Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily DeathMyers, F. W. H. (Frederic William Henry)
Religion
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
Myers, F. W. H. (Frederic William Henry)
Immortality; Parapsychology; Personality
And now, standing once more upon our watershed of entencephalic vision,
let us trace the advancing capacities of internal vision. The forms of
vision now to be considered are virtually independent of the eye; they
can persist, that is to say, after the destruction of the eye, if only
the eye has worked for a few years, so as to give visual education to
the brain. We do not, in fact, fully know the limits of this
independence, which can only be learnt by a fuller examination of
intelligent blind persons than has yet been made. Nor can we say with
certainty how far in a seeing person the eye is in its turn influenced
by the brain. I shall avoid postulating any "retropulsive current" from
brain to retina, just as I have avoided any expression more specific
than "the brain" to indicate the primary seat of sight. The arrangement
here presented, as already explained, is a psychological one, and can
be set forth without trespassing on controverted physiological ground.
We may take _memory-images_ as the simplest type of internal vision.
These images, as commonly understood, introduce us to no fresh
knowledge; they preserve the knowledge gained by conscious gaze upon the
outer world. In their simplest spontaneous form they are the _cerebral_
sequelæ of external vision, just as after-images are its _entoptic_
sequelæ. These two classes of vision have been sometimes confounded,
although the distinction is a marked one. Into the cerebral storage of
impressions one element habitually enters which is totally absent from
the mere retinal storage, namely, a psychical element--a rearrangement
or generalisation of the impressions retinally received.
Next we come to a common class of memory-images, in which the subliminal
rearrangement is particularly marked. I speak of _dreams_--which lead us
on in two directions from memory-images; in the direction of
_imagination-images_, and in the direction of _hallucinations_. Certain
individual dreams, indeed, of rare types point also in other directions
which later on we shall have to follow. But dreams as a class consist of
confused memory-images, reaching a kind of low hallucinatory intensity,
a glow, so to say, sufficient to be perceptible in darkness.
I will give the name of _imagination-images_ to those conscious
recombinations of our store of visual imagery which we compose either
for our mere enjoyment, as "waking dreams," or as artifices to help us
to the better understanding of facts of nature confusedly discerned.
Such, for instance, are imagined geometrical diagrams; and Watt, lying
in bed in a dark room and conceiving the steam-engine, illustrates the
utmost limit to which voluntary internal visualisation can go.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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