"To tell the truth, I do not myself hold that the whole of any one of us is incarnated in these terrestrial bodies; certainly not in childhood; more, but perhaps not so very much more, in adult life. What is manifested in this body is, I venture to think likely, only a portion--an individualized, a definite portion--of a much larger whole. What the rest of me may be doing, for these few years while I am here, I do not know, perhaps it is asleep; but probably it is not so entirely asleep with men of genius; nor, perhaps, is it all completely inactive with the people called 'mediums.' "Imagination in science is permissible, provided one's imaginations are not treated as fact, or even theory, but only as working hypotheses,--a kind of hypotheses which, properly treated, is essential to the progress of every scientific man. Let us imagine, then, as a working hypothesis, that our subliminal self--the other, the greater part of us--is in touch with another order of existence, and that it is occasionally able to communicate, or somehow, perhaps unconsciously, transmit to the fragment in the body something of the information accessible to it. This guess, if permissible, would contain a clue to a possible explanation of clairvoyance. We should then be like icebergs floating in an ocean, with only a fraction exposed to sun and air and observation: the rest--by far the greater bulk--submerged and occasionally in subliminal contact, while still their peaks, their visible peaks, were far separate."