s have fully admitted the
existence of a subliminal mental region, under the name either of
unconscious cerebration or of the involuntary life; but they have never
definitely taken up the question of the extent of this region, never
sought explicitly to map it out. Myers definitely attacks this problem,
which, after him, it will be impossible to ignore.

_What is the precise constitution of the Subliminal_--such is the problem
which deserves to figure in our Science hereafter as the _problem of
Myers_; and willy-nilly, inquiry must follow on the path which it has
opened up. But Myers has not only propounded the Problem definitely, he
has also invented definite methods for its solution. Posthypnotic
suggestion, crystal-gazing, automatic writing and trance-speech, the
willing-game, etc., are now, thanks to him, instruments of research,
reagents like litmus paper or the galvanometer, for revealing what would
otherwise be hidden. These are so many ways of putting the Subliminal on
tap. Of course without the simultaneous work on hypnotism and hysteria
independently begun by others, he could not have pushed his own work so
far. But he is so far the only generalizer of the problem and the only
user of all the methods; and even though his theory of the extent of the
Subliminal should have to be subverted in the end, its formulation will,
I am sure, figure always as a rather momentous event in the history of
our Science.

Any psychologist who should wish to read Myers out of the profession--and
there are probably still some who would be glad to do so to-day--is
committed to a definite alternative. Either he must say that we knew all
about the subliminal region before Myers took it up, or he must say that
it is certain that states of super-normal cognition form no part of its
content. The first contention would be too absurd. The second one
remains more plausible. There are many first hand investigators into the
Subliminal who, not having themselves met with anything super-normal,
would probably not hesitate to call all the reports of it erroneous, and
who would limit the Subliminal to dissolutive phenomena of consciousness
exclusively, to lapsed memories, subconscious sensations, impulses and
_phobias_, and the like. Messrs. Janet and Binet, for aught I know, may
hold some such position as this. Against it Myers' thesis would stand
sharply out. Of the Subliminal, he would say, we can give no
ultra-simple account: t