800. In the pursuit of the vast and inchoate inquiry to which this work is devoted, we are inevitably driven to push on in several directions in turn, along an irregular line of advance. And it will be well to look back for a moment from this point on the paths by which we have thus far travelled, to realise what we have already achieved, and to make a preliminary survey of the ground which still lies before us.

Marcus Aurelius.

Our main theme, I repeat once more, is the analysis of human personality, undertaken with the object of showing that in its depths there lie indications of life and faculty not limited to a planetary existence, or to this material world.

In the first chapter this thesis was explained, and each chapter that has followed has advanced us a step towards its establishment. In the second chapter we found that the old-fashioned conception of human personality as a unitary consciousness known with practical completeness to the waking self needed complete revision. We began by tracing instances in which that consciousness was disintegrated in various ways; and even among those morbid cases we found traces of the action of a profounder self. In the third chapter, dealing with the phenomena of so-called genius, we found further indications of a deeper self possessing habitually a higher degree of faculty than the superficial self can readily employ. In the fourth chapter certain phenomena connected with sleep - manifestations of supernormal faculty both telaesthetic, telepathic, and premonitory - led us on to the conception of a highly evolved subliminal self operating with unknown faculty in an unknown environment. Nay, we have thus been led to think that this subliminal self represents, more fully than the supraliminal self, our central and abiding being, so that, when the slumber of the supraliminal self leaves it comparatively free, it performs two functions of profound importance; in the first place restoring and rejuvenating the bodily organism by drafts upon the energy of the spiritual world with which it is in communion, and in the second place itself entering into closer connection with that spiritual world, apart from the bodily organism.

Our fifth chapter, on Hypnotism, served as an experimental illustration of this view. We there found that we could, by empirical processes, deepen the sleeping phase of personality, and thus increase both the subliminal self's power of renovating the organism, both in familiar and in unfamiliar ways, and also its power of operating in a quasi-independent manner in the spiritual world. In the hypnotic trance, moreover, that hidden self was able to come to the surface, to speak and to answer; to present itself as an independent agent with which we could directly deal. We seemed to see here an opening which might lead us far, if we could learn to intensify the trance, and at the same time to keep the subliminal self sufficiently alert and near to us to be still able to describe its experiences as they occur. If, then, my evidence had ended at this point, I should already have ventured to say, not indeed that my far-reaching theses had received adequate proof, but yet that I had offered an intelligible and coherent hypothesis which would be found to cover a multitude of phenomena which at present stand in the text-books with no adequate explanation, as well as a multitude of phenomena which the text-books altogether ignore.

But the evidence has not in fact ended with my fifth chapter. On the contrary it has from that point taken a fresh start; has become more explicitly and manifestly corroborative of my initial thesis. For we have gone on to find that this subliminal self, whose more remarkable workings had thus far mainly been apparent in the sleeping phase of our personality, is active, at any rate at occasional moments, during waking hours as well. We proceeded in the sixth chapter to the study of automatisms, that is to say, of manifestations of submerged mental processes, which do not enter into ordinary consciousness. For convenience' sake I have divided these automatisms into sensory and motor: on the one hand, the sights and sounds which we see and hear through some subliminal faculty rather than through the ordinary channels of sense; on the other hand, the motions which we perform, the words which we utter, moved in like manner by some unknown impulse from the deeps within.

The sensory automatisms with which the sixth chapter dealt might be regarded, then, as messages transmitted from the subliminal to the supraliminal self. Many of those sensory messages seemed plainly to have been originated in the automatist's own mind. These illustrated in a new way the coexistence of different series of thought and expressions of thought in the same organism, but did not add to the evidence of supernormal operations. Other sensory messages, however, there were which the agency of a second person also was manifestly needed to explain. Such were the telepathic or coincidental hallucinations for which so much evidence has been adduced. These definitely indicate, - I should rather say that they distinctly prove, - a communication between the minds of living persons, independently of the action of the recognised organs of sense.

But this was not all. In the seventh chapter I (Introduction. Human Personality And Its Survival Of Bodily Death) went on to show that there was no valid reason to suppose that bodily death put a stop to the despatch of telepathic messages. By a long series of narratives I endeavoured to prove that departed spirits, perhaps as frequently as incarnate spirits, have communicated with incarnate spirits, - with living persons, - by telepathic sensory messages of the same general type.

Here then we found a class of evidence - the ghost-story of all ages - which has always hung loosely present in human belief, but which now at last attains to a real cogency, partly by the improvement in its quality as well as in its quantity, but largely also by its juxtaposition with all that other telepathic evidence with which it is in fact of kindred type, - and which shows the old ghostly stories as no supernatural anomaly, but as merely an advanced term in a progressive series of incidents dependent on some coherent, though as yet incomprehensible, law.

At this point, one may broadly say, we reach the end of the phenomena whose existence is vaguely familiar to popular talk. And here, too, I might fairly claim, the evidence for my primary thesis, - namely, that the analysis of man's personality reveals him as a spirit, surviving death, - has attained an amplitude which would justify the reader in accepting that view as the provisional hypothesis which comes nearest to a comprehensive co-ordination of the actual facts. What we have already recounted seems, indeed, impossible to explain except by supposing that our inner vision has widened or deepened its purview so far as to attain some glimpses of a spiritual world in which the individualities of our departed friends still actually subsist.