Psychic

“ Let us first consider the concept of the unconscious. I have here introduced the unconscious under the conception of a psychological function, namely, the function of the sum of all those psychic contents which do not reach the threshold of consciousness. I have divided the unconscious materials into personal—that is to reminiscences attributable to personal experiences, combinations and tendencies—and into impersonal collective contents, that is, those whose contents cannot be attributed to personal experiences. ”

“ No material agent could thus turn round and grasp itself—material activities always grasp something else than the agent. And if a brain could grasp itself and be self-conscious, it would be conscious of itself as a brain and not as something of an altogether different kind. The Soul then exists as a simple spiritual substance in which the various psychic faculties, operations, and affections inhere. ”

“ There is a distinct difference between the truly spiritual and what may be termed the psychic: there are hidden powers and latent possibilities which the specially sensitive are beginning to unfold. But the danger is exactly on a par with that which up-to-date chemists and scientists foresee in the physical world. ”

“ The general psychological problem is to describe the actual psychic events as they occur, to analyze them into their simplest elements, and inasmuch as it is this purely pragmatic application of psychology to the problem of inference that concerns us, we need to deal only with that law which defines the combination of images and with the question,—how the spirit achieves this combination. ”

“ The metaphysical tendency which so completely separates the two sciences, and the physiological tendency which agrees with it, regard feeling as a purely psychic or spiritual function, whereas in the case of sensation they have to admit the connection with bodily functions, especially sense-action. ”

“ Mental synthesis of psychic content in the unity of a moment-consciousness is a fundamental principle of psychology. ”

“ There can be but two hypotheses for the phenomena— (1) The intelligence exhibited by the medium is “ultra-mundane,” in other words, is the effect of spirit control, or, (2) it is the result of the conscious or unconscious exercise of psychic powers on the part of the medium. ”

“ The philosophy which deals with what is variously called the automatic faculty, the subjective consciousness, the subconsciousness or the sub-liminal ("Below the threshold") consciousness as an important factor in fantastic and misleading psychic phenomena from spirits will be found set forth at length in my little book on Hell's Happy Sunshine. ”

“ The conclusion to the whole matter is—the psychic, or soul-powers in some persons are less entrammelled by the senses than in others; that a high degree of organic sensitiveness always accompanies those who are recognised as psychics or sensitives; that this state of sensitiveness is natural to some, and in others may be developed by accident, disease, or induced by somnambulism and trance. ”

“ That ideas and feelings, thus indirectly and mechanically transmitted or stored, can affect the sensitive soul in unmistakable fashion, is a fact of experience; but that deposits in matter are competent to produce so purely psychic an effect can surely only be explained in terms of the potentialities and previous experience of the mind or soul itself. No emotional influence can be expressed, or rendered intelligible, in terms of matter. Matter is an indirect medium of communication between mind and mind. ”

“ Double and Psychic Consciousness, Clairvoyance, natural and induced; Psychometry, its natural and leading features as a spiritual faculty; Thought-Transference, visions, dreams, and their portents, are in turn briefly dealt with, in order to extract therefrom some evidence of soul.
Modern Spiritualism is referred to, in so far as Thought-Reading is likely to throw any light upon its psychological phases, as well as on its physical phenomena. ”

“ In the following pages I shall prove that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted, and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state. I shall furthermore endeavour to explain the processes which give rise to the strangeness and obscurity of the dream, and to discover through them the nature of the psychic forces which operate, whether in combination or in opposition, to produce the dream. ”

“ Any assumption as to the structure of the psychic apparatus which covers the development of both the dream and the neurotic symptom has also an undeniable claim to be taken into consideration in any theory of normal psychic life. ”

“ Not only psychic research, but metaphysical philosophy and speculative biology are led in their own ways to look with favour on some such “pan-psychic” view of the universe as this.’ (W. James, The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher, in The American Magazine, October 1909) . ”

“ The psychic force or faculty by which we remember and picture things and scenes; the law of our being which requires that sense-impressions should stimulate our thinking and feeling into action, and that symbols, woven by the picturing faculty out of these impressions, should then express these our thoughts and feelings ”

“ Thought moreover is simple, whilst the activities of the brain are compounded of the elementary activities of each of its parts. Furthermore, thought is spontaneous or free, whilst all material activity is determined ab extra; and the will can turn itself against all corporeal goods and appetites, which would be impossible were it a corporeal function. For these objective reasons the principle of psychic life must be both immaterial and simple as well as substantial, must be what is called a Soul. ”

“ But our account of the soul, as a series of events, may be attacked perhaps from the ground of psychology itself. There are psychical facts, it may be urged, which are more than events, and these facts, it may be argued, refute our definition. I must briefly deal with this objection, and my reply may be summed up thus. There are psychical facts, which are more than events; but, if they are not also events, they are not facts at all. ”

“ Consciousness and Will, enter into all psychological phenomena such as Hypnotism and Mediumship, and into every form of mental alienation, insanity, obsession and the like.
Moreover, by building out of mental phenomena a distinct entity—largely independent of the self-conscious Intelligence, and almost equally so with consciousness—our “philosophies,” “metaphysics,” and explanations have become as confused and unreliable as the psychical phenomenon itself. ”

