Myers: Human Personality
F. W. H. Myers: Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2002. 352 pp. $16.95 (paper). ISBN 1-57174-238-7.
Book Review - Emily W. Kelly
(From Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2003;17:160-163, reproduced with permission)
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. W. H. Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, a massive two-volume, 1360-page treatise that the author hoped would serve as the foundation and launching point for the development of a comprehensive theory of human personality,one that could adequately account for a wide range of psychological phenomena, from the pathologically abnormal phenomena of increasing interest to clinicians, to psychological processes associated with normal waking consciousness, to the rare manifestations of supernormal functioning, including creativity and telepathy. By the dawn of the 20th century, Myers’s writings and ideas had gained the attention of many prominent psychologists, clinicians, and philosophers, and althoughMyers himself died in 1901 at the unfortunately early age of 57, it seemed likely that his posthumously published magnum opus might serve as the inspiration for much important psychological research and theorizing. At the turn of the 21st century, however, Myers and his writings are unknown to the vast majority of psychologists, and, while Human Personality is considered a classic in psychical research/parapsychology, it is (I strongly suspect) unread even by many parapsychologists. In attempts to attract a larger readership for this long and difficult book, one-volume abridgments have occasionally been issued, the first in 1907 by Myers’s son, and the second in 1961 by the author Susy Smith. This latest publication of a one-volume edition, by Hampton Roads and Russell Targ in a series called ‘‘Studies in Consciousness’’, is a reprinting of the 1961 Susy Smith edition, including also the 1961 foreword by Aldous Huxley and a new introduction by Jeffrey Mishlove.
Why has an important book such as Human Personality, filled with rich case material on a wide variety of psychological phenomena as well as provocative ideas about the interpretation of these phenomena, been so neglected in psychology and the history of ideas? The answer is complicated and lies in a variety of social, intellectual, and even emotional factors familiar to readers of this journal and other investigators of phenomena that seem to fly in the face of prevailing views about the natural order. But recognizing two major themes in particular that run throughout Human Personality may help in understanding both why the book is so important and why it has been so neglected.
First, Myers’s book was primarily his development of a view of human personality, or consciousness, that ran directly counter to the view gaining great momentum in the late 19th century and continuing throughout the 20th century—the view that consciousness is the product of increasingly complex neural processes. In contrast, Myers’s view, presented here with a vast amount of supporting empirical material, is that consciousness is far more extensive than the waking self with which we are familiar and that the brain, rather than being the producer of consciousness, is instead the mechanism that, in response to the demands of the organism’s environment, filters, limits, and shapes our ordinary waking (or supraliminal) consciousness out of a larger, 160 Book Reviews primarily latent or subliminal consciousness. Myers used the analogy of the electromagnetic spectrum to illustrate his hypothesis: The larger, latent subliminal Self is comparable to the full spectrum, extending indefinitely, whereas our ordinary, supraliminal self or waking consciousness is comparable to the small fragment of the spectrum that is visible to us as a result of the evolutionary development of our visual system. In most individuals,the “visible” portion of the psychological spectrum fluctuates as elements enter and depart waking consciousness, but it remains relatively stable. In other individuals, however, such as hysterical or multiple personality patients, creative geniuses, or automatists (Myers’s term for mediums or sensitives), the ‘‘barrier’’ controlling the flow of psychological elements between the supraliminal and subliminal portions of the Self is more ‘‘permeable’’, allowing for the ‘‘down-draught’’ or loss of functions associated with hysteria, the ‘‘uprush’’ of subliminal mentation of creative geniuses, the occasional emergence of latent faculties such as telepathy, or other alterations in the ordinary structure and content of consciousness.
A view of human personality that is so at variance with the view that has come to dominate modern psychology and that is supported in large part by rare and controversial phenomena such as hysteria, hypnotism/mesmerism, trance phenomena, and telepathy, would engender resistance under the best of circumstances. But Myers’s work, and by extension the psychical research which formed so important a part of its foundation, encountered an even greater obstacle because a second major theme in Human Personality was largely ignored, leading to much misunderstanding over the past century about the nature and purposes of psychical research in general and of Myers’s work in particular. According to Myers, ‘‘the principle of continuity . . . has guided us throughout this work’’ (Myers, 1903, 2:202). For Myers and most other 19thcentury scientists, the continuity and uniformity of nature had emerged as the one most fundamental principle guiding modern science: The faith to which Science is sworn is faith in the uniformity, the coherence, the intelligibility of, at any rate, the material universe . . .. [I]f any phenomenon . . . seems arbitrary, or incoherent, or unintelligible, she does not therefore suppose that she has come upon an unravelled end in the texture of things; but rather takes for granted that a rational answer to the new problem must somewhere exist—an answer which will be all the more instructive because it will involve facts of which the first question must have failed to take due account. (Myers, 1900, p. 120) Myers’s entire body of work, therefore, was based on the conviction that no phenomena are truly ‘‘anomalous’’, that is, ‘‘an unravelled end in the texture of things.’’He recognized that for many people, especially scientists, ‘‘the difficulty of belief is not so much in defect of trustworthy evidence as in the unintelligibility, the incoherence of the phenomena described, which prevents them from being retained in the mind or assimilated with previous knowledge’’, and he went on to say that ‘‘I have myself felt the full force of this objection’’ (Myers, 1903, 2:505).
