Any psychologist who should wish to read Myers out of the profession--and
there are probably still some who would be glad to do so to-day--is
committed to a definite alternative. Either he must say that we knew all
about the subliminal region before Myers took it up, or he must say that
it is certain that states of super-normal cognition form no part of its
content. The first contention would be too absurd. The second one
remains more plausible. There are many first hand investigators into the
Subliminal who, not having themselves met with anything super-normal,
would probably not hesitate to call all the reports of it erroneous, and
who would limit the Subliminal to dissolutive phenomena of consciousness
exclusively, to lapsed memories, subconscious sensations, impulses and
_phobias_, and the like. Messrs. Janet and Binet, for aught I know, may
hold some such position as this. Against it Myers' thesis would stand
sharply out. Of the Subliminal, he would say, we can give no
ultra-simple account: there are discreet regions in it, levels separated
by critical points of transition, and no one formula holds true of them
all. And any conscientious psychologist ought, it seems to me, to see
that, since these multiple modifications of personality are only
beginning to be reported and observed with care, it is obvious that a
dogmatically negative treatment of them must be premature and that the
problem of Myers still awaits us as the problem of far the deepest moment
for our actual psychology, whether his own tentative solutions of certain
parts of it be correct or not.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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