Frederic Myers

Bio

by U. Mohrhoff:

"F. W. H. Myers, (is) a largely forgotten genius of scientific psychology.

Like many of the intellectual leaders of the mid-19th century, Myers rejected the Christianity in which he had been raised. However, the assumption that mind is a byproduct of purely material processes seemed to him just as gratuitous. To examine it along novel lines of empirical research, Myers helped found the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882, whose founders and early members included such prominent scientists and intellectual leaders as Arthur and Gerald Balfour, W. F. Barrett, W. E. Gladstone, Sir Oliver Lodge, Lord Rayleigh, John Ruskin, F. C. S. Schiller, Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick, Balfour Stewart, Lord Tennyson, and J. J. Thomson.

For the first two decades of the SPR’s existence, Myers was one of its most active investigators and prolific writers. His model of human personality, which he began to formulate in the early 1880s and then presented in detail in the 1890s, became the theoretical framework for psychical research and remained so for decades. In fact, much of William James’s later work, including Varieties of Religious Experience and A Pluralistic Universe, can be viewed as the systematic application of Myers’s central theoretical ideas to problems in religion, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Between the formation of the SPR in 1882 and his death in 1901, Myers and his colleagues published in their Proceedings and Journal over 10,000 pages of reports on supernormal phenomena, including not only extended field observations with mediums and heavily documented studies of spontaneous cases, but early attempts to study telepathy and kindred phenomena experimentally and quantitatively. Gauld echoes James when he writes, “The industry, thoroughness, and care manifest in these publications is unsurpassed in any scientific literature known to me” (Kelly et al., 2006, p. 353).

Aldous Huxley (1961, pp. 7–8), comparing Myers’s (1903) posthumously published Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death2 (HP) to better-known writings on the “unconscious” by Freud and Jung, justly wondered:

- How strange and how unfortunate it is that this amazingly rich, profound, and stimulating book should have been neglected in favor of descriptions of human nature less complete and of explanations less adequate to the given facts!

And in his review of Myers’s (1903), James (1903) wrote:

Myers’s theory, so far, is simple enough. It only postulates an indefinite inward extension of our being, cut off from common consciousness by a screen or diaphragm not absolutely impervious but liable to leakage and to occasional rupture. The “scientific” critic can only say it is a pity that so vast and vaguely defined a hypothesis should be reared upon a set of facts so few and so imperfectly ascertained.

A century later, it isn’t the case any longer that the relevant facts are “so few” and that all or even most of these facts are “imperfectly ascertained.” Many of Myers’s observations have been powerfully confirmed, reinforcing the need for a theory of human personality which — like his — encompasses the full range of human experience.

It was Myers who introduced the term “subliminal consciousness” into scientific psychology. His huge body of published writings is essentially an elaboration of the view that certain phenomena of psychology, particularly of abnormal psychology and psychical research, demonstrate that human personality is far more extensive than we ordinarily realize. For Myers, our ordinary waking consciousness amounts to a relatively small selection of psychological elements and processes from a more extensive consciousness, the subliminal self. Thus Myers suggested — to give an example — that genius should be regarded as a power of utilizing a wider than normal range of faculties, “a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought” (HP, vol. 1, p. 71). He described the “inspiration of genius” (his own quotes) as a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being. I shall urge that there is here no real departure from normality. . . but rather a fulfilment of the true norm of man, with suggestions, it may be, of something supernormal; — of something which transcends existing normality as an advanced stage of evolutionary progress transcends an earlier stage. (HP, vol. 1, p. 71)

To Myers, genius represents the norm of the future. Ordinary supraliminal perceptual and cognitive processes reveal only relatively superficial aspects of a far wider and deeper environment, mostly unknown, in which we are immersed. Evolution consists “not only of gradual self-adaptation to a known environment, but of discovery of an environment, always there, but unknown” (HP, vol. 1, p. 95). This discovery leads to the progressive mobilization of faculties initially subliminal. “Man is in course of evolution,” Myers wrote anticipating Sri Aurobindo, and “it may be in his power to hasten his own evolution in ways previously unknown” (HP, vol. 1, p. 23).

Kelly et al. (2006) aim to carry Myers’s project forward in the context of relevant substantive and methodological achievements of the intervening century, predicting that the psychology of the 21st Century will be a “psychological filter theory of the Myers/James sort.” James had pointed out that “[w]hen we think of the law that thought is a function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function” (James, 1898/1900, p. 15). Most subsequent advocates of James’s analysis have favored its “transmission” thread, so much so that the whole picture is now widely known by that name.

In the view of Kelly et al. (2006, p. 607), it is actually the other thread — permission — that is theoretically the more promising:

- by thinking of the brain as an organ which somehow constrains, regulates, restricts, limits, and enables or permits expression of the mind in its full generality, we can obtain an account of mind-brain relations which potentially reconciles Myers’s theory of the Subliminal Self with the observed correlations between mind and brain, while circumventing the conceptual difficulties. . . in transmission models. Within the framework recommended by Kelly et al. (2006, p. 637–638), human personality would be pictured as a complex system made up of the same kind of ‘stuff’ throughout. The system consists of a hierarchy of levels or strata of the types recognized in particular by Myers, James, and the wisdom traditions. Each level is characterized by its own form of psychophysical organization and has both interior and exterior aspects that allow it to participate in some form of experienced world appropriate to itself. The activities of these different strata are somehow interconnected, and coordinated in greater or lesser degree, by something like Myers’s Subliminal Self, or by a consciousness that somehow underlies or pervades the whole structure. . . We need to chart more fully and accurately the natural history of these “higher” or “deeper” subliminal realms. How many meaningfully distinguishable states or levels of consciousness actually or potentially exist within us, with what properties and what relationships to each other? Under what sorts of conditions do they occur, and what sorts of consequences do they have? Can we harness the benefits of potentially useful states by developing improved means of facilitating their occurrence? "

(https://antimatters2.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/1-2-subliminal-revised.pdf)