In dreams we forget our waking experiences; they are as if they were

not. And the converse is also true. As a rule, no memory is retained

during the waking state of what has happened during mesmeric trance,

although when again entranced the person may remember it distinctly,

and may then forget facts belonging to the waking state. We thus have,

within the bounds of healthy mental life, an approach to an alternation

of _me's_.

False memories are by no means rare occurrences in most of us, and,

whenever they occur, they distort the consciousness of the me. Most

people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to

their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them,

or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so. The content of

a dream will oftentimes insert itself into the stream of real life in

a most perplexing way. The most frequent source of false memory is

the accounts we give to others of our experiences. Such accounts we

almost always make both more simple and more interesting than the

truth. We quote what we should have said or done, rather than what we

really said or did; and in the first telling we may be fully aware

of the distinction. But ere long the fiction expels the reality from

memory and reigns in its stead alone. This is one great source of the

fallibility of testimony meant to be quite honest. Especially where

the marvellous is concerned, the story takes a tilt that way, and the

memory follows the story. Dr. Carpenter quotes from Miss Cobbe the

following, as an instance of a very common sort:

"It happened once to the Writer to hear a most scrupulously

conscientious friend narrate an incident of table-turning, to which

she appended an assurance that the table rapped when _nobody was

within a yard of it_. The writer being confounded by this latter fact,

the lady, though fully satisfied of the accuracy of her statement,

promised to look at the note she had made ten years previously of

the transaction. The note was examined, and was found to contain

the distinct statement that the table rapped when _the hands of six

persons rested on it!_ The lady's memory as to all other points proved

to be strictly correct; and in this point she had erred in entire good

faith."[298]

It is next to impossible to get a story of this sort accurate in all

its details, although it is the inessential details that suffer most

change.[299] Dickens and Balzac were said to have constantly mingled

their fictions with their real experiences. Every one must have known

_some_ specimen of our mortal dust so intoxicated with the thought of

his own person and the sound of his own voice as never to be able even

to think the truth when his autobiography was in question. Amiable,

harmless, radiant J. V.! mayst thou ne'er wake to the difference

between thy real and thy fondly-imagined self![300]

2. When we pass beyond alterations of memory to abnormal _alterations

in the present self_ we have still graver disturbances. These

alterations are of three main types, from the descriptive point of

view. But certain cases unite features of two or more types; and our

knowledge of the elements and causes of these changes of personality is

so slight that the division into types must not be regarded as having

any profound significance. The types are:

(1) Insane delusions;

(2) Alternating selves;

(3) Mediumships or possessions.

* * * * *

1) In insanity we often have delusions projected into the past, which

are melancholic or sanguine according to the character of the disease.

But the worst alterations of the self come from present perversions

of sensibility and impulse which leave the past undisturbed, but

induce the patient to think that the present _me_ is an altogether

new personage. Something of this sort happens normally in the rapid

expansion of the whole character, intellectual as well as volitional,

which takes place after the time of puberty. The pathological cases are

curious enough to merit longer notice.

The basis of our personality, as M. Ribot says, is that feeling of our

vitality which, because it is so perpetually present, remains in the

background of our consciousness.

"It is the basis because, always present, always acting, without

peace or rest, it knows neither sleep nor fainting, and lasts as long

as life itself, of which it is one form. It serves as a support to

that self-conscious _me_ which memory constitutes, it is the medium

of association among its other parts.... Suppose now that it were

possible at once to change our body and put another into its place:

skeleton, vessels, viscera, muscles, skin, everything made new, except

the nervous system with its stored-up memory of the past. There can

be no doubt that in such a case the afflux of unaccustomed vital

sensations would produce the gravest disorders. Between the old sense

of existence engraved on the nervous system, and the new one acting

with all the intensity of its reality and novelty, there would be

irreconcilable contradiction."[301]

With the beginnings of cerebral disease there often happens something

quite comparable to this:

"Masses of new sensation, hitherto foreign to the individual, impulses

and ideas of the same inexperienced kind, for example terrors,

representations of enacted crime, of enemies pursuing one, etc. At

the outset, these stand in contrast with the old familiar _me_, as

a strange, often astonishing and abhorrent _thou_.[302] Often their

invasion into the former circle of feelings is felt as if the old

self were being taken possession of by a dark overpowering might,

and the fact of such 'possession' is described in fantastic images.

Always this doubleness, this struggle of the old self against the

new discordant forms of experience, is accompanied with painful

mental conflict, with passion, with violent emotional excitement.

This is in great part the reason for the common experience, that the

first stage in the immense majority of cases of mental disease is an

emotional alteration particularly of a melancholic sort. If now the

brain-affection, which is the immediate cause of the new abnormal

train of ideas, be not relieved, the latter becomes confirmed.

