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 not only this. His hallucinations are in most cases elaborate
products--complex images which must have needed intelligence to fashion
them--although the process of their fashioning is hidden from our view.
In this respect they resemble the inspirations of genius. For here we
find again just what we found in those inspirations--the uprush of a
complex intellectual product, performed beneath the threshold, and
projected ready-made into ordinary consciousness. The uprushing stream
of intelligence, indeed, in the man of genius flowed habitually in
conformity with the superficial stream. Only rarely does the great
conception intrude itself upon him with such vigour and such
untimeliness as to bring confusion and incoherence into his ordinary
life. But in the case of these induced hallucinations the incongruity
between the two streams of intelligence is much more marked. When a
subject, for instance, is trying to keep down some post-hypnotic
hallucinatory suggestion, one can watch the smooth surface of the
supraliminal river disturbed by that suggestion as though by jets of
steam from below, which sometimes merely break in bubbles, but sometimes
force themselves up bodily through the superficial film.
It is by considering hallucinations in this generalised manner and among
these analogies, that we can best realise their absence of necessary
connection with any bodily degeneration or disease. Often, of course,
they accompany disease; but that is only to say that the central sensory
tracts, like any other part of the organism, are capable of morbid as
well as of healthful stimulus. Taken in itself, the mere fact of the
quasi-externalisation of a centrally initiated image indicates strong
central stimulation, and absolutely nothing more. There is no
physiological law whatever which can tell us what degree of vividness
our central pictures may assume consistently with health--short of the
point where they get to be so indistinguishable from external
preceptions that, as in madness, they interfere with the rational
conduct of life. That point no well-attested case of veridical
hallucinations, so far as my knowledge goes, has yet approached.
It was, of course, natural that in the study of these phantasms, as
elsewhere, the therapeutic interest should have preceded the
psychological, but in the newer practical study of _eugenics_--the study
which aims at improving the human organism, instead of merely conserving
it--experimental psychology is indispensable, and one branch of this is
the experimental study of mental visions.
Let us consider whether, apart from such a rare and startling incident
as an actual hallucination, there is any previous indication of a habit
of receiving, or a power of summoning, pictures from a subliminal
store-house? Any self-suggestion, conscious or unconscious, which places
before the supraliminal intelligence visual images apparently matured
elsewhere?
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