The Drama of Love and Death: A Study of Human Evolution and TransfigurationCarpenter, Edward
Philosophy
The Drama of Love and Death: A Study of Human Evolution and Transfiguration
Carpenter, Edward
Death; Love; Personality
I can only attempt here—very roughly I am afraid, and
unsystematically—to point out _some_ of the properties and qualities of
the underlying or hidden or subconscious self—whichever term we may
like to use. In the first place, its memory appears to be little short
of perfect, and at any rate to our ordinary intelligence and estimate,
nothing short of marvellous. When a servant girl, who can neither read
nor write, reproduces, in her wandering speech during a nervous fever,
whole sentences of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which she could not
possibly understand, and which had only fallen quite casually on her
ears years before from the lips of an old scholar (who used to recite
passages to himself as he walked up and down a room adjoining the
kitchen in which the girl at that time worked[62]); we perceive that the
under or latent memory _may_ catch and retain for a lengthy period, and
with strange accuracy, the most fleeting and apparently superficial
impressions. When Dr. Milne Bramwell instructs a hypnotized subject to
make a cross on a bit of paper exactly 20,180 minutes after the giving
of the order; and the patient, having of course emerged from the
hypnotic sleep, and gone about her daily work, and having no conscious
remembrance of the command, does nevertheless at the expiration of the
stated number of days and minutes take a piece of paper and make the
said cross upon it,[63] we can only marvel both at the persistence and
accuracy of memory which the subliminal being displays, and at the
strict command which this being may exercise in its silent way over the
actions of the supraliminal self. When we are repeatedly told that in
the moment of drowning, people remember every action and event of their
past life, though we may doubt the exact force of the word ‘every,’ we
cannot but be convinced that an enormous and astounding resurgence of
memory does take place,[64] and we cannot but suspect that the
memorization is somehow on a different plane of consciousness from the
usual one, being simultaneous and in mass instead of linear and
successive. Or when, again, a ‘calculating boy’ or prodigy of quite
tender years on being asked to find the cube-root of 31,855,013
instantly says 317, or being given the number 17,861 immediately remarks
that it consists of the factors 337 × 53,[65] we are reduced to the
alternative suppositions, either that the boy’s subconscious self works
out these sums with a perfectly amazing rapidity, or that it has access
to stores of memory and knowledge quite beyond the experience of the
life-time concerned. In all these cases, and hundreds and thousands of
others which have been observed, the memory of the subliminal
self—whether manifested through hypnotism, or in sleep or dreams, or in
other ways—seems to exceed in range and richness, as well as in
rapidity, the memory of the supraliminal self; and indeed Myers goes so
far as to say that the deeper down one penetrates below the
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