242. Next in order to the uprushes of genius will come the uprushes of dream. All men pass normally and healthily into a second phase of personality, alternating with the first. That is sleep, and sleep is characterised by those incoherent forms of subliminal uprush which we know as dreams. It is here that our evidence for telepathy and telęsthesia will first present itself for discussion. Sleep will indicate the existence of submerged faculty of a rarer type than even that to which genius has already testified.

There are, moreover, other states, both spontaneous and induced, analogous to sleep, and these will form the subject of my fifth chapter, that on Hypnotism. Hypnotism, however, does not mean trance or comnambulism only. It is a name, if not for the whole ensemble, yet or a large group of those artifices which we have as yet discovered for he purpose of eliciting and utilising subliminal faculty. The results of hypnotic suggestion will be found to imitate sometimes the subliminal prushes of genius, and sometimes the visions of spontaneous somnam-ulism; while they also open to us fresh and characteristic accesses into ubliminal knowledge and power.

243. Further than this point our immediate forecast need not go. But when we shall have completed the survey here indicated, we shall see, I think, how significant are the phenomena of hysteria in any psychological cheme which aims at including the hidden powers of man. For much as he hysteric stands in comparison with us ordinary men, so perhaps do we ordinary men stand in comparison with a not impossible ideal of faculty and of self-control.

For might not all the hysteric tale be told, mutato nomine, of the whole ace of mortal men? What assurance have we that from some point of higher vision we men are not as these shrunken and shadowed souls? suppose that we had all been a community of hysterics; all of us together subject to these shifting losses of sensation, these inexplicable gaps of memory, these sudden defects and paralyses of movement and of will. Assuredly we should soon have argued that our actual powers were all with which the human organism was or could be endowed. We should lave thought it natural that nervous energy should only just suffice to keep attention fixed upon the action which at the moment we needed to perform. We should have pointed out that our lack of sensation over lrge tracts of the body rarely led to positive injury; but by what means such injury was averted, by the action of what subjacent intelligence our skin was saved from steel or fire - of this we should have been too contentedly ignorant even to ask the question. Nor, again, should we have been astonished at our capricious lack of power over our organisms, our intermittent defect of will.

We should have held, and with some reason, that the mystery as to how our will could ever move any limb of our bodies was far greater than the mystery as to why certain limbs at certain moments failed to obey it. And as for defects of recollection; - is the reader inclined to think that the hysterical memory could never have been accepted as normal? That some guess of a more continuous consciousness, of an identity unmoved and stable beneath the tossing of the psychic storm, must needs have been suggested by all those strange interruptions? by the lapses into other phases of personality, by the competing fields of reminiscence, by the clean sweep and blank destruction of great slices and cantles of the Past? I ask in turn how much of guess at an underlying continuity has been suggested, I do not say to the popular, but even to the scientific mind, by life broken as we know it now? - by our nightly lapses into a primitive phase of personality? by the competing fields of recollection which shift around the hypnotic trance? by the irrecoverable gaps in past existence when the sun's ray or the robber's bludgeon has struck too rudely on the skull?

244. Nay, if we had been a populace of hysterics we should have acquiesced in our hysteria. We should have pushed aside as a fantastic enthusiast the fellow-sufferer who strove to tell us that this was not all that we were meant to be. As we now stand, - each one of us totus, teres, atque rotundus in his own esteem, - we see at least how cowardly would have been that contentment, how vast the ignored possibilities, the forgotten hope. Yet who assures us that even here and now we have developed into the full height and scope of our being? A moment comes when the most beclouded of these hysterics has a glimpse of the truth. A moment comes when, after a profound slumber, she wakes into an instant clair - a flash of full perception, which shows her as solid vivid realities all that she has in her bewilderment been apprehending phantas-mally as a dream. 'Eξ ovelpov δavika - Hv vπap. Is there for us also any possibility of a like resurrection into reality and day? Is there for us any sleep so deep that waking from it after the likeness of perfect man we shall be satisfied; and shall see face to face; and shall know even as also we are known?

245. But apart from these broader speculations, it will surely have become evident, as we have studied the evidence in this chapter that human personality is, at any rate, a much more modifiable complex of forces than is commonly assumed, and is a complex, moreover, which has hitherto been dealt with only in crude, empirical fashion. Each stage, each method of disintegration, suggests a corresponding possibility of integration. Two points have been especially noticeable throughout the chapter. In the first place, we observe in many of the narratives some rudiment of supernormal perceptivity cropping up; probably something in itself useless, yet enough to indicate to us how great a reserve of untapped faculty is latent at no great depth beneath our conscious level. In the second place, we observe that in the more recent cases, where it has been possible to appeal, mainly through hypnotic suggestion, to the deeper strata of the personality, that appeal has seldom been made in vain. In almost every case something more has been thus learnt of the actual mischief which was going on, something effected towards the re-establishment of psychical stability.

These disturbances of personality are no longer for us - as they were even for the last generation - mere empty marvels, which the old-fashioned sceptic would often plume himself on refusing to believe. On the contrary, they are beginning to be recognised as psycho-pathological problems of the utmost interest; - no one of them exactly like another, and no one of them without some possible apercn into the intimate structure of man.

The purpose of this book, of course, is not primarily practical. It aims rather at the satisfaction of scientific curiosity as to man's psychical structure; esteeming that as a form of experimental research which the more urgent needs of therapeutics have kept in the background too long. Yet it may not have been amiss to realise thus, on the threshold of our discussion, that already even the most delicate speculations in this line have found their justification in helpful act; that strange bewilderments, paralysing perturbations, which no treatment could alleviate, no drug control, have been soothed and stablished into sanity by some appropriate and sagacious mode of appeal to a natura medicatrix deep-hidden in the labouring breast.