Frederic William Henry Myers

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Frederic William Henry Myers (February 6, 1843 - January 17, 1901), was an English poet and essayist. He was the son of Frederic Myers (the author of Lectures on Great Men (1856) and Catholic Thoughts (first collected 1873)).

He was born in Keswick, Cumberland, and was educated at Cheltenham and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled academically, and in 1865 was appointed classical lecturer. He had no love for teaching, which he soon gave up, but he returned to live in Cambridge in 1872, becoming a school inspector. Meanwhile, he published, in 1867, an unsuccessful essay for the Seatonian prize, a poem entitled St Paul, which became very popular, though not typical of his later work. It was followed by small volumes of collected verses in 1870 and 1882; both are marked by a flow of rhetorical ardour which culminates in a poem of real beauty, "The Renewal of Youth" in the 1882 collection. His best verse is in heroic couplets.

Myers is more likely to be remembered by his two volumes of Essays, Classical and Modern (1883). The essay on Virgil, generally considered his best work, is followed by a carefully wrought essay on Ancient Greek Oracles, and a monograph on Wordsworth (1881) for John Morley's "English Men of Letters".

In 1882, after several years of inquiry and discussion, Myers took the lead among a small band of explorers (including the Sidgwicks and Shadworth Hodgson, Edmund Gurney, and Frank Podmore) who founded the Society for Psychical Research. He continued for many years to be the mouthpiece of the society, a position for which his perfervidum ingenium(Scotorum????), still more his abnormal fluency and alertness, admirably fitted him. His proficiency in the neo-hermeneutic jargon evolved by the society excited the admiration of all who frequented the psychical meetings in Westminster town hall. He contributed greatly to the coherence of the society by steering a mid-course between extremes (the extreme scepticism on the one hand, and the enthusiastic spiritualists on the other), and by sifting and revising the cumbrous mass of Proceedings, the chief concrete results being the two volumes of Phantasms of the Living (1886).

He was also an early member of the Theosophical Society, possibly leaving about 1886. ^[1]

Myers coined the terms methetherial, meaning "beyond the ether", the transcendental world in which the spirits exist, and telepathy (in order to replace the older term thought transference).

Like many theorists, he tended to generalise plausibly while producing striking formulae. His long series of papers on Subliminal Consciousness, the results of which were embodied in a posthumous work called Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, constitute his own chief contribution to psychical theory, and this, as he himself would have been the first to admit, was little more than provisional. The last work published in his lifetime was a small collection of essays, Science and a Future Life (1893). He died in Rome, but was buried in his native soils, at Keswick.

The poet and translator Ernest James Myers (1844-1921) was his younger brother. The novelist Leopold Hamilton Myers (1881-1944) was his son.

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"Human personality is a much more modifiable complex of forces than is commonly assumed, and is a complex, moreover, which has hitherto been dealt with only in crude, empirical fashion. Each stage, each method of disintegration, suggests a corresponding possibility of integration." from Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, 1903.