F. W. H. Myers

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Frederic William Henry Myers (1843–1901) was an English poet, classical scholar, and one of the principal founders of the Society for Psychical Research (1882). The word telepathy — a sensation felt “at a distance” — was his coinage, one of several terms, including supernormal, that he minted to give a careful vocabulary to experiences that had until then been left to credulity or ridicule.

He was born at Keswick, in the Lake District, in February 1843, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at seventeen, where he took a double first in classics and moral science and won a string of university prizes. In the 1860s and 1870s he was a working poet and man of letters — St Paul appeared in 1867, The Renewal of Youth and Other Poems in 1882 — though he held no great illusions about his literary gift. For roughly three decades he earned his living as an Inspector of Schools, and he lent his name to the causes of women’s suffrage and women’s higher education. The classical learning he carried out of Cambridge would, many years after his death, become unexpectedly load-bearing in the strangest episode attached to it.

Myers came to the work from a particular loss of faith. Educated in the classics and drawn to the consolations of religion, he found those consolations dissolving under the pressure of Victorian science, and the question of whether anything in a human being survives death became for him not a doctrine to be defended but a matter to be settled by evidence. He dated his own resolve to a single night in 1869 — a “starlight walk and talk” with Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge philosopher who would become his closest collaborator and the first president of the Society they helped to found. With Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, and others, Myers gathered and sifted case-reports — accounts of crisis apparitions, of automatic writing, of mediums in trance — applying to them a standard of testimony and corroboration that was new to the subject, and that often led the investigators to reject the very cases they had hoped would persuade them. The fruit of that collecting labor was Phantasms of the Living (1886), the great early survey of apparitions written chiefly by Gurney with Myers and Frank Podmore; Myers supplied its introduction and concluding chapter.

The coinage of telepathy in 1882 was the most durable of his contributions to the language. The Society’s own committee on the subject had borne the plainer name Thought-Transference; Myers’s Greek compound — tele, at a distance; patheia, feeling — soon displaced the older “thought-reading,” and it did so deliberately, detaching the idea from the séance room and fitting it for the laboratory. It was part of a whole vocabulary he built to discipline a credulous field: supernormal and veridical, and his own technical coinages subliminal and supraliminal, automatism, the crisis apparition, the psychorrhagic diathesis. To name a thing precisely, he seems to have believed, was the first condition of studying it at all.

His most ambitious idea is the one that has worn best. In the posthumously published Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) — two volumes running to some thirteen hundred pages, compiled by his friends after his death — Myers proposed that the conscious mind is only the surface of a far larger self. Below the threshold of ordinary awareness, he argued, lies a “subliminal” region, of which the waking “supraliminal” self is a thin and accidental fraction; he called the submerged region “the real ego, a vast psychic organism.” He sorted it into strata — an autonomic layer governing the body, a hypnotic layer answering to suggestion, and a higher subliminal that he held to be the source of inspiration, of genius, of dream, and of the apparent intrusions studied by psychical research. “I accord no primacy to my ordinary waking self,” he wrote, “except that among my potential selves this one has shown itself the fittest to meet the needs of common life.” He held that this submerged self might persist beyond bodily death; that was the claim the evidence was meant to test, and it is the claim on which scholarship remains unpersuaded.

His investigative logic ran from telepathy to survival. If a mind could act at a distance from its own body, then communication between the living and the dead became at least conceivable, and survival the hypothesis the evidence might decide. He pursued it through the trance mediumship of Leonora Piper in Boston and Rosalie Thompson in London, through documentary study of earlier figures, and through sittings with the physical medium Eusapia Palladino — holding throughout to a hard evidentiary bar, demanding facts “known to the departed and not known to the automatist.” He never let the demand soften into faith. “May not that knowledge be gained,” he asked of his own best cases, “clairvoyantly or telepathically with no intervention of any spirit?” He was elected President of the Society for Psychical Research in 1900, a chair until then reserved for distinguished men of science; he died in Rome a few months later, in January 1901.

His death became, in a sense, the next experiment. Within weeks the automatic writing of several women in widely separated places began to yield the interlocking fragments later known as the cross-correspondences — scripts that, taken alone, read as fragmentary and obscure, but that seemed when compared to complete one another, as though split across hands that did not know one another’s work. Their purported author was the dead Myers himself, together with Gurney and Sidgwick, attempting to prove their own survival by a feat no single living automatist could have arranged: a classical or literary theme, the kind of allusion that had been Myers’s lifelong trade, fragmented across minds that could not have colluded. Thousands of scripts accumulated over the following decades, and for a time many in the field thought them the strongest survival evidence ever produced. That confidence has since drained away — the very subtlety of the literary puzzles makes them hard to judge, and telepathy among the living can never be wholly excluded — but Myers remains the central figure of the affair, the scholar whose death supplied its theme and whose erudition it appeared to deploy.

The standing of the work is divided along a clean line. As a piece of psychical research, Myers’s case for survival is not regarded as established, and the phenomena he cataloged have found other explanations or none. As a psychologist of the unconscious, however, he is taken more seriously: his “subliminal self” reached William James, who proposed that the whole field be called “the problem of Myers,” and Théodore Flournoy, and the broad idea of a mind whose greater part lies beneath awareness entered the wider stream of depth psychology. He occupies an unusual position — a figure whose central conviction the evidence did not bear out, but whose framing of the question left a mark on the study of the mind regardless.

→ Related: Henry Sidgwick · Eleanor Sidgwick · Eusapia Palladino · Telepathy · Spiritualism · William Crookes