“ Psy′cho-stat′ics, the theory of the conditions of the phenomena of mind; Psychothē′ism, the doctrine that God is pure spirit; Psychotherapeu′tics, Psychother′apy, the art of curing mental disease.—Psychical research, inquiring into alleged phenomena, apparently implying a connection with another world; Psychic force, a power not physical or mechanical, supposed to cause certain so-called spiritualistic phenomena. [L. psychicus—Gr. psychikos—psychē, the soul—psychēin, to breathe.] ”

“ Even where on investigation the psychic can be recognised as the primary course of a phenomenon, a more profound penetration will some day succeed in finding a continuation of the path to the organic determination of the psychic. ”

“ Let us assume as a hypothesis for everything which follows, that the dream is not a somatic but a psychic phenomenon. ”

“ Psychological pertains to the empirical data of consciousness, (thoughts, ideas, sensations, etc.) while psychical pertains to the inner or ultimate nature of these data. Though the data as given in consciousness are psychical, that which is psychical may not be solely manifested as psychological phenomena. It may be manifested as physical phenomena and perhaps be identified with the energy of the universe. ”

“ What the senses convey to us alone builds up our mental content, from mere sensory perceptions upwards to the most abstract ideas from the simplest psychical elements up to the most complex ideas, concepts, and conclusions, to the most varied imaginative constructions. And in the development of the mental content the “soul” itself is merely the stage upon which all that is acquired through the senses crowds, and jostles, and unites to form images, perceptions, and precepts. ”

“ Of late years vigorous attempts have been made to eject the term consciousness from our vocabulary, but, in my opinion, these efforts, though richly significant, are metaphysical, not psychological, since all are mainly concerned to overcome the dualistic opposition of psychical to physical. ”

“ Psychology must postulate uniformity of interrelation of physical, physiological, and psychic processes. ”

“ American Practitioner and News, I suggested (as a possible explanation for certain psychical phenomena) the existence in man of two consciousnesses, an active, vigilant consciousness and a pseudo-dormant consciousness. Again, in the American Naturalist, in an essay entitled “The Psychology of Hypnotism,” [100] I reasserted this theory and, to a certain extent, elaborated it. ”

“ For I wish to make it quite plain that the psychical fact from which I propose to start, is on what I may perhaps best call the sentient level of consciousness, i.e. involves only a consciousness which feels pleasure and pain, which strives and desires without as yet clear self-consciousness or conception of objects. ”

“ We must be satisfied with the definition already given, which will prove quite sufficient for our purpose, namely the conception of the unconscious as the sum of all psychical processes below the threshold of consciousness. ”

“ Psychology is the science of psychic states both as to content and form, regarded from an objective standpoint, and brought in relation to the living corporeal individual. ”

“ I may add that, within proper limits, I think psychology must make use of unconscious psychical facts. ↑ How far the soul can be said to result from merely physical conditions I shall enquire lower down. ”

“ The unconscious is the larger circle which includes within itself the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has its preliminary step in the unconscious, whereas the unconscious may stop with this step and still claim full value as a psychic activity. Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs. ”

“ The difficulty is indeed so great as to induce some thinkers to suggest that the psychical process may be without a physical parallel—that the connection between the two psychical states may conceivably be found in the psychical world alone. ”

“ On the other hand, if the psychical life is subjected to the incessant influences of a powerful and rich experience, then every representative element in the mind is connected with so many others that the actual and natural course of the thoughts is easily influenced and determined by insignificant circumstances, which accidentally are decisive. ”

“ If this is the method of procedure, there has taken place in the formation of the dream a transference and displacement of the psychic intensities of the individual elements, of which the textual difference between the dream and the thought content appears as a result. ”

“ The represented object floats so to say in a stream of consciousness. The subject matter which the psychologist investigates is not the objective reality itself, but objective states of consciousness. ”

“ One might also conclude that whereas Psychology is concerned with the phenomena commonly associated with mental activities and their variation under normal as also under unusual and pathological circumstances, Psychical Research is interested in the demonstration of supernormal faculties, and in the establishment of forms of mentality that diverge from and transcend those with which every-day humanity is permitted to become familiar ”

“ The subjective mind is released, or elevated above the threshold of consciousness, and performs its functions independently of, or synchronously with, the objective mind, just in proportion to the degree of hypnosis induced. ”

“ There is no more common or popular explanation of certain phases of spiritistic phenomena than attributing them to mind-reading. When a medium relates to you incidents of your life of which you know he has no previous knowl [Pg 217] edge, the most obvious explanation is that he reads your mind,—that is, if you do not believe that he is controlled by spirits ”

“ to-day there is but a small minority among educated persons who doubt that the dream is the dreamer's own psychical act. ”

“ Or does one seriously think he understands better how the knower 'connects' its objects, when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls them Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psychosis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling,—what you like—it must know. ”

“ Consequently, when, at the outset of these discussions, we pointed out the element of will in the constitution of ideas, we were dwelling upon precisely what for the psychologist appears as the intimate connection between the knowing process of the mind and the motor responses of the organism to its environment. When we know, we have in the first place present to our minds certain contents, certain data, certain facts, it may be of the outer senses, it may be of the memory and the imagination. ”