(6) Mental Expenditure; Response To Stimuli Modified By Subliminal Control

(A) Subliminal Ideation; The Inspirations Of Genius

From this brief review of the influence of the subliminal self on mental nutrition, let us turn to consider its influence on mental expenditure. There is, of course, no hard and fast line between the two, and all our consciousness is Will in the making. All cerebration, in other words, is probably at once sensory and motor; and at any rate when we are dealing with "subliminal messages" it must seem a matter almost of chance whether the message shall take the sensory form of hallucination, visual or auditory, or the motor form of an impulse to write or speak. But first we have to deal, under this heading, with something which is not for us in common parlance either sensory or motor;- namely, ideation; or such intra-cerebral readjustments as involve only images which fall short of hallucination and impulses which have not yet set the muscles in action.

I have urged elsewhere (in Chapter III (Genius).) that even our habitual current of thought bears abundant testimony to cerebration beneath the ordinary threshold of consciousness.1 With all of us there are subliminal uprushes - incursions of ideas and images ready-made and vivid into the superficial stratum of more continuous, but less ardent, less flashing thought. Such uprushes, although alike in mechanism, leave products of very different worth. For most men nothing better than dust and scoriae is flung up from the subterranean chambers; for few only do the rock-fragments bear in their cavities the precious crystals which have gathered in hidden laboratories into the emerald's or the ruby's glow.

(B) Motor Automatism; Concurrent Consciousness; Hyperboulia

So long as we confine ourselves to these intra-cerebral responses to external stimuli, We have no obvious line to draw between the ideas which we manufacture piecemeal above the threshold and those which come to us ready-made from below. Even here, no doubt, there are physiological effects already indicating an extension of mental influence over the bodily frame. When, in the poet's words, "a great thought strikes along the brain, and flushes all the cheek," the sudden uprush of ideation has affected the vaso-motor system in a way which we cannot deliberately rival. But yet this glowing thought has come mixed with cooler thoughts; it runs, so to say, into the amalgam of common life. We have now to note that a point may be reached, in some men if not in all, where the two streams of faculty are not conjoint but concurrent; the subliminal faculty using the organism in a separate and definite manner, in writing, namely, or speech, which in reference to the man's habitual processes seems automatic or even quasi-external, and which suggests to him that some intelligence other than his own must be moving his hand or speaking through his mouth.

Sometimes, as I believe, such an external intelligence is indeed at work; oftener the man's own deeper self is thus acting on his empirical self, and writing its own messages with the hand to which it has, after all, an equal claim.

1 It may be worth while to remind the reader that the first important statement in English of the Leibnitzian view of "latent modifications" of minds occurs in Sir W. Hamilton's "Lectures on Metaphysics" (Lect. XVIII.). Dr. Carpenter, to whom the theory is sometimes popularly ascribed, added little except the term "unconscious cerebration." But in reality Leibnitz, with his "insensible perceptions," was nearer the truth (as I conceive it) than either Hamilton or Carpenter; for he did not explicitly deny accompanying consciousness; and that there is a subliminal consciousness I regard (as my readers know) as certain.

From many points of view these automatic motor messages form for us a central and instructive phenomenon. In the first place it is obvious that they are closely allied with - sometimes interchangeable with - sensory hallucinations. They thus materially support the view that these phantoms also are in the same sense automatic; that is, that they are for the most part at least shaped by the percipient's own subliminal self, and presented to his supraliminal perception as a method of informing or influencing him from the depths of his own being. In the second place, they enable us to set out a continuous series from the transitory phenomena of hypnotic suggestion at the one end to changes of personality and "spirit-pos-session" at the other end. We start, say, from Edmund Gurney's post-hypnotic experiment, where you tell a man a fact in the trance which on waking he forgets, - but which he can nevertheless write out automatically with no recognition of its source. Here we know perfectly whence the fact originally came; we can feel sure that no telepathic, no disembodied influence has been brought to bear. Then come the ordinary mass of spontaneous automatic messages, presumably self-originated, since they contain no fact which the automatist may not have learnt by ordinary sensory means.

And from this point the automatisms may diverge in several directions. They may, as I have already said, begin to show knowledge which, cannot have been acquired by normal means; - which seems as if it must have come telepathically from living men; - or even knowledge which, alike in its substance and in its lacunae, seems coincident with the presumable knowledge and ignorance of some departed spirit.

This is of course the most interesting form of development. But the automatisms may also become markedly impressive in a different way. While still showing no actual knowledge beyond the automatist's normal reach, they may nevertheless assume a character so distinct, - a mode of self-expression so deeply involving the entire organism, - that they come to rank as new phases of personality, representing fresh positions of relative stability into which the man's psychical being may be thrown.

And here again, while thus led forward to our impending notice of Modifications of Personality, we are also led backward to our previous account of psycho-therapeutics and self-suggestion, of the modification of physical nutrition by subliminal control. What we there described, so to say, from the outside, we are now regarding from the inward or subjective point of view. For these motor automatisms pass insensibly into hyper-boulia; that is to say, the same subliminal motor response to stimuli which guides the automatist's hand in this strange fashion is not limited in power to mere writing or vocal utterance; it can work upon stomach or liver as well as upon hand or tongue. It has overpassed the traditional bounds in one direction; it shows next that it can overpass them in another; it leaves us asking what bounds it may not overpass. Much in the same way did Frenchmen once speculate as to what causes in a paper constitution the First Consul was likely to respect. The nerve-system is a kind of traditional Constitution; the Will is a force whose strength, whose very nature, is all unknown. The Will, we say, acts directly on striped muscle and not on unstriped.

What is this but a convention which wills obey because they have always obeyed it? What boundary line can the physiologist draw through the phenomena of man's bodily life, assuring us that here the purposive must necessarily end, and the unpurposed, the inevitable begin? If Will does anything, why should it not do all?