501. In the course of this study of human personality and human evolution, it is to be hoped that at every stage of our collection and discussion of evidence we may attain a somewhat wider conception of the directions in which that evolution may be looked for, or may even be actively pursued.

Our discussion in Chapter II (Disintegrations Of Personality). of the ways in which human personality is apt to disintegrate helped us to grasp in Chapter III (Genius). the conception of genius as an integration of subliminal faculty with supraliminal, - an utilisation of a greater proportion of man's psychical being in subservience to ends desired by his supraliminal control. Genius, indeed, seems at present attainable rather by fortunate sports of heredity than by any systematic training; but it is, nevertheless, important to realise that a level thus definitely higher than our own has already often been reached in the normal progress of the race.

In Chapter IV (Sleep). we reviewed the sleeping phase of our personality. Dreams introduced us - though incoherently and obscurely - into a strangely widened conception of man's environment and his destiny. They showed him in relation with a world profounder than even genius had apprehended, and on the threshold of powers to which not even genius has aspired.

We were led on, indeed, into a conception of sleep which, whether or not it prove ultimately in any form acceptable by science, is at any rate in deep congruity with the evidence brought forward in this work. Our human life, in this view, exists and energises, at the present moment, both in the material and in the spiritual world. Human personality, as it has developed from lowly ancestors, has become differentiated into two phases; one of them mainly adapted to material or planetary, the other to spiritual or cosmic operation. The subliminal self, mainly directing the sleeping phase, is able either to rejuvenate the organism by energy drawn in from the spiritual world; - or, on the other hand, temporarily and partially to relax its connection with that organism, in order to expatiate in the exercise of supernormal powers; - telepathy, telaesthesia, ecstasy.

Such were the suggestions of the evidence as to dream and vision; such, I may add, will be seen to be the suggestions of spontaneous somnambulism, which has not yet fallen under our discussion. Yet claims so large as these demand corroboration from observation and experiment along many different lines of approach. Some such corroboration we have, in anticipatory fashion, already acquired. Discussing in Chapter II (Disintegrations Of Personality). the various forms of disintegration of personality, we had frequent glimpses of beneficent subliminal powers. We saw the deepest stratum of the self intervening from time to time with a therapeutic object (in the cases, e.g. of "Léonie III." or " Léonore" in 230 A, or Anna Winsor in 237 A), or we caught it in the act of exercising, even if aimlessly or sporadically, some faculty beyond supraliminal reach. And we observed, moreover, that the agency by which these subliminal powers were invoked was generally the hypnotic trance. Of the nature of that trance I then said nothing; it was manifest only that here was some kind of induced or artificial somnambulism, which seemed to systematise that beneficial control of the organism which spontaneous sleep-waking states had exercised in a fitful way.

It must plainly be our business to understand ab initio these hypnotic phenomena; to push as far as may be what seems like an experimental evolution of the sleeping phase of personality.

502. Let us suppose, then, that we are standing at our present point, but with no more knowledge of hypnotic phenomena than existed in the boyhood of Mesmer. We shall know well enough what, as experimental psychologists, we desire to do; but we shall have little notion of how to set about it. We desire to summon at our will, and to subdue to our use, these rarely emergent sleep-waking faculties. On their physical side, we desire to develop their inhibition of pain and their reinforcement of energy; on their intellectual side, their concentration of attention; on their emotional side, their sense of freedom, expansion, joy. Above all, we desire to get hold of those supernormal faculties - telepathy and telæsthesia - of which we have caught fitful glimpses in somnambulism and in dream.

Yet to such hopes as these the so-called "experience of ages" (generally a very short and scrappy induction!) will seem altogether to refuse any practical outcome. History, indeed, - with the wonted vagueness of history, - will offer us a long series of stories of the strange sanative suggestion or influence of man on man; - beginning, say with David and Saul, or with David and Abishag, and ending with Valentine Great-rakes, - or with the Stuarts' last touch for the King's evil. But in knowledge of how actually to set about it, we should still be just on the level of the Seven Sages.1

And now let the reader note this lesson on the unexhausted possibilities of human organisms and human life. Let him take his stand at one of the modern centres of hypnotic practice, - in Professor Bernheim's hospital-ward, or Dr. van Renterghem's clinique; let him see the hundreds of patients thrown daily into hypnotic trance, in a few moments, and as a matter of course; and let him then remember that this process, which now seems as obvious and easy as giving a pill, was absolutely unknown not only to Galen and to Celsus, but to Hunter and to Harvey; and when at last discovered was commonly denounced as a fraudulent fiction, almost up to the present day. Nay, if one chances to have watched as a boy some cure effected in Dr. Elliotson's Mesmeric Hospital, before neglect and calumny had closed that too early effort for human good; - if one has seen popular indifference and professional prejudice check the new healing art for a generation; - is not one likely to have imbibed a deep distrust of all a priori negations in the matter of human faculty; - of all obiter dicta of eminent men on subjects with which they do not happen to be acquainted? Would not one, after such an experience, rather choose (with Darwin) "the fool's experiment" than any immemorial ignorance which has stiffened into an unreasoning incredulity?

1 Long ago Solon had said, apparently of mesmeric cure.