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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: so far been rather limited and, in part at least, eccentric,
consisting of unusually suggestible hypnotic subjects, and of
hysteric patients. Yet the elementary mechanisms of our life are
presumably so uniform that what is shown to be true in a marked
degree of some persons is probably true in some degree of all,
and may in a few be true in an extraordinarily high degree.
The most important consequence of having a strongly developed
ultra-marginal life of this sort is that one's ordinary fields of
consciousness are liable to incursions from it of which the
subject does not guess the source, and which, therefore, take for
him the form of unaccountable impulses to act, or inhibitions of
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