F(rederic) W(illiam) H(enry) Myers

Poet and essayist, born in Keswick, Cumbria, NW England, UK. A classical scholar, he studied at Cambridge, and became a school inspector (1872–1900). He wrote poems (collected 1921), essays, a book on Wordsworth (1881), and Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903). He was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, and for the rest of his life he was one of its most productive researchers.

Frederick William Henry Myers (February 6, 1843 - January 17, 1901), was an English poet and essayist.

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.

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 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 Proceeedings, 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.

Myers coined the term methetherial, meaning "beyond the ether", the transcendental world in which the spirits exist.

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).

The poet and translator Ernest James Myers (1844-1921) was his younger brother.