Bλεπoμευ γàρ aρτι δι' εσóπτρoυ ευ aιυiγματι

600. We have now reached a central node in our complex argument. Several lines of evidence, already pursued, converge here to form the starting-point for a new departure. Our view of the subliminal self must pass in this chapter through a profound transition. The glimpses which we have till now obtained of it have shown it as something incidental, subordinate, fragmentary. But henceforth it will gradually assume the character of something persistent, principal, unitary; appearing at last as the deepest and most permanent representative of man's true being.

Let us consider what the successive stages of our realisation of this submerged consciousness have thus far taught us.

First of all, in Chapter II (Disintegrations Of Personality)., we realised that secondary streams of consciousness and memory, separate from the ordinary supraliminal stream, are in certain cases developed, and may even become permanent, thus either alternating with the original stream of memory or supplanting it altogether. Yet in most cases the uprush of these subterranean streams, the upheaval of these submerged strata, seemed merely disintegrative phenomena; seemed rather to reveal the incoherent elements from which human personality has been thus far unified than to suggest hope of its still closer unity, its still further concentration.

In the next Chapter (III.) we approached the subject from a different side. Without entering on any cases obviously abnormal, we traced the uprushes of the subliminal faculty which occur, helpfully and sanely, in the course of ordinary thought and life. We saw that there lay hidden beneath the threshold a concentrative or imaginative power more vivid than that with which we habitually deal. The " inspirations of genius " which seem to spring full-armed into our ken from the depths of our being must count as a form of subliminal faculty, when that is otherwise established, although no theory of such faculty could be based solely upon mental products so closely interwoven with supraliminal or voluntary thinking.

In the next following Chapter (IV.) we traced the varieties of subliminal action in that alternating phase of our personality which may be said to lie wholly beneath the threshold of waking consciousness.

We found that the state of sleep reproduced and varied the subliminal phenomena observed in waking hours. The pictures and utterances of some dreams, presenting themselves without our conscious elaboration, resemble confused fragments of the inspiration of genius. Pushed somewhat further, becoming more intense and more separate from waking life, dreams turn into somnambulisms (discussed in Chapter V (Hypnotism).), and thus may develop into veritable fissions of personality.

For the most part, dream introduces us only to incoherent thought, somnambulism only to irrational action. Yet from time to time we have found in dreams indications of a memory which surpasses waking memory; nay, which even implies that something within us has exercised in waking hours a perception more minute and comprehensive than our supraliminal consciousness ever knew. During various forms of sleep itself, moreover, something of unusual faculty seems to be exercised; mathematical or philological ingenuity may surpass its waking level; the senses may show a delicacy of which we had not judged them capable. And in the background of all this we catch glimpses of still higher faculty; of those supernormal powers of telepathy and telæsthesia on whose existence our belief in a unitary Self must ultimately be so largely based.

Beneath the apparent blankness of sleep, many changes, both physical and psychical, may occur unnoted, for evil or for good. On the degenerative side sleep passes into coma, and somnambulisms merge into hysteria; and at many points our description of sleep indicates the nearness of those morbid dissociations already described. But sleep and sleep-waking states may be developed on the other, the evolutive side as well. The subliminal self appears to exercise in sleep an increased control, and to be able to carry thereby the physical organism into higher vitality, the mind into readier communication, by supernormal methods, with other minds, and into scenes beyond the range of sense. Incidentally we perceive a new development of multiplex personality; a new power of alternating or combining streams of memory, of changing for a time or permanently the character and the will.

Our last Chapter (V.) was devoted to this hypnotic concentration and expansion of human faculty. I briefly detailed the empirical artifices employed to give effect to self-suggestion, and reviewed the results, especially the intellectual and moral results, to which that self-suggestion ultimately leads. And here more than ever, - both in hypnotic phenomena and in the analogous cases of spontaneous somnambulism described in the same chapter, - we perceived elements of new supernormal faculty mingling with heightened faculty of familiar types.

Each, then, of these several lines of inquiry has led us, through widely varying phenomena, in substantially the same direction. From every side we have indications of something complex and obscure in the structure of human personality; of something transcending sensory experience in the reserves of human faculty.