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
This being so, I cannot see how we can phrase our definition more simply
than by saying that any act or condition must be regarded as conscious
if it is _potentially memorable_;--if it can be recollected, under any
circumstances, by the subject concerned. It does not seem needful that
the circumstances under which such recollection may occur should arise
while the subject is still incarnated on this planet. We shall never on
this planet remember the great majority of our dreams; but those dreams
were presumably no less conscious than the dreams which a sudden
awakening allowed us to keep in memory. Certain hypnotic subjects,
indeed, who can be made to remember their dreams by suggestion,
apparently remember dreams previously latent just as easily as dreams
previously remembered. And we shall have various other examples of the
unexpected recollection of experiences supposed to have been entirely
devoid of consciousness.
We are bound, I think, to draw at least this negative conclusion: that
we must not take for granted that our apparently central consciousness
is something wholly different in kind from the minor consciousnesses out
of which it is in some sense elaborated. I do indeed believe it to be in
an important sense different; but this difference must not be assumed on
the basis of our subjective sensations alone. We must approach the whole
subject of split or duplicated personalities with no prepossession
against the possibility of any given arrangement or division of the
total mass of consciousness which exists within us.
Before we can picture to ourselves how that mass of consciousness may
_disintegrate_, we ought, were it possible, to picture to ourselves how
it is in the first instance _integrated_. That, however, is a difficulty
which does not begin with the constitution of man. It begins when
unicellular develop into multicellular organisms. It is, of course, a
mystery how a single cell can hold together, and what kind of unity it
can possess. But it is a fresh mystery when several cells cohere in a
conjoint and independent life. In the collective unity of certain
"colonial animals" we have a kind of sketch or parody of our own complex
being. Higher intelligences may possibly see us as we see the
hydrozoon--a creature split up into different "persons," a "hydriform
person" who feeds, a "medusiform person" who propagates, and so
on--elements of the animal differentiated for different
ends--interconnected from one point of view as closely as our stomach
and brain, yet from another point of view separable existences, capable
of detachment and of independent regeneration in all kinds of different
ways. Still more composite, though less conspicuously composite, is
every animal that we meet as we rise through the scale; and in man we
reach the summit both of colonial complexity and of centralised control.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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