ABSTRACT
Intermingled with Frederic Myers’ theory of the subliminal self, and tending to confuse matters not a little, is what is virtually a second theory or kind of explanatory principle. Myers regards ‘each man as at once profoundly unitary and almost infinitely composite, as inheriting from earthly ancestors a multiplex and “colonial” organism—polyzoic and perhaps polypsychic in an extreme degree’. Matters are further complicated by the fact that Myers sometimes talks of the subliminal self, no doubt through enthusiasm for its alleged supernormal powers, as though it were the soul. The actual nature of the mechanism by which the soul achieves its control of the organism Myers finds inexplicable; he talks of it in terms of the avowed metaphor of ‘paying attention’. Myers’ expressions of his religious and cosmological views are for the most part widely scattered amongst his miscellaneous writings, and often amongst the least known of them.
