Frederic W. H. Myers

A surprising amount of the language in which this whole subject is still discussed was coined by Myers, and the coinages were arguments in compressed form. Telepathy, from the Greek for feeling at a distance, replaced the older thought-transference and was deliberately neutral about mechanism. Supraliminal and subliminal, above and below the threshold, gave him a way to describe a mind whose ordinary waking consciousness is only the visible portion of something much larger, without committing to any particular theory of the unconscious. He also introduced the term veridical for a hallucination that corresponds to a real distant event, which allowed the society to separate the question of whether someone saw something from the question of whether anything was there to see. This vocabulary let a Victorian gentleman scholar discuss apparitions and mediums in language that sounded like psychology rather than religion, which was precisely the point, since the society existed to move these questions out of the seance room and into something resembling a scientific literature. Modern psychology kept subliminal and discarded the framework it belonged to. Telepathy, however, it kept whole, and it is now a common English word owned by nobody in particular.

Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death appeared in 1903, two years after Myers died, and it is a strange and ambitious work. Its thesis is that the self available to waking introspection is a narrow band of a much wider personality, and that the same submerged region accounts for a range of phenomena ordinarily filed separately: creative inspiration, the automatisms of hypnotic suggestion, hysterical symptoms, the productions of mediums, and, he argued, communication that outlasts the body.

The evidential half of the book is a mass of case material that has not aged well, since the standards of collection were those of the 1880s and much of it depends on testimony gathered long after the event. The theoretical half is why the book is still cited. William James thought Myers had posed the right question about the structure of the mind even where he had answered it wrongly, and the notion of a subliminal region with its own organisation runs through the psychodynamic tradition that followed. Myers's conclusion, that the evidence favoured survival of death, was not accepted by James, is not accepted now, and does not follow from the psychological argument the book makes so well.