Sometimes again—quite apart from any oral suggestion or apparent outside influence—we find the subjective being taking most decisive command of a person’s faculties and actions. This happens, for instance, in somnambulism, when the sleepwalker perhaps passes along the narrow and perilous ridge of a roof or wall with perfect balance and sureness of foot—adjusting a hundred muscles in the most delicate way, and yet with total unconsciousness as far as the supraliminal self is concerned. Or it happens sometimes—even more remarkably—to people in full possession of their waking faculties, at some moment when extreme danger threatens to overwhelm them. John Muir in his _The Mountains of California_,[68] describes how when scaling the very precipitous face of a cliff he found himself completely baffled, at a great height from the ground, and unable to proceed either up or down. He was seized with panic and a trembling in every limb, and was on the point of falling, when suddenly a perfect calm and assurance took possession of him, and somehow—he never quite knew how—with an astonishing agility and sure-footedness he completed the ascent, and was saved. “I seemed suddenly to become possessed of a new sense. The other Self—bygone experiences, Instinct or Guardian Angel, call it what you will—came forward and assumed control. My trembling muscles became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through a microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with which I seemed to have nothing at all to do. Had I been borne aloft upon wings, my deliverance could not have been more complete.” Mæterlinck, in his chapter on “The Psychology of Accident” (in _Life and Flowers_), describes how in the nerve-commotion of danger, Instinct, “a rugged, brutal, naked, muscular figure,” rushes to the rescue. “With a glance that is surer and swifter than the onrush of the peril, it takes in the situation, then and there unravels all its details, issues and possibilities, and in a trice affords a magnificent, an unforgettable spectacle of strength, courage, precision, and will, in which unconquered life flies at the throat of death.” And similar instances—of instinctive presence of mind, and an almost miraculous development of faculty in extreme danger—are within the knowledge of most people. The subliminal being steps in quite decisively, and the ordinary conscious mind _feels_ that another power is taking over the reins.