Moreover, there seems no reason to assume that our active consciousness is necessarily altogether superior to the consciousnesses which are at present secondary, or potential only. We may rather hold that _super-conscious_ may be quite as legitimate a term as _sub-conscious_, and instead of regarding our consciousness (as is commonly done) as a _threshold_ in our being, above which ideas and sensations must rise if we wish to cognize them, we may prefer to regard it as a _segment_ of our being, into which ideas and sensations may enter either from below or from above; say a thermometric tube, marking ordinary temperatures, but so arranged that water may not only rise into it, by expansion, from the bottom, but also fall into it, by condensation, from the top. Strange and extravagant as this doctrine may seem, I shall hope to show some ground for it in the present paper. I shall hope, at least, to show not only that our unconscious may interact with our conscious mental action in a more definite and tangible manner than is usually supposed, but also that this unconscious mental action may actually manifest the existence of a capital and cardinal faculty of which the conscious mind of the same persons at the same time is wholly devoid. For the sake of brevity I shall select one alone out of many forms of unconscious action which may, if rightly scrutinized, afford a glimpse into the recesses of our being.[27] I shall take _automatic writing_; and I shall try, by a few examples from among the many which lie before me, to show the operation, _first_, of unconscious cerebral action of the already recognized kind, but much more complex and definite than is commonly supposed to be discernible in waking persons; and, _secondly_, of telepathic action,—of the transference, that is to say, of thoughts or ideas from the conscious or unconscious mind of one person to the conscious or unconscious mind of another person, from whence they emerge in the shape of automatically written words or sentences. I shall be able to cover a corner only of a vast and unexplored field. I venture to think that the phenomena of automatic writing will before long claim the best attention of the physiological psychologist. They have been long neglected, and I can only conjecture that this neglect is due to the eagerness with which certain spiritualists have claimed such writings as the work of Shakespeare, Byron, and other improbable persons. The message given has too often fallen below the known grammatical level of those eminent authors, and the laugh thus raised has drowned the far more instructive question as to _whence_ in reality the automatic rubbish came. Yet surely to decline to investigate “planchette” because “the trail of Katie King is over it all,” is very much as though one refused to analyse the meteorite at Ephesus because the town-clerk cried loudly that it was “an image which fell down from Jupiter.”