For ‘‘resolute antagonists . . . no new evidence can carry conviction. . . unless it be continuous with old evidence’’ (Myers, 1903, 2:2). Although ‘‘the popular mind has expressly desired something startling, something outside Law and above Book Reviews 161 Nature . . . I can hardly too often repeat that my object in these pages is of a quite opposite character’’ (p. 168).
Myers’s goal, therefore, was to enlarge and advance scientific understanding of the natural order by weaving the loose ends of apparently anomalous phenomena together with already existing knowledge into a wider, more comprehensive picture. For him, those who ignored or excluded certain phenomena or questions from scientific inquiry showed ‘‘a want rather than an excess of confidence’’ in ‘‘the immutable regularity of nature’’(Myers, 1881, p. 99). Myers’s method was to take a wide variety of psychological phenomena—including hysteria and multiple personality, genius and creativity, sleep and dreams, hypnotism and mesmerism, hallucinations, apparitions, and other sensory automatisms, motor automatisms such as automatic writing, and trance, possession, and ecstasy—and, in ‘‘lead[ing] by transitions as varied and as gradual as possible from phenomena held as normal to phenomena held as supernormal’’ (p. 7), to demonstrate that they are in fact not isolated anomalies but are all integral parts of a larger picture of human personality.
Myers’s passion, the engine that drove his prodigious energy, productivity, and creative thinking, was his desire to learn ‘‘whether or not [human] personality involves any element which can survive bodily death’’ (p. 1). Here, too, however, he insisted that ‘‘in dealing with matters which lie outside human experience [i.e., postmortem survival], our only clue is some attempt at continuity with what we already know’’ (p. 338). Therefore, although one task undertaken by Myers and his colleagues was ‘‘the collection and analysis of evidence ... pointing directly to the survival of man’s spirit’’ (p. 4), he understood that evidence that was apparently so at variance with the implications of modern neurology and psychology had to be integrated somehow with modern neurology and psychology if it was to carry any conviction: ‘‘It became gradually plain to me that before we could safely mark off any group of manifestations as definitely implying an influence from beyond the grave, there was need of a more searching review of the capacities of man’s incarnate personality than psychologists unfamiliar with this new evidence had thought it worth their while to undertake’’ (p. 4). In other words, Myers’s goal was to learn whether there are characteristics and features of incarnate personality that support the possibility that human personality is more extensive than what manifests in one particular biological organism, and Human Personality, with its mass of empirical material woven into the theoretical framework of a Self larger than the self of which we are ordinarily cognizant, was the result.
Susy Smith did an excellent job of abridging Human Personality, and I hope that this abridgment will attract readers who might feel daunted by the full 1360-page version. Nevertheless, I hope that readers will understand that in a scaling down from 1360 pages to 350, no matter how good, much interesting and essential material in the original is necessarily lost. As Gardner Murphy cautioned (Murphy, 1975, p. iv), a careful reading of the full two volumes, including the voluminous appendices that contain most of the supporting 162 Book Reviews material, is ‘‘the only way in which the documentary strength and philosophical significance of Myers can be understood.’’ I hope that reading the present abridgment will whet readers’ appetites enough to send them on to the full work.
Emily Williams Kelly
Division of Personality Studies
P.O. Box 800152
University of Virginia Health System
Charlottesville, VA 22908
USA
References
Murphy, G. (1975). Introduction to F. W. H. Myers. In: Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. New York: Arno Press.
Myers, F. W. H. (1881). M. Renan and miracles. Nineteenth Century, 10:90–106.
Myers, F. W. H. (1900). Presidential address. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 15:110–127.
Myers, F. W. H. (1903). Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (2 vols.). London: Longmans Green. [PDF; registration required]
© 2003 Society for Scientific Exploration
Editorial Note (SRN): The original 2-volumes edition of Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) is availabe online free of charge at the Library of Exploratory Science (Lexscien)
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