(1) Subliminal Consciousness; Obscurely Aware Of The Transcendental World, Through Telepathic And Telcesthetic Impressions

Let us turn now to our second scheme; that which is to represent for us vital function under the nascent control of a subliminal consciousness, and amid the dimly-guessed operations of a transcendental world. The subliminal faculties whose existence I infer from our evidence will be traced in detail as we proceed. Here at the beginning I must merely explain on what principle I have assigned to some of these faculties and not to others a source in the subliminal self, or in telepathic action from other embodied minds, rather than in any extra-terrene or spiritual intervention. This distinction is often obscure; but I have here drawn the line so as to avoid unduly favouring my own argument. I am endeavouring to show that certain subliminal processes which I hold to be going on in each of us do form a real intermediate class between the processes of normal life and those attributed to spirit-control. I have, therefore, here left to the account of spirit-control all that can be at all plausibly claimed for it;l believing that the remaining phenomena, those which seem almost indisputably referable to a source within ourselves, will be enough to carry us half-way across the apparently impassable gulf which separates Mr. Moses' and similar experiences from the experiences of the mass of mankind.

For these phenomena will not only in themselves show great accessions of power, but also will give plain indication of still more marked development to come. We shall not only see the spectrum of supraliminal consciousness largely extended in both directions, but shall also realise that this extension implies a new environment - an environment whose laws we have yet to learn, and whose denizens to encounter.

Let us discuss, then, the subliminally guided faculties in the same order in which we have just discussed the faculties of common life.

(2) Physical Nutrition Modified By Subliminal Control. (A) Suggestion, Self-Suggestion, Psycho-Therapeutics

And first as to the influence of subliminal control on bodily nutrition. We have here, as it happens, the most conspicuous and popular group in our whole range of unfamiliar phenomena. The experimental study of the subliminal self was virtually originated by the empirical discovery that "mesmeric passes," and afterwards that hypnotic suggestion in general, had power to alter the condition of the nervous system; - to induce sleep, to relieve pain, to re-establish arrested secretion, and to restore morbid secretion to healthy normality. I have already discussed (in Sections 568-570) the part which an actual effluence, or a telepathic impact, may play in such operations as these, and will take here the only remaining logical view, which assumes that suggestion from a hypnotiser is virtually self-suggestion; the hypno-tiser's order having merely the power of reaching in some unexplained way the subject's subliminal self, and setting in action that hyperboulia, so to term it, - that extension of will-power over parts of the organism unreachable by supraliminal will, - which enables the hidden self to achieve the marvellous restorations of "psycho-therapeutics." For this submerged and intimate will can wield, as it were, the very vis medicatrix naturae, and chase back the runaway molecules into a road made familiar to them by long memories of healthy action.

(B) Stigmatisation

Yet this, though the easiest, is not the only road down which the dominated molecules can be driven. The various phenomena of modified secretion to which the conventional name of stigmatisa-tion has been given consist in a selective direction of cells or of even minuter bodily elements away from their settled customary performance, through changes which the predecessors of these cells have indeed traversed before, - but never without specific objective cause - never on so impalpable an invitation. The serum which rises in the "suggested" blisters is in itself no novel product; but its evocation without mechanical irritation shows (as I have urged elsewhere, see 543) a quite novel power to play upon the organism as with purposive manipulation from within.

1 The reader must observe that the standpoint adopted for the purpose of this special argument differs from that of the book as a whole, in which the onus probandi is laid on the spiritistic theory. - Editors.