Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death - Vol. 1

by F.W.H. Myers

Volume 1 of 2. These works are but a partial presentation of an ever- growing subject on personality and its survival after the body dies. This book is an exposition rather than a proof. What Myers tried to do is to render knowledge more easily gained by coordinating it in a form as clear and intelligible as his own limited skill and the nature of the facts themselves permitted. Contents: introduction; disintegrations of personality; genius; sleep; hypnotism; sensory automatism; appendices.

700 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1903

About the author

Frederic William Henry Myers was a poet, classicist, philologist, and a founder of the Society for Psychical Research. Myers' work on psychical research and his ideas about a "subliminal self" were influential in his time, but have not been accepted by the scientific community.

Myers was the son of Revd Frederic Myers (1811–1851) and his second wife Susan Harriet Myers nee Marshall. He was a brother of poet Ernest Myers (1844–1921) and of Dr. Arthur Thomas Myers (1851–1894). His maternal grandfather was the wealthy industrialist John Marshall (1765–1845).

Myers was educated at Cheltenham College and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A. in 1864, and university prizes, including the Bell, Craven, Camden and Chancellor's Medal, though he was forced to resign the Camden medal for 1863 after accusations of plagiarism. He was a Fellow of Trinity College from 1865 to 1874 and college lecturer in classics from 1865 to 1869. In 1872 be became an Inspector of schools.

In 1867, Myers published a long poem, St Paul, which became popular. The poem included the words of the hymn Hark what a sound, and too divine for hearing. This was followed in 1882 by The Renewal of Youth and Other Poems. He also wrote books of literary criticism, in particular Wordsworth (1881) and Essays, Classical and Modern (in two volumes, 1883).