here are discreet regions in it, levels separated
by critical points of transition, and no one formula holds true of them
all. And any conscientious psychologist ought, it seems to me, to see
that, since these multiple modifications of personality are only
beginning to be reported and observed with care, it is obvious that a
dogmatically negative treatment of them must be premature and that the
problem of Myers still awaits us as the problem of far the deepest moment
for our actual psychology, whether his own tentative solutions of certain
parts of it be correct or not.

Meanwhile, descending to detail, one cannot help admiring the great
originality with which Myers wove such an extraordinarily detached and
discontinuous series of phenomena together. Unconscious cerebration,
dreams, hypnotism, hysteria, inspirations of genius, the willing-game,
planchette, crystal-gazing, hallucinatory voices, apparitions of the
dying, medium-trances, demoniacal possession, clairvoyance,
thought-transference, even ghosts and other facts more doubtful; these
things form a chaos at first sight most discouraging. No wonder that
scientists can think of no other principle of unity among them than their
common appeal to men's perverse propensity to superstition. Yet Myers
has actually made a system of them, stringing them continuously upon a
perfectly legitimate objective hypothesis, verified in some cases and
extended to others by analogy. Taking the name "automatism" from the
phenomenon of automatic writing--I am not sure that he may not himself
have been the first so to baptize this latter phenomenon--he made one
great simplification at a stroke by treating hallucinations and active
impulses under a common head, as _sensory_ and _motor automatisms_.
Automatism he then conceived broadly as a message of any kind from the
Subliminal to the Supraliminal. And he went a step farther in his
hypothetic interpretation, when he insisted on "symbolism" as one of the
ways in which one stratum of our personality will often interpret the
influences of another. Obsessive thoughts and delusions, as well as
voices, visions, and impulses, thus fall subject to one mode of
treatment. To explain them, we must explore the Subliminal; to cure them
we must practically influence it.

Myers' work on automatism led to his brilliant conception, in 1891, of
hysteria. He defined it, with good reasons given, as "a disease of the
hypnotic stratum." Hardly had