The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesaware of. The exploration of the transmarginal field has hardly yetbeen seriously undertaken, but what Mr. Myers said in 1892 in hisessay on the Subliminal Consciousness348 is as true as when it wasfirst written: “Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity farmore extensive than he knows—an individuality which can neverexpress itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. TheSelf manifests through the organism; but there is always some partof the Self unmanifested; and always, as it seems, some power oforganic expression in abeyance or reserve.”349 Much of the contentof this larger background against which our conscious beingstands out in relief is insignificant. Imperfect memories, silly jingles,inhibitive timidities, “dissolutive” phenomena of various sorts, asMyers calls them, enters into it for a large part. But in it many of theperformances of genius seem also to have their origin; and in ourstudy of conversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we haveseen how striking a part invasions from this region play in the religiouslife.Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be onits farther side, the “more” with which in religious experience wefeel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuationof our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychologicalfact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with “sci-348 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. vii. p. 305. Fora full statement of Mr. Myers’s views, I may refer to his posthumous work,“Human Personality in the Light of Recent Research,” which is alreadyannounced by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. as being in press. Mr.Myers for the first time proposed as a general psychological problem theexploration of the subliminal region of consciousness throughout its wholeextent, and made the first methodical steps in its topography by treatingas a natural series a mass of subliminal facts hitherto considered only ascurious isolated facts and subjecting them to a systematized nomenclature.How important this exploration will prove, future work upon thepath which Myers has opened can alone show. compare my paper: “FredericMyers’s services to Psychology,” in the said Proceedings, part xlii., May,1901.349 Compare the inventory given above on pp. 472-4, and also what issaid of the subconscious self on pp. 228-231, 235-236.455