ne of remembrance, and that in pure
consciousness nothing of the past is lost, the whole life of a
conscious personality being an indivisible continuity; are we not led
to suppose that the effect continues beyond, and that in this passage
of consciousness through matter (the passage which at the tunnel's exit
gives distinct personalities) consciousness is tempered like steel, and
tests itself by clearly constituting personalities and preparing them,
by the very effort which each of them is called upon to make, for a
higher form of existence?"[6]

But the psychologist has yet more to tell us about the nature of
personality. Although helped to distinctiveness of self-conscious
expression by means of its experience of the struggle under present
material conditions, it is not the whole of it that can be thus
expressed. In fact its present physical embodiment is but partially
adequate to the task. In other words, "cerebral life represents only a
small part of the mental life." "One of the roles of the brain is to
limit the vision of the mind, to render {91} its action more
efficacious"[7]--more efficacious, that is to say, for such uses as are
of value for survival and success under our existing conditions.

It is to Frederick Myers that we have chiefly owed the conception of
the subliminal or subconscious mind. The full report of his researches
is given in the two volumes of his work on "Human Personality and its
Survival of Bodily Death" (1901). He it was who invented the word
"telepathy" to express the fact that mental action can be exerted at a
distance. And it was he who brought for the first time the phenomena
of clairvoyance and apparitions under thorough examination by the
employment of the most exacting tests. Along such lines he was led to
the conclusion, now largely accepted, that the conscious self is only a
fraction of the entire personality, the fraction being greater or less
according to the magnitude of the individual.

By means of this subconscious part of our being we are, he held,
brought into touch with one another and are capable of attaining a
knowledge which may greatly transcend that which comes to us through
our ordinary channels of communication. In the case of genius we watch
the emergence of exceptional {92} potentialities, which may serve as
the promise and pledge of what the future has in store for us all. One
day like some winged insect we shall pass to a condition beyond that of
t