rformed such wonders in Darwin's hands. When
Darwin met a fact which seemed a poser to his theory, his regular
custom, as I have heard an able colleague say, was to fill in all round
it with smaller facts, as a wagoner might heap dirt round a big rock in
the road, and thus get his team over without upsetting. So Mr. Myers,
starting from the most ordinary facts of inattentive consciousness,
follows this clue through a long series which terminates in ghosts, and
seeks to show that these are but extreme manifestations of a {321}
common truth,--the truth that the invisible segments of our minds are
susceptible, under rarely realized conditions, of acting and being
acted upon by the invisible segments of other conscious lives. This
may not be ultimately true (for the theosophists, with their astral
bodies and the like, may, for aught I now know, prove to be on the
correcter trail), but no one can deny that it is in good scientific
form,--for science always takes a known kind of phenomenon, and tries
to extend its range.

I have myself, as American agent for the census, collected hundreds of
cases of hallucination in healthy persons. The result is to make me
feel that we all have potentially a 'subliminal' self, which may make
at any time irruption into our ordinary lives. At its lowest, it is
only the depository of our forgotten memories; at its highest, we do
not know what it is at all. Take, for instance, a series of cases.
During sleep, many persons have something in them which measures the
flight of time better than the waking self does. It wakes them at a
preappointed hour; it acquaints them with the moment when they first
awake. It may produce an hallucination,--as in a lady who informs me
that at the instant of waking she has a vision of her watch-face with
the hands pointing (as she has often verified) to the exact time. It
may be the feeling that some physiological period has elapsed; but,
whatever it is, it is subconscious.

A subconscious something may also preserve experiences to which we do
not openly attend. A lady taking her lunch in town finds herself
without her purse. Instantly a sense comes over her of rising from the
breakfast-table and hearing her purse drop upon the floor. On reaching
home she finds {322} nothing under the table, but summons the servant
to say where she has put the purse. The servant produces it, saying;
"How did you know where it was? You rose and left the room as if you