Consciousness; Aware Only Of The Material World Through Sensory Impressions

Beginning with the series of manifestations of supraliminal or "normal" faculty - normal merely in the sense that it is more habitually observed than the subliminal - I must needs make my first heading simply Consciousness. We must assume this starting-point from which to work, and we must briefly point out the limits within which this supraliminal consciousness is circumscribed. It is, as I hold, largely an outcome of the struggle for existence; a fraction of the potential consciousness of each individual life, selected and developed by planetary evolution and earthly needs. I am conscious of some of my points of relation to this material world, because without such awareness my ancestors could never have subsisted here. I am unconscious of my profounder, my cosmic relations, if such there be, because while my ancestors were struggling upwards from the brute such knowledge would have been to them a bewilderment rather than a help. Nay, even the spectrum of ordinary consciousness, as I have termed it, extending from where it fades at the red end into unconscious organic processes to where it fades at the violet end among psychical hints and indications which we can no longer follow, - even that habitual range of perception is interspersed with many dark belts and lines.

For that range of perception has been contrived by Nature, so to say, on no scientific principle, but merely so as to give, at the least physiological expense, a rough notion of some superficial features of a molar world. We gradually learn, indeed, by reason and calculation, that this apparently molar world consists (for our intelligence) of at least two interpenetrating environments, molecular and etherial; but to the supraliminal consciousness all that lies beyond the range of eye and ear is matter of inference and artifice, not of direct apprehension.

(2) Physical Nutrition, Including Respiration. (A) Physiological And Pathological Processes And Products

In an en-vironment thus conceived we have to build up and to expand the energies of body and mind, apparently inseparably united to form a personality which we have as yet no reason to suppose to be of more than earthly scope. The nutrition of the body is the first necessity, but most of the mechanism of this nutrition lies now beneath the conscious threshold - beyond the red end of our imaginary spectrum. Even upon the body with which it popularly identifies itself the supraliminal consciousness gazes as a mere outsider. We can do no more than register our own idiosyncrasies, and employ observed tendencies of our inward mechanism to repair its own aberrations. We become familiar with certain processes and reactions, physiological and pathological; but why the elements of our body are thus associated and dissociated we know not; nor can we (speaking broadly) produce any reaction by means other than those which the organism itself habitually employs.

(3) Physical Expenditure; Action On Material And Etherial Environment. (A) Mechanical Work Done At The Expense Of Food Assimilated

Our body, thus built up by nutrition (including respiration) from its original germ, has acquired energy which it can expend on its environment, both molecular and etherial; as well as exerting an obscurer form of action, of which we shall speak later, on the world of life to which the germ belongs. The most fully conscious and purposive form which the body's energy takes is that of mechanical work upon molar masses. Here we can, to a great extent, compute its work like an artificial engine's; noting that the relation between food absorbed and work done is never such as to threaten disturbance of the general law of Conservation of Energy.

(B) Production Of Heat, Odour, Sound, Chemical Changes, As The Result Of Protoplasmic Metabolism

The animal body exerts various effects, other than mechanical, upon different kinds of living and lifeless matter. It generates and imparts heat both by conduction and by radiation; it propagates sound-waves and odours which specifically affect certain prepared surfaces; it may generate electric charges and electric currents; both in its higher and lower forms it effects, without as well as within its own periphery, certain chemical associations and dissociations whose range is unknown.

(C) Production Of Etherial Disturbances; As Emission Of Light And Generation Of Electrical Energy

One of these specific effects, exerted not on the molecular but on the etherial world - the production of light - is important enough, in view of what is to follow, to be placed under a heading by itself. It will be convenient, however, to defer dealing with this topic until a later stage in our discussion. The development of electro-motive force of considerable magnitude, as for instance, in some species of fishes, is a rare phenomenon; but electrical manifestations of a feeble kind occur in the muscles and nerves of all animals, and even in the tissues of some plants.

