(4) Action On The Incarnation Of Life On The Planet

(A) Prenatal Suggestion Through Intermediate Organism Of Parent

We come next to the problem of the influence of subliminal control on the realm of life, - on the manner in which the sum of life on earth is supplied by fresh incarnations from the unknown environing energy. The first question will be as to the power of suggestion, by influencing the mother, to influence the unborn child. And so large a collection has now been made of cases where an impression, produced (more often, of course, by accident than by design) upon the mother has been reflected by the offspring (see 526) that I feel entitled to assume such influence as highly probable, if not established.1 This fact, if fact it be, is of an importance greater than has yet been realised. We cannot fix a terminus a quo before which such influence is impossible; and the much-needed science of "eugenics" seems likely to depend largely upon a psychical factor.

(5) Mental Nutrition (Sensory And Supersensory Receptivity) Subliminally Controlled

(A) Hyperaesthesia; Anaesthesia; Analgesia

We have now dealt with the influence of the subliminal self in upbuilding the organism, and in modifying the organism's effect upon its environment. With the discussion of its effect upon the world of life we have reached as it were the watershed of physical and psychical determination; and we proceed now to the region of intellectual effects; - of influence subliminally exercised, first upon sensory receptivity, and then upon motor response.

Subliminal modifications of sensory receptivity, important as they are. have been already so fully discussed in Chapter V (Hypnotism). that we need here do no more than recapitulate them, thus preparing the reader for the still more potent sway which we shall find ascribed to spirits over the perception of men. Briefly, then, the senses can be either stimulated or suspended to an extent hardly yet fathomed. Cases of hyperesthesia are recorded which seem scarcely compatible with that we know of the structure of the sensory end-organs themselves.

So profound an anesthesia, on the other hand, may be produced that prolonged and painful operations can be undergone without evoking a murmur. Nay, what is even more remarkable, the sense of pain may be abrogated while other sensations remain intact, and an analgesia produced which is no result of disease or disintegration, but apparently the highest - the most serviceable - condition to which the organism has yet been raised.

(B) Hypermnesia, Manifested In Dreams Or Automatisms

The sub-liminal control of memory - of the stored-up knowledge derived from past sensation - shows a similar advance upon the supraliminal. To retain in supraliminal memory - or sufficiently near the threshold to be summoned at will - even facts or scenes upon which we have deliberately fixed attention is a task which often exceeds our powers. But some reason has been shown for believing that in the subliminal memory we possess at least a much fuller, if not a complete, record of all that has passed, even, as we say, "unnoticed," across our visual or auditory field; and in hypermnesic dreams and crystal vision we seem to peep for the moment into a treasure-house whose existence was not suspected till now.

1 The best list of references is to be found in a book otherwise of little value. "Ædoeology," by S. B. Elliott, M.D., Boston, U.S.A., 1893. See also Professor Macalister on Stigmatisation (ad fin.) in Encyclopaedia Britannica. The list of cases has been much extended since Professor Macalister wrote.

There seem, moreover, to be various influences, as yet hardly realised or defined, which should rather rank as sensory than under any other heading, namely, the heteraesthesice discussed in 541.

(C) Telepathy; Veridical Hallucinations; Sensory Automatism

And here we reach a critical point in our series; the introduction, namely, among phenomena which may be regarded as merely extending powers already known, of those newly recognised and manifestly supernormal faculties of telepathy and telaesthesia (or clairvoyance) with which so much of our work in psychical research has been concerned. Can we still regard ourselves as passing only from one to another degree of faculty exercised in the already known environment? or are we beginning to observe human faculty operating in an environment new to science? At first sight, the least inconceivable explanation of telepathy might seem to lie in assuming a fresh form of ether-waves which should carry the vibra-tions of one brain and imprint them on another.

I have already shown (632-634) the inadequacy of this theory to ex-plain even many simple experimental cases - still more cases of collective percipience, of telepathy from the dead, and of the faculties analogous to telepathy to be discussed immediately, - telaesthesia and clairvoyance, pre-cognition and retrocognition. We may still, however, find some points of transition between at least the supraliminal manifestations of telepathy and phenomena already known. And telepathy is thus linked with the sense-perception and the memory which we have just been discussing; - even as we shall presently find it linked with emotion and will. In the first place, the hyperaesthesia which I have claimed for the subliminal self seems some-times to pass gradually beyond the point which any sensory influence can be stretched to cover. We must then assume at least a mingling of some form of supernormal acquisition of knowledge; - telepathy if we have an agent's mind already possessed of that knowledge, telaesthesia if no such agent can be suggested.

The hypermnesia, again, of which we were but now speaking seems often to act as a kind of nidus for germs of knowledge borne home from some other quarter. In itself this extension of subliminal memory is most significant of hidden faculty. For the extended memory itself implies intellectual operation; it is n7ot a mere indiscriminating photograph, but an impressionist or sometimes even a symbolical picture, where facts sub-jectively important are brought into intentional prominence. And that picture - let us take for example an actual picture seen in a crystal - is selected from amongst a presumable multitude of its congeners, and presented to supraliminal view at the useful moment. And often, as I have said, among the contents of this subliminal memory unexpected items float up into cognisance; crystal-vision or hallucination turns out to be veridical - to tell truly of a fact which no actual observation, however acute, can ever have stored up in the subliminal memory. We find, in short, that the subliminal consciousness does not only acquire and retain a fuller picture of its material surroundings than the every day waking man can boast, but also acquires knowledge by means of its own, and especially by telepathic impression from other minds.

(D) Telcesthesia Or Clairvoyance; Perception Of Distant Scenes; Retro-Cognition, Precognition

The knowledge which is received by telepathy is knowledge which has been already worked up, so to say, into manageable form in another mind. Is it possible that this power of spiritual perception can be still further extended? that the human spirit can absorb knowledge without the aid either of its own bodily senses or of other minds?

I believe that our answer must be affirmative, and indeed that this power of telcesthesia is a faculty perhaps of wider range than telepathy itself. Naturally, we cannot always distinguish such a phenomenon from telepathy; and in many cases of "telepathic clairvoyance" both powers seem to have been at work;- the agent's crisis summoning the percipient's subliminal attention, and the percipient then discerning details of which the agent was not himself directly conscious. Such scenes seem to come midway between telepathy proper and the telaesthetic perception of quite indifferent scenes, presented to the percipient in waking vision or crystal-picture or dream, as it were at random;- as though the casual slipping of a shutter in some vast camera obscura had thrown upon the mind's receptive surface a remote and irrelevant segment of the reflected totality of things.

Nor is this all. For it is, perhaps, under this wide heading of telaesthesia that mention should be made of a still more surprising extension of view, from things distant in space to things distant in time also. I need not here repeat the arguments which indicate that these perceptions, although partly due to spiritual communications, seem also partly due to faculties of the subliminal self.