respect, beyond any question, primacy must be given the writings of
Myers. Even before the organization of the society, his personal
researches had led him to suspect that, whatever the truth about the
life beyond the grave, there was reason for radical changes of belief
regarding the nature of human personality itself. In the light of the
phenomena of the hypnotic trance, clairvoyance, hallucinations, and even
of natural sleep, it seemed to him that, instead of being a stable,
indivisible unity, human personality was essentially unstable and
divisible.

And as the years passed and he was enabled to coordinate the results of
the investigations carried on by the different committees, he gradually
became convinced that over and beyond the self of which man is normally
conscious there existed in every man a secondary self endowed with
faculties transcending those of the normal wake-a-day self. To this he
gave the name of the "subliminal self," and, in the words of Professor
James, "endowed psychology with a new problem,--the exploration of the
subliminal region being destined to figure thereafter in that branch of
learning as Myers's problem."

Not content with this, he gave himself, with all the earnestness that
had originally drawn him into activity with Sidgwick, to the
formulation of a cosmic philosophy based on the hypothesis of the
subliminal self and its operations in that unseen world of whose
existence he no longer doubted. Here he laid himself open to the charge
of extravagance and transcendentalism, and undoubtedly exceeded the
logical limit. But for all of that his labors--cut short by death six
years ago, and only a few months after the death of his beloved master,
Sidgwick--have been little short of epoch marking, and amply suffice to
vindicate the existence of the once despised, and still by no means
venerated, Society for Psychical Research.

Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Mr. Frank Podmore are other
members of the society who have granted the outside world informative
glimpses of its workings and discoveries. Sir William Crookes, of
course, is best known as a great chemist, discoverer of the element
thallium, and inventor of numerous scientific instruments; while Sir
Oliver Lodge's most striking work has been in electricity, and more
particularly in the direction of improving wireless telegraphy. But both
have long been actively interested in psychical research, and perhaps
most of all in th