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.Instead, they might have been led to unknown experiences far beyond the present limit of human conception of experience, as they passed from the instinctive to the conscious in changing and improving the use and functioning of the human self.In this connexion I think it may be of general interest to quote the following passage from The Thought and Character of William James * by Ralph Barton Perry which shows the attitude of William James towards sensory experience.Professor Perry writes :—" In speaking, first, of James's sensibility, I do not mean his susceptibility to feeling or emotion, but the acuity of his senses— the voluminousness and richness of the experience which he received through them, and the prominence of that experience and of its underlying motive in his life as a whole.His psychological writings testify to his discrimination of organic sensations." Having a high sensuous endowment and being avid of sensory experience, it is not surprising that he should have felt such experience to convey the authentic revelation of reality.It is the unsaid but fundamental premise of his whole metaphysics that only he can speak authoritatively of the universe who is most sensitively attuned to it.Metaphysics is an apprehending of reality in its most immediate and lifelike aspect, or a listening to hear ' the pulse of Being beat.' When he said that he found ' no good warrant for even suspecting the Preface to New Edition viiexistence of any reality of a higher denomination than that distributed and strung-along and flowing sort of reality which we finite beings swim in,' he was placing his ultimate reliance on the human sensorium." *This is of particular interest to me because a member of the medical profession, a close friend of William James, had interested him enough in my work to persuade him to come to me in London for a course of lessons.Unfortunately, unforeseen circumstances interfered with this plan, so I did not have the pleasure and honour of numbering him among my pupils.For me this has been a lifelong regret, because, from what this friend told me, there can be little doubt that much could have been done to help him to enlarge his experience by means which would tend to restore trustworthiness to the sensory processes which were more or less untrustworthy, and bring the psycho-physical processes which activated his " high sensuous endowment"under conscious control, thus enabling him to bridge the gap between the instinctive and the conscious way of living.I am emboldened to make this claim because of the knowledge I have gained through the evolution of my technique, first in teaching myself and then in my long experience of teaching others.As my technique evolved it became increasingly clear that by its procedures provision is made for coming into contact with the unknown, because the improved condition of psychophysical functioning brought about is not the result of working for a previously conceived and directed end (the known), but emerges as the indirect result of the employment of reasoned means whereby improved conditions in the use of the self are brought about (the unknown).This result does not come about by inducing self-hypnotism, or because of some chance happening, as, for instance, the coming into contact with an outside influence, personal or otherwise, or the possession of some natural aptitude (habitual reaction) which is fitted to produce a certain desired result.In all these cases instinct rather than the thinking and reasoning processes is relied upon, whereas " reasoning from the known to the unknown," as in my technique, depends upon the conscious employment of means that conform to biological, physiological, and other laws known to us; in which,* Vol.II, pp.682-3.Quoted by the courtesy of Little, Brown & Co., Boston.(1935.)viii Preface to New Editionalso, the observation of phenomena in cause and effect can be tested according to strict scientific method, so that, as Dr.Dewey writes in his Introduction, " the causes that are used to explain the consequences, or effects, can be concretely followed up to show that they actually produce these consequences and not others."To-day I do not know of any person who doubts that if man is to evolve in the right direction, the gap between instinctive and conscious control of the self must be bridged, in order to bridge " the gap between idealistic theory and actual practice."During the past fifty years I have had a unique experience in helping men and women in many walks of life to do this, by employing their conscious reasoning processes in changing and improving their human sensorium as they pass from known (wrong) to unknown (right) experiences of their use of themselves.Moreover and all-important, the prerequisite to each step in this process was the restoration of trustworthiness to the human sensorium without which a human being could not register experience so as to be able to test its validity.The untrustworthiness of the sensory appreciation of the people of this age is demonstrable, and will be found to be extreme in the rapidly increasing number of people afflicted with so-called " mental " and criminal tendencies [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]