usion which Myers'
suggestion would then have been the first indispensable step towards
finally clearing away.

Once more, then, whatever be the upshot of the patient work required
here, Myers' resourceful intellect has certainly done a service to
psychology.

I said a while ago that his intellect was not by nature philosophic in
the narrower sense of being that of a logician. In the broader sense of
being a man of wide scientific imagination, Myers was most eminently a
philosopher. He has shown this by his unusually daring grasp of the
principle of evolution, and by the wonderful way in which he has worked
out suggestions of mental evolution by means of biological analogies.
These analogies are, if anything, too profuse and dazzling in his pages;
but his conception of mental evolution is more radical than anything yet
considered by psychologists as possible. It is absolutely original; and,
being so radical, it becomes one of those hypotheses which, once
propounded, can never be forgotten, but sooner or later have to be worked
out and submitted in every way to criticism and verification.

The corner-stone of his conception is the fact that consciousness has no
essential unity. It aggregates and dissipates, and what we call normal
consciousness,--the "Human Mind" of classic psychology,--is not even
typical, but only one case out of thousands. Slight organic alterations,
intoxications, and auto-intoxications, give supraliminal forms completely
different, and the subliminal region seems to have laws in many respects
peculiar. Myers thereupon makes the suggestion that the whole system of
consciousness studied by the classic psychology is only an extract from a
larger total, being a part told-off, as it were, to do service in the
adjustments of our physical organism to the world of nature. This
extract, aggregated and personified for this particular purpose, has,
like all evolving things, a variety of peculiarities. Having evolved, it
may also dissolve, and in dreams, hysteria, and divers forms of
degeneration it seems to do so. This is a retrograde process of
separation in a consciousness of which the unity was once effected. But
again the consciousness may follow the opposite course and integrate
still farther, or evolve by growing into yet untried directions. In
veridical automatisms it actually seems to do so. It drops some of its
usual modes of increase, its ordinary use of the senses, for example, and
la