Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death

THE matter contained in these volumes has for the most part appeared in various publications of the society for Psychical Research; but that fact will hardly make the appearance of the collected work less welcome, since this vast mass of material is now brought into a form which makes it possible to apprehend more clearly and estimate more justly the character and value of the late F. W. H. Myers’s contributions to this new field of human inquiry.

Readers not familiar with these matters, and not versed in the technicalities of modern psychology, will be inclined to shrink from such a formidable task as the reading of these two stout volumes ; but a closer scrutiny will assure them that the undertaking is not so serious; they will find the general plan of the work easy to follow and the arrangement of its matter clear and systematic; a glossary will interpret the hard terms that may discourage at first glance some readers; syllabuses give a serviceable analysis of the successive chapters, and appendices contain abundant and interesting cases, which both illustrate the author’s doctrine and are intended to establish his propositions. The work on the whole is admirably constructed, and can be successfully read by those not versed in the technicalities of such subjects.

F. W. H. Myers, whose death in January, 1901, was a distinct loss to the world, had long devoted all his rare powers to the field of psychical research in which he was a most enthusiastic and indefatigable worker, and his contributions to this branch of science had already won for him a high recognition.

The substantial value of Myers’s work will remain unaffected by any fortune that may await his special theories. He has opened new fields to psychological science; he has made impossible the old limitations of that science; he has forced upon the psychologists of the future the recognition of new problems and the necessity of new solutions for old problems. He has enriched the field of scientific research by conceptions, by hypotheses, which, whether they are accepted or rejected, are destined to lead the way to other and truer conceptions.

The title of these volumes is at the same time the statement of the problem with which they deal, — the nature of human personality and the possibility of its continued existence after the death of the body. The problem itself is as old as man, and the most momentous question that has ever engaged his thought; for it is, after all, the problem of the world. These volumes are a new argument for immortality. Their originality lies in the method of approach to this old problem and in the solution offered. The old lines of speculative reasoning are abandoned; there is no appeal to supernatural revelation or to authoritative dogmas; it is a new conception of our human personality, a new interpretation of the facts of our experience that is to open the door into that world which lies beyond death.

Two convictions impel the author in his undertaking: one is, that it is both necessary and possible to have a truer conception of human personality than the state of our knowledge has hitherto permitted ; the other conviction is, that it is necessary to base our hope of immortality upon surer grounds than those reasons with which we have been compelled to content ourselves. So strong has become the current of scientific thought, so dominant its temper in all circles of culture, that we can no longer let our immortality remain an unverified hypothesis, or content ourselves with the “ larger hope; ” nor can any evidence hope for acceptance if it is not somehow continuous with that kind of evidence on which our other beliefs repose.

But if psychological analysis of our human personality shows it to be something that no mere blood and brain can explain; if there appears in our life here the working of a faculty which is not earth-born, and not dependent on bodily conditions; if there are phenomena which, while they do not break the continuity of our present experience, at the same time strongly point to the continued life of man after the death of the body, then the old hope can appeal to the latest science for its justification. Such is the claim of the author.

What then is this human personality, this self of ours ? Recent psychology is making us familiar with a conception of the soul quite different from that idea of the human ego we have for the most part entertained. We are compelled to recognize that each man is potentially at least more and other than in his customary consciousness he takes himself to be; that what goes on in his every-day consciousness and above the threshold of it, so to speak, is not all that can, and under certain conditions does, go on within his individuality; and further, that the subliminal or submerged portion of our psychical life is in the case of some persons richer in content, better organized, wiser and saner than the supra-liminal portion.

It is no longer possible to regard the human soul as a single, simple, unchanging substance; we are rather multiplex in the structure of our egos; there exists more than one psychic personality in the life history of the same human individual.

Psychologists have known these facts for a considerable time; this subliminal region has long been recognized; but psychologists have been cautious about venturing to determine the nature and the limits of this region of psychic life. It is just here that Myers strikes out a new path, ventures a new hypothesis. That conception is the following: That which we call the self of every-day experience is in reality only a portion of a larger personality which is our true and larger self; the self of our customary consciousness is that part of our larger self which the conditions of our terrene existence have made possible. The constituents and powers of this self have been determined by a process of natural selection out of a larger possible psychic life. The other part of our total self exists and functions as a subliminal consciousness, at times manifesting itself in the supra-liminal field, as in the inspired achievements of genius; and, in the case of some individuals, this submerged self invades and takes temporary possession of the supra-liminal region, as in mediums and in alternating or secondary personalities.

The true self, the human soul, did not begin to exist with the life of the body; it will not cease with the cessation of that life. The human soul does not depend for its existence on the body, but only for its manifestations, the transmission of its thoughts to other souls; nor is the soul thus dependent upon the body for the exercise of all its faculties; the subliminal self manifests intelligence and communicates thought independently of bodily functions.

This hypothesis will, to most readers, seem fanciful and romantic, a mere flight of a speculative genius, and to promise little help in the solution of the problems of our existence. But whoever reads carefully these two volumes will not deny one thing to this conception: it enabled Mr. Myers to group together in a most successful way a bewildering variety of seemingly unrelated phenomena, and this unification is no superficial affair; these facts are united by a common principle which affiliates them as truly and as intimately as does the law of gravitation the scattered masses of matter in the universe.

A successful classification of such widely separated and heterogeneous phenomena as those discussed in these volumes is itself an achievement fit to make a man’s reputation, to say nothing of the strong indication it affords that the author is on the right track, and will ultimately be followed by those men who most strenuously reject his theory.

Not to follow the author into details, we note a few instances of the use he makes of this hypothesis in the explanation of such psychic phenomena as hypnotism, telepathy, phantasms of the living and of the dead, and alleged communications from such persons to the living. The hypnotic intelligence, the author maintains, is best explained if we regard it as only a “fragmentary intelligence, a dreamlike scrap of the subliminal self functioning apart from that central and pro founder control; ” these marvels of hypnotism are the “fragmentary expression of that more comprehensive intelligence, of a power which the supra-liminal self does not possess.”

To take another instance; experiments have established as a fact the communication by one mind of thoughts to another mind without the medium of any known sensory or physical channels ; and this communication between minds is not limited to particular perceptions or ideas; one person has been able to make himself appear to another person at a distance, in the entire absence of his bodily presentation. Accept the author’s hypothesis and these facts are readily explained and fall into line with the facts of genius, — hypnotism and other allied phenomena; — the hypothesis fits them all.

But the chain of phenomena does not end here. If the work of the Census Bureau can be relied upon, these veridical hallucinations are continuous in kind with experimental cases of telepathy, and tend with them to establish the author’s hypothesis.

More remarkable still, — the death of the body does not seem to break this chain of evidential facts; the ghost, rightly understood, presents no essential difference, no wide departure from the phenomena of telepathy and phantasms of the living.

To take a last step in this direction: whoever has read the alleged communications made through the medium Mrs. Piper will not find it easy to reject the author’s contention, that the evidence which tends to establish the continued life of the human personality after the death of the body is continuous with the evidence that establishes the fact that a human personality here on the earth can communicate his thoughts and manifest himself to other persons without the medium of the body; and however reluctant such a reader may be to accept the author’s hypothesis, we think he will agree with us that it is time for professed psychologists seriously to set about putting some other explanation in its place than the charge of fraud, self-deception, or childish credulity, which they have been content to substitute for serious examination of the alleged facts.

The author of these volumes will have accomplished his substantial purpose, if he compels the science of the future to face aright this question of the human soul and its destiny.

John E. Russell.