(4) Action On The Incarnation Of Life On The Planet. (A) Reproduction As Physiological Division

The living organism has one further power; - of all its powers at once the most complex and the most subliminal. It can influence by reproduction the incarnation of life upon this planet. From the supraliminal standpoint we can speak of reproduction only as of an elaborate process of physiological division. But the distinction between supraliminal and subliminal knowledge and purpose, - where the subliminal purpose has sometimes been held to be no merely individual aim, - has here been guessed by philosophers in the illusion which Nature, for her own ends, throws around her children; - leading them by roads which they blindly follow towards an end which, for aught she cares, they may even desire to shun.

(5) Mental Nutrition; Sensory Receptivity. (A) Ordinary Sense Perception

From the nutrition and expenditure of the bodily organism let us turn to the nutrition and expenditure of the mind, which, however inseparable its connection with the body may be deemed, - even if we regard it merely as a concatenation of "highest-level brain-centres" - must yet, for clearness' sake, be treated separately in any scheme of vital function. The nourishment of the mind (or highest-level centres) is through sensory impressions, which reach it from without through definite channels so soon as they attain a definite intensity.

(B) Memory

The residual changes which these impressions leave constitute the physical basis of memory; and supraliminal memory normally contains the residue only of supraliminal impressions.

(6) Mental Expenditure; Response To Stimuli. (A) Intra-Cerebral Response; Ideation

To these stimuli, freshly impinging, or become in a sense fixed and inherent, we find the mind or highest centres reacting, first in ideation, or intra-cerebral readjustments.

(B) Emotion; Will; Voluntary Innervation

Next we find them reacting in emotion and in will, - or motor innervation, which energises beyond the brain, and gives orders to voluntary muscles, - to eyes and tongue and hands and limbs, - which express the intelligent personality within. These orders are supraliminally conceived in molar terms, but they receive a molecular obedience. We say to the hand, Write! But the answer is not a mere puppet-like movement of such molar mechanism as we could ourselves conceive, but - like the inward ideation itself - depends upon a rearrangement of molecules such as no science can at present trace or explain.

(7) Modifications Of Supraliminal Personality. (A) Birth; As Physiological Individuation

And, finally, both body and mind may pass through we know not how many phases without losing what we regard as the identity of either. Birth in this scheme we must regard as physiological individuation, obliging the new animal to seek food for itself, and thus compelling, in higher animals, a rhythmically recurring increase of alertness which we term the waking state.

(B) Sleep; With Dreams, As Oscillations Of The Conscious Threshold

But an abeyance in sleep of the supraliminal control perpetually recurs, and is needful to the organism's preservation. And in the temporary obliteration of the conscious threshold thus induced, the fragmentary ideation immediately below the waking level makes itself manifest in dream (and the subliminal control becomes dominant in various ways and in varying degrees).

(C) Metamorphoses, As Of Insects And Amphibia, And Polymorphism, As Of Hydrozoa: Multiplex Personality

Even profounder changes occur in animal metamorphoses, where the struggle for existence brings to the surface at different stages of life different selections from the potential syntheses of faculty included in the original germ, - those, namely, which are adapted to the environment in which the particular stage is passed. In the higher animals the variations that occur as the infant progresses through youth to maturity are much less marked and more gradual. In some few abnormal men, however, cerebral rearrangements may sometimes bring about sudden and complete changes in the superficial character and memory. These differ from the metamorphoses of the lower animals in having, as a rule, no relation to different stages of life, and remind us rather of the polymorphism of a colonial Hydrozoon, in which the different attributes and characteristics of a single complete organism are distributed among the various individuals of the colony. The man with a multiplex personality is like a single individual of such a colony, in that only certain elements of his ordinary self are manifest at once, the rest being for the time submerged.

(D) Death; As Physiological Dissolution

And ultimately the individual organism loses the power of self-adaptation to its environment; physiological dissolution ensues; and from the supraliminal standpoint we discern no energy which is not dispersed in lower forms at death.

Of thus much, then, and of thus much only of ourselves, the struggle for earthly existence has compelled us to be aware. It is an empirical or superficial cognisance; and here, as truly as anywhere in nature, "all that we know is phenomenal of the unknown".