The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 232present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body. The important fact which this Afield' formula commemorates is the indetermination of the margin. Inattentively realized as is the matter which the margin contains, it is nevertheless there, and helps both to guide our behavior and to determine the next movement of our attention.

It lies around us Hke a ^ magnetic field/ inside of which our centre of energy turns like a compass-needle, as the present phase of consciousness alters into its successor. Our whole past store of memories floats beyond this margin, ready at a touch to come in ; and the entire mass of residual powers, impulses, and knowledges that constitute our empirical self stretches continuously beyond it.

So vaguely drawn are the outlines between what is actual and what is only potential at any moment of our conscious life, that it is always hard to say of certain mental elements whether we are conscious of them or not.

The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing the marginal outline, has nevertheless taken for granted, first, that all the consciousness the person now has, be the same focal or marginal, inattentive or attentive, is there in the ^ field ' of the moment, all dim and impossible to assign as the latter's outline may be ; and, second, that what is absolutely extra-marginal is absolutely non-existent, and cannot be a fact of consciousness at all.

And having reached this point, I must now ask you to recall what I said in my last lecture about the subconscious life. I said, as you may recoUect, that those who first laid stress upon these phenomena could not know the facts as we now know them. My first duty now is to tell you what I meant by such a statement.

p. 233I cannot but think that the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, first made in 1886-^that;, in certain subjects at least, there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary field, with its usual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts, arid feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs.

I call this the most important step forward because, ^ unlike the other advances which psychology has made, this . ;' discovery has revealed to us an entirely unsuspected pe- •>i^ culiarity in the constitution of human nature. No other step forward which psychology has made can proffer any such claim as this.

In particular this discovery of a consciousness existing beyond the field, or subliminally as Mr. Myers terms it, casts light on many phenomena of religious biography. That is why I have to advert to it now, although it is naturally impossible for me in this place to give you any account of the evidence on which the admission of such a consciousness is based.

You will find it set forth in many recent books, Binet's Alterations of PersonaHty ^ being perhaps as good a one as any to recommend. The human material on which the demonstration has been made has so far been rather limited and, in part at least, eccentric, consisting of unusually suggestible hypnotic subjects, and of hysteric patients.

Yet the elementary mechanisms of our life are presumably so uniform that what is shown to be true in a marked degree of some persons is probably true in some degree of all, and may in a few be true in an extraordinarily high degree. 1 Published in the luternational Scientific Series.

p. 234The most important consequence of having a strongly developed ultra-marginal life of this sort is that one's ordinary fields of consciousness are liable to incursions from it of which the subject does not guess the source, and which, therefore, take for him the form of unaccountable impulses to act, or inhibitions of action, of obsessive ideas, or even of hallucinations of sight or hearing.

The impulses may take the direction of automatic speech or writing, the naeaning of which the subject himself may not understand even while he utters it ; and generalizing this phenomenon, Mr. Myers has given the name of mi- . tomatism, sensory or motor, emotional or intellectual, to ^2^ i this whole sphere of effects, due to ' uprushes ' into the • ordinary consciousness of energies originating in the subliminal parts of the mind.

The simplest instance of an automatism is the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion, so-called. You give to a hypnotized subject, adequately susceptible, an order to perform some designated act — usual or eccentric, it makes no difference — after he wakes from his hypnotic sleep.

Punctually, when the signal comes or the time elapses upon which you have told him that the act must ensue, he performs it ; — but in so doing he has no recollection of your suggestion, and he always trumps up an improvised pretext for his behavior if the act be of an eccentric kind.

It may even be suggested to a subject to have a vision or to hear a voice at a certain interval after waking, and when the time comes the vision is seen or the voice heard, with no inkling on the subject's part of its source.

In the wonderful explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and others, of the subhminal consciousness of patients with hysteria, we have revealed to us whole systems of underground life, in the shape of memories of a painful sort which lead a