ud, Mason,
Prince, and others, of the subliminal consciousness of patients with
hysteria, we have revealed to us whole systems of underground life, in
the shape of memories of a painful sort which lead a parasitic
existence, buried outside of the primary fields of consciousness, and
making irruptions thereinto with hallucinations, pains, convulsions,
paralyses of feeling and of motion, and the whole procession of
symptoms of hysteric disease of body and of mind. Alter or abolish by
suggestion these subconscious memories, and the patient immediately
gets well. His symptoms were automatisms, in Mr. Myers's sense of the
word. These clinical records sound like fairy-tales when one first
reads them, yet it is impossible to doubt their accuracy; and, the path
having been once opened by these first observers, similar observations
have been made elsewhere. They throw, as I said, a wholly new light
upon our natural constitution.

And it seems to me that they make a farther step inevitable.
Interpreting the unknown after the analogy of the known, it seems to me
that hereafter, wherever we meet with a phenomenon of automatism, be it
motor impulses, or obsessive idea, or unaccountable caprice, or
delusion, or hallucination, we are bound first of all to make search
whether it be not an explosion, into the fields of ordinary
consciousness, of ideas elaborated outside of those fields in
subliminal regions of the mind. We should look, therefore, for its
source in the Subject's subconscious life. In the hypnotic cases, we
ourselves create the source by our suggestion, so we know it directly.
In the hysteric cases, the lost memories which are the source have to
be extracted from the patient's Subliminal by a number of ingenious
methods, for an account of which you must consult the books. In other
pathological cases, insane delusions, for example, or psychopathic
obsessions, the source is yet to seek, but by analogy it also should be
in subliminal regions which improvements in our methods may yet
conceivably put on tap. There lies the mechanism logically to be
assumed--but the assumption involves a vast program of work to be done
in the way of verification, in which the religious experiences of man
must play their part.[124]

[124] The reader will here please notice that in my exclusive reliance
in the last lecture on the subconscious "incubation" of motives
deposited by a growing experience, I followed the method of employing
a