in conscious
state; and, "There is no great physical difference between the normal
and the hypnotic state," he read; "the real mental difference lies in
the temporary removal of motives tending to counteract the suggestion,
and this removal does not imply an inhibition of faculty, but an
actual extension or liberation of faculty."

In fine, these men agreed that the mind, reaching back, by its very
structure, to the beginning of organic life, was limited by
consciousness to a comparatively small number of its potentialities,
whereas its subliminal life (on the contrary) was infinite and
unsearchably subtle. All minds partook, in varying degrees, of these
baffling powers, but only now and then, through unusual favoring
circumstances, was the brain able to manifest its depth and subtlety.
Sickness, sleeplessness, physical shock, some accidental series of
events now and then permitted a display of these hidden acquirements,
and thereafter the individual was marked as abnormal, possessed,
according to the ancient view, by angels or devils.

Others still, by putting themselves deliberately into the study, had
been able to subordinate the conscious mind, little by little
liberating their subliminal forces by practice, attaining thus almost
miraculous powers. In this way the "medium" became clairvoyant,
clairaudient, telekinetic. In other cases still, as in Viola's case,
this subordination of the supra-liminal self had been accomplished by
the suggestion of others, by submission to the will of others.

He had been profoundly instructed by Tolman's account of a case of
alternating personality which he had studied with so much care. The
fact that the secondary self appeared when the subject's life seemed
at a lower ebb, and when the cerebral centres were sparsely supplied
with the life-current, and the further fact that the use of a certain
substance which stimulated (without poisoning) the higher
brain-centres, was able to bring back the primary or supra-liminal
self, was of the utmost value. It threw a flood of light upon Viola's
condition, for had she not in her trance become inert, cold, and
almost without pulse? He had provided himself with this drug, and as
he studied its appearance in the phial, so minute, so colorless, so
helpless in its prison, he felt once again the mystery of matter, and
smiled to think how childish was the popular conception of the
physical universe as something dead and inorganic. Nothing is mor