Nor, indeed, if the subliminal consciousness be accepted as the source of such perplexing messages, can we feel altogether happy in the possession of a secondary self or subconscious mind which is admittedly guilty in many instances of trickery, evasion, flippancy, deliberate and often cruel deception. Any clouds of glory that such a self may have trailed behind it are at times sadly tarnished, nor is the conviction either agreeable or inspiring that we harbour within us a force capable of præternatural knowledge and amazing achievement and yet characterized at times by conduct which the ordinary mind of any decent person would utterly condemn; for such a secondary self is frequently exhibited as “repressed, conative, infantile, unreasoning, predominantly sexual” and, one may add, sometimes fraudulent and usually non-moral. So many difficulties, indeed, appear to be involved in connecting these messages with any conscious activity that some investigators take refuge in the view that they consist only of the “stuff that dreams are made of,” proceeding from the lumber-room of the mind, and no more fraudulent or immoral than the elusive vagaries and incongruities of some fantastic dream. One other source of the perplexing messages under discussion remains for our consideration. There is, as we have said, a feature common to them all: they invariably claim to proceed from disembodied personalities. If the devotees of the ‘subliminal self’ hypothesis persist in bringing these agencies also within the broad compass of the human mind, conscious or unconscious, it may, I suppose, be urged that the claim to discarnate existence put forward by these _animulae vagulae, blandulae_, is a delusion which is built upon the accumulated mental experience of the human race, always believing, or striving to believe in a life beyond the grave. From the dim recesses of our racial history this pathetic protest against annihilation has, as it were, become a stereotyped portion of the human mind, and so it comes to pass that while the normal self may reject a personal survival, faint and fleeting echoes of the primaeval faith still rise from the depths of the unconscious self.