122. Thus far I shall have been dealing with conditions or phases of personality which, whether for good or evil, appear spontaneously and without artificial induction. Were we limited to such a review alone, I should still trust that the importance and in a certain sense the independence of the subliminal portion of our consciousness might be brought out by careful inference. But we are not in fact thus restricted. We are not confined to observation only. We are able to mix therewith an element of experiment which, although yet in its infancy, has already, in my view, given us an insight into much of man's nature which no mere speculation or introspection could ever have reached. First among our experimental methods I must speak of hypnotism. That word indeed, as now used, is a vague one. It includes all the methods and they are all of them frankly empirical - which have been found successful in inducing in man, - whether apparently waking or sleeping, what is in fact a development and concentration of his sleeping phase; and in thus reaching organic processes over which his supraliminal will has no control.

The chief - some say the only - method which has been found thus effective is called "suggestion "; - a mere name for an appeal to subliminal faculty which sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails, without our being able either to predict or to explain its success or its failure. Long opposed or ignored by orthodox Science, this mode of acting on man's hidden being is now in most countries established in medical practice, and is increasingly successful in the direction especially of relieving pain. At the same time the psycho-physiological problems at the root of its success are quite unsolved; and its profounder influences on personality have hardly yet been approached.

The discussion in my fifth chapter - that on Hypnotism - will naturally fall under three main heads. I shall first briefly discuss the psychology of hypnotism. I shall consider what actually are the methods which succeed in hypnotism, - whether this be called mesmerism on the one hand or suggestion on the other; - different aspects of an influence which no name fully expresses and which no theory fully explains. In the next place I shall describe some of the triumphs of psycho-therapeutics. These cures effected by suggestion belong to the very core of my subject. They are, so to say, the public advertisement or commercial application of just those hidden and subliminal faculties which for the most part show themselves in less easily apprehended fashion. Like the application of the "X rays" to the discovery and extraction of bullets or needles, these cures must at least bring home to the most conservative reader the fact that there is some unexplained agency operating upon human nature, - something of extraordinary potency which orthodox science has thus far completely failed to grasp.

So surprising, indeed, are some of these cures, - they reproduce so startlingly certain cures held of old as miraculous, - that many men have been led to ask whether it be not in some way or other religion rather than science which is answerable for the marvels. A question, this, of deeper import than the literature either of the Lourdes miracles or of American "mental science " might lead the sceptical reader to suppose! On this point I shall dwell at some length; nor is there, I think, any line of inquiry more essential to the physical well-being of mankind.

Less conspicuously important, but of equal significance for my argument, is that group of hypnotic results which I shall in the third place briefly discuss. These phenomena I shall consider first as they occur in spontaneous sleep-waking states or somnambulisms, and then as they appear in cases experimentally induced, where they are manifested in a more marked degree. We see here the influence exercised by suggestion and self-suggestion on higher types of faculty, supernormal as well as normal, on character, on personality. It is on this side, indeed, that the outlook is the most deeply interesting. Man is in course of evolution; and the most pregnant hint which these nascent experiments have yet given him is that it may be in his power to hasten his own evolution in ways previously unknown.

123. In the following chapter on Sensory Automatism (Chapter VI (Sensory Automatism).) I shall proceed to describe certain other experiments, less familiar to the public than those classed as hypnotic, but which give a still further insight into our subliminal faculty. With those experiments will be intermingled many spontaneous phenomena; and the chapter will take up and continue the spontaneous phenomena of Chapters III. and IV. as well as the experiments of Chapter V (Hypnotism). Its theme will be the messages which the subliminal self sends up to the supraliminal in sensory form; - the visions fashioned internally, but manifested not to the inward eye alone; the voices which repeat as though in audible tones the utterance of the self within. In this way we shall be in continued connection with the phenomena of Chapter II (Disintegrations Of Personality). also; but, instead of the morbid hallucinations which were there described, we shall be dealing with hallucinations which not only are consistent with health and sanity, but also resemble and in a sense surpass the inspirations of genius in their manifestation of important faculty, habitually screened from our view.

Even so long as these subliminal messages convey to us knowledge of no new kind, - even while they are still occupied with the known spectrum, - they are nevertheless full of instruction as regards the extent of subliminal faculty. They are the products of internal vision ejected into apparent externality; and the sights projected outwards from within us are to the psychologist even more interesting than the sights projected inwards from without.

But at this point, and amid these subjective hallucinations which, although they extend, do not fundamentally modify previous conceptions, we come face to face with a class of perceptions which, although in one sense hallucinatory, are in another sense the messengers of a truth deeper and more direct from the source than any which our ordinary senses convey to us. We come upon experiments which prove telepathy; - the transference of ideas and sensations from one mind to another without the agency of the recognised organs of sense. We shall already have encountered some telepathic and telæsthetic incidents among the phenomena of dreams and of hypnosis. But we shall now find that telepathy and telæs-thesia occur in waking moments also; occur sometimes as the result of direct experiment; oftener as the spontaneous and apparently casual convergence of forces which we may be led to suppose to be normally operative between all of us. This is the central theme of Edmund Gurney's Phantasms of the Living; and subsequent experiment and observation, while they have strengthened the evidence for the conclusions of that book, have in no way diminished their startling importance.

Believe though we may in the ultimate continuity of all existence and operation, there is still a vast and sudden separation - unbridgeable at present by any hypothesis of etherial vibrations or the like - between the smallest act of telepathic transmission and all that we have previously known concerning matter and motion. Even if there be no true Rubicon disparting the ocean of things, we have here for mortal minds the Rubicon between the mechanical and the spiritual conceptions of the Universe. I at least can see no logical halting-place between the first admission of supersensory faculty and.the conclusion that such faculty is exercised by somewhat within us which is not generated from material elements, nor confined by mechanical limitations, but which may survive and operate uninjured in a spiritual world.

There is one particular line of telepathic experiment and observation which seems to lead us by an almost continuous pathway across that hitherto impassable gulf. Among telepathic experiments, to begin with, none is more remarkable than the occasional power of some agent to project himself phantasmally; to make himself manifest, as though in actual presence, to some percipient at a distance. The mechanism of such projection is entirely unknown to the agent himself; nor is the act always preceded by any effort of the supraliminal will. But our records of such cases do assuredly suggest a quite novel disengagement of some informing spirit from the restraint of the organism; - a form of distant operation in which we cannot say whether the body in its apparent passivity co-operates or no.

With these experiments in mind, let us turn to the main groups of spontaneous telepathic phenomena which fill the work on Phantasms of the Living above alluded to. These are apparitions of a distant person mainly at moments of crisis, and at the moment of death. Now these spontaneous apparitions at moments when the agent whose phantasm appears is actually passing through some external or internal crisis, are separated by no clear line from the experimentally induced projection of a man's phantasmal figure of which I have spoken above. Sometimes, as I have already implied, we hardly know whether to call such a self-projection experimental or not, since the agent does not know how to accomplish it, and may not even have been conscious of desiring it at the precise moment when it occurred. Thus far the series of phenomena is plainly continuous. And it remains continuous as we gradually pass on from apparitions coincident with crises - crises often involving great danger or even apparent death - to apparitions coincident with the coma which frequently precedes death, or with the moment of death itself.