I discovered Carl Gustav Jung just after I had passed my
nineteenth year—and Frederic W.H. Myers as I’m approaching my seventy-ninth. Clearly
Jung captured the attention of elements of my generation much more effectively
than Myers. Jung was the worthy adversary (to use a phrase from Castaneda) of
Sigmund Freud. Myers was associated chiefly with parapsychology as a founder of
the Society for Psychical Research, an activity in shadows. Yet now I realize
that the younger Jung (born 1875 versus Myers’ birth-year of 1843) owed an
enormous debt to Myers. One doesn’t have to look hard or very long to discover
the grounding ideas in Jung’s psychology fully developed in Myers and already published
when Jung was just a little boy. Myers had the subconscious, which he called
the subliminal mind; he also maintained the idea that the subliminal mind’s powers
were greater and much wider than that of the conscious mind; finally, like Jung
later, he also imagined the conscious mind as a subset of total consciousness
or, to use Jung’s phrasing, as a small island floating in a sea of superior
consciousness.
Myers had formulated this idea to explain anomalous
phenomena in human behavior and experience—all those experiences we now label
as paranormal. His views were in part shaped by the rise in evolutionary
thought. Darwin was 34 years older than Myers and Myers 32 years older than
Jung. Myers reached out to evolution in attempts to explain paranormal powers
in humans; it seemed sensible to view them, in his time, as emerging by means
of an evolutionary process. Evolution was in the air, you might say. Thus Myers’
explanation made use of a bottom-up model. To be sure, Myers was something of a
genius; as his knowledge advanced he also came to see that what was bubbling up
from beneath the threshold (subliminally)
also at times seemed to come down from
above the waking consciousness. But, in effect, he set the stage for a
not-quite materialistic psychology which had a bottom-up framing. Start of the
twentieth century.
At the start of the twenty-first, Myers is once more rising
into prominence but, curiously, as a champion of a top-down theory of
psychology. That theory is that the mind is irreducible to matter and must
therefore in some sense either transcend matter or belong to another radically
different order. (See this post on Irreducible
Mind here.)
Myers’ work supports that thesis because his exhaustive review of the empirical
evidence for the veridical character of paranormal phenomena had already
effectively undermined materialist monism back at the tail of the nineteenth
century. But nobody paid it any mind. Materialism was rising like a gusher
based on technological success. By the twenty-first century, despite being
ignored, evidence for the paranormal had greatly increased.
It occurs to me that cycles in civilization also tend to be
either bottom-up or top-down in orientation. Modernity is bottom up—whether it
is in explaining reality by studying matter or ruling collective by democratic
means. The age that came before was top-down in looking up towards an invisible
Creator. I’ve slowly come to feel that beginning roughly in the 1820s a
transition back from bottom-up to top-down began with the decay of Western
civilization. Myers occupies a kind of midway point in this transition. It is not
surprising, therefore, that his labors are equally useful in the support both
modes of thought. He saw the one nearing its end and foresaw the other rising. These
processes, needless to say, do not take place on a human time scale. Reading
the papers I see a total conviction that we’re only beginning to build the Tower of Siloam. The sky’s really the limit.
Poets see only cracks (link).
