If you ask me how his doctrine has this effect, I answer: By
co-ordinating! For Myers' great principle of research was that in order
to understand any one species of fact we ought to have all the species of
the same general class of fact before us. So he took a lot of scattered
phenomena, some of them recognized as reputable, others outlawed from
science, or treated as isolated curiosities; he made series of them,
filled in the transitions by delicate hypotheses or analogies; and bound
them together in a system by his bold inclusive conception of the
Subliminal Self, so that no one can now touch one part of the fabric
without finding the rest entangled with it. Such vague terms of
apperception as psychologists have hitherto been satisfied with using for
most of these phenomena, as "fraud," "rot," "rubbish," will no more be
possible hereafter than "dirt" is possible as a head of classification in
chemistry, or "vermin" in zoology. Whatever they are, they are things
with a right to definite description and to careful observation.
I cannot but account this as a great service rendered to Psychology. I
expect that Myers will ere long distinctly figure in mental science as
the radical leader in what I have called the romantic movement. Through
him for the first time, psychologists are in possession of their full
material, and mental phenomena are set down in an adequate inventory. To
bring unlike things thus together by forming series of which the
intermediary terms connect the extremes, is a procedure much in use by
scientific men. It is a first step made towards securing their interest
in the romantic facts, that Myers should have shown how easily this
familiar method can be applied to their study.
Myers' conception of the extensiveness of the Subliminal Self quite
overturns the classic notion of what the human mind consists in. The
supraliminal region, as Myers calls it, the classic-academic
consciousness, which was once alone considered either by associationists
or animists, figures in his theory as only a small segment of the psychic
spectrum. It is a special phase of mentality, teleologically evolved for
adaptation to our natural environment, and forms only what he calls a
"privileged case" of personality. The out-lying Subliminal, according to
him, represents more fully our central and abiding being.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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