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
Here at any rate the commonly admitted category of stages of inward
vision will close. Thus far and no farther the brain's capacity for
presenting visual images can be pushed on under the guidance of the
conscious will of man. It is now my business to show, on the contrary,
that we have here reached a mere intermediate point in the development
of _internal_ vision. These imagination-images, valuable as they are,
are merely attempts to control supraliminally a form of vision which--as
spontaneous memory-images have already shown us--is predominantly
subliminal. The memory-images welled up from a just-submerged stratum;
we must now consider what other images also well upward from the same
hidden source.
To begin with, it is by no means certain that some of Watt's images of
steam-engines did not well up from that source,--did not emerge
ready-made into the supraliminal mind while it rested in that merely
_expectant_ state which forms generally a great part of invention. We
have seen in Chapter III. that there is reason to believe in such a
conveyance in the much inferior mental processes of calculating boys,
etc., and also in the mental processes of the painter. In short, without
pretending to judge of the proportion of voluntary to involuntary
imagery in each several creative mind, we must undoubtedly rank the
spontaneously emergent visual images of genius as a further stage of
internal vision.
And now we have reached, by a triple road, the verge of a most important
development of inward vision--namely, that vast range of phenomena which
we call _hallucination_. Each of our last three classes had led up to
hallucination in a different way. _Dreams_ actually _are_
hallucinations; but they are usually hallucinations of low intensity;
and are only rarely capable of maintaining themselves for a few seconds
(as hypnopompic illusions) when the dreamer wakes to the stimuli of the
material world. _Imagination-images_ may be carried to a hallucinatory
pitch by good visualisers.[102] And the _inspirations of
genius_--Raphael's San Sisto is the classical instance--may present
themselves in hallucinatory vividness to the astonished artist.
A hallucination, one may say boldly, is in fact a _hyperæsthesia_; and
generally a _central_ hyperæsthesia. That is to say, the hallucination
is in some cases due indirectly to peripheral stimulation; but often
also it is the result of a stimulus to "mind's-eye vision," which sweeps
the idea onwards into visual form, regardless of ordinary checks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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