Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. F. W. H. Myers
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given during the hypnotic trance, but intended to operate after that trance has ceased.
Precognition.—Knowledge of impending events supernormally acquired.
Premonition.—A supernormal indication of any kind of event still in the future.
*Preversion.—A tendency to characteristics assumed to lie at a further point of the evolutionary progress of a species than has yet been reached; opposed to reversion.
*Promnesia.—The paradoxical sensation of recollecting a scene which is only now occurring for the first time; the sense of the déjà vu.
*Psychorrhagy.—A special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the phantasm of a person easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a psychical element, definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion of space.
*Psychorrhagic diathesis.—A habit or capacity of detaching some psychical element, involuntarily and without purpose, in such a manner as to produce a phantasm.
Psycho-therapeutics.—"Treatment of disease by the influence of the mind on the body." (Tuke's Dict.)
Reciprocal.—Used of cases where there is both agency and percipience at each end of the telepathic chain, so that A perceives P, and P perceives A also.
*Retrocognition.—Knowledge of the past, supernormally acquired.
Secondary personality.—It sometimes happens, as the result of shock, disease, or unknown causes, that an individual experiences an alteration of memory and character, amounting to a change of personality, which generally seems to have come on during sleep. The new personality is in that case termed secondary, in distinction to the original, or primary, personality.
Secondary sensations (Secunddrempfindungen, audition colorée, sound-seeing, synæsthesia, etc.).—With some persons every sensation of one type is accompanied by a sensation of another type; as for instance, a special sound may be accompanied by a special sensation of colour or light (chromatisms or photisms). This phenomenon is analogous to that of number-forms—a kind of diagrammatic mental picture which accompanies the conception of a progression of numbers. See Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty.
Shell-hearing.—The induction of hallucinatory voices, etc., by listening to a shell. Analogous to crystal-gazing.
Stigmatisation.—The production of blisters or other cutaneous changes on the hands, feet, or elsewhere, by suggestion or self-suggestion.
Subliminal.—Of thoughts, feelings, etc., lying beneath the ordinary threshold (limen) of consciousness, as opposed to supraliminal, lying above the threshold.
Suggestion.—The process of effectively impressing upon the subliminal intelligence the wishes of some other person. Self-suggestion means a suggestion conveyed by the subject himself from one stratum of his personality to another, without external intervention.
*Supernormal.—Of a faculty or phenomenon which transcends ordinary experience. Used in preference to the word supernatural, as not assuming that there is anything outside nature or any arbitrary interference with natural law.
Supraliminal.—See Subliminal.
Synæsthesia.—See Secondary Sensations.
Synergy.—A number of actions correlated together, or combined into a group.
Telekinesis.—Used of alleged supernormal movements of objects, not due to any known force.
*Telepathy.—The communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense.
*Telæsthesia.—Any direct sensation or perception of objects or conditions independently of the recognised channels of sense, and also under such circumstances that no known mind external to the percipient's can be suggested as the source of the knowledge thus gained.
*Telergy.—The force exercised by the mind of an agent in impressing a percipient—involving a direct influence of the extraneous spirit on the brain or organism of the percipient.
Veridical.—Of hallucinations, when they correspond to real events happening elsewhere and unknown to the percipient.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
| Maior agit deus, atque opera la maiora remittit. |
| —VIRGIL. |
IN the long story of man's endeavours to understand his own environment and to govern his own fates, there is one gap or omission so singular that, however we may afterwards contrive to explain the fact, its simple statement has the air of a paradox. Yet it is strictly true to say that man has never yet applied to the problems which most profoundly concern him those methods of inquiry which in attacking all other problems he has found the most efficacious.
The question for man most momentous of all is whether or no he has an immortal soul; or—to avoid the word immortal, which belongs to the realm of infinities—whether or no his personality involves any element which can survive bodily death. In this direction have always lain the gravest fears, the farthest-reaching hopes, which could either oppress or stimulate mortal minds.
On the other hand, the method which our race has found most effective in acquiring knowledge is by this time familiar to all men. It is the method of modern Science—that process which consists in an interrogation of Nature entirely dispassionate, patient, systematic; such careful experiment and cumulative record as can often elicit from her slightest indications her deepest truths. That method is now dominant throughout the civilised world; and although in many directions experiments may be difficult and dubious, facts rare and elusive, Science works slowly on and bides her time—refusing to fall back upon tradition or to launch into speculation, merely because strait is the gate which leads to valid discovery, indisputable truth.
I say, then, that this method has never yet been applied to the all-important problem of the existence, the powers, the destiny of the human soul.
Nor is this strange omission due to any general belief that the problem is in its nature incapable of solution by any observation whatever which mankind could make. That resolutely agnostic view—I may almost say that scientific superstition—"ignoramus et ignorabimus"—is no doubt held at the present date by many learned minds. But it has never been the creed, nor is it now the creed, of the human race generally. In most civilised countries there has been for nearly two thousand years a distinct belief that survival has actually been proved by certain phenomena observed at a given date in Palestine. And beyond the Christian pale—whether through reason, instinct, or superstition—it has ever been commonly held that ghostly phenomena of one kind or another exist to testify to a life beyond the life we know.
But, nevertheless, neither those who believe on vague grounds nor those who believe on definite grounds that the question might possibly be solved, or has actually been solved, by human observation of objective facts, have hitherto made any serious attempt to connect and correlate that belief with the general scheme of belief for which Science already vouches. They have not sought for fresh corroborative instances, for analogies, for explanations; rather they have kept their convictions on these fundamental matters in a separate and sealed compartment of their minds, a compartment consecrated to religion or to superstition, but not to observation or to experiment.
It is my object in the present work—as it has from the first been the object of the Society for Psychical Research, on whose behalf most of the evidence