It may gradually contract associations with the trains of ideas

which characterized the old self, or portions of the latter may be

extinguished and lost in the progress of the cerebral malady, so

that little by little the opposition of the two conscious _me's_

abates, and the emotional storms are calmed. But by that time _the

old me itself has been falsified and turned into another_ by those

associations, by that reception into itself of the abnormal elements

of feeling and of will. The patient may again be quiet, and his

thought sometimes logically correct, but in it the morbid erroneous

ideas are always present, with the adhesions they have contracted,

as uncontrollable premises, and the man is no longer the same, but a

really new person, his old self transformed."[303]

But the patient himself rarely continues to describe the change in just

these terms unless new _bodily sensations_ in him or the loss of old

ones play a predominant part. Mere perversions of sight and hearing, or

even of impulse, soon cease to be felt as contradictions of the unity

of the me.

What the particular perversions of the bodily sensibility may be, which

give rise to these contradictions, is for the most part impossible for

a sound-minded person to conceive. One patient has another self that

repeats all his thoughts for him. Others, among whom are some of the

first characters in history, have familiar dæmons who speak with them,

and are replied to. In another someone 'makes' his thoughts for him.

Another has two bodies, lying in different beds. Some patients feel as

if they had lost parts of their bodies, teeth, brain, stomach, etc. In

some it is made of wood, glass, butter, etc. In some it does not exist

any longer, or is dead, or is a foreign object quite separate from the

speaker's self. Occasionally, parts of the body lose their connection

for consciousness with the rest, and are treated as belonging to

another person and moved by a hostile will. Thus the right hand may

fight with the left as with an enemy.[304] Or the cries of the patient

himself are assigned to another person with whom the patient expresses

sympathy. The literature of insanity is filled with narratives of such

illusions as these. M. Taine quotes from a patient of Dr. Krishaber an

account of sufferings, from which it will be seen how completely aloof

from what is normal a man's experience may suddenly become:

"After the first or second day it was for some weeks impossible

to observe or analyze myself. The suffering--angina pectoris--was

too overwhelming. It was not till the first days of January that I

could give an account to myself of what I experienced.... Here is

the first thing of which I retain a clear remembrance. I was alone,

and already a prey to permanent visual trouble, when I was suddenly

seized with a visual trouble infinitely more pronounced. Objects grew

small and receded to infinite distances--men and things together.

I was myself immeasurably far away, I looked about me with terror

and astonishment; _the world was escaping from me_.... I remarked at

the same time that my voice was extremely far away from me, that it

sounded no longer as if mine. I struck the ground with my foot, and

perceived its resistance; but this resistance seemed illusory--not

that the soil was soft, but that the weight of my body was reduced to

almost nothing.... I had the feeling of being without weight...." In

addition to being so distant, "objects appeared to me _flat_. When

I spoke with anyone, I saw him like an image cut out of paper with

no relief.... This sensation lasted intermittently for two years....

Constantly it seemed as if my legs did not belong to me. It was almost

as bad with my arms. As for my head, it seemed no longer to exist....

I appeared to myself to act automatically, by an impulsion foreign

to myself.... There was inside of me a new being, and another part

of myself, the old being, which took no interest in the new-comer.

I distinctly remember saying to myself that the sufferings of this

new being were to me indifferent. I was never really dupe of these

illusions, but my mind grew often tired of incessantly correcting the

new impressions, and I let myself go and lived the unhappy life of

this new entity. I had an ardent desire to see my old world again, to

get back to my old self. This desire kept me from killing myself....

I was another, and I hated, I despised this other; he was perfectly

odious to me; it was certainly another who had taken my form and

assumed my functions."[305]

In cases similar to this, it is as certain that the _I_ is unaltered as

that the _me_ is changed. That is to say, the present Thought of the

patient is cognitive of both the old _me_ and the new, so long as its

memory holds good. Only, within that objective sphere which formerly

lent itself so simply to the judgment of recognition and of egoistic

appropriation, strange perplexities have arisen. The present and the

past both seen therein will not unite. Where is my old me? What is this

new one? Are they the same? Or have I two? Such questions, answered by

whatever theory the patient is able to conjure up as plausible, form

the beginning of his insane life.[306]

A case with which I am acquainted through Dr. C. J. Fisher of Tewksbury

has possibly its origin in this way. The woman, Bridget F.,

"has been many years insane, and always speaks of her supposed self

as 'the rat,' asking me to 'bury the little rat,' etc. Her real self

she speaks of in the third person as 'the good woman,' saying, 'The

good Woman knew Dr. F. and used to work for him,' etc. Sometimes she

sadly asks: 'Do you think the good woman will ever come back?' She

works at needlework, knitting, laundry, etc., and shows her work,

saying, 'Isn't that good for only a rat?' She has, during periods of

depression, hid herself under buildings, and crawled into holes and

under boxes. 'She was only a rat, and wants to die,' she would say

when we found her."

2. The phenomenon of _alternating personality_ in its simplest

phases seems based on lapses of memory. Any man becomes, as we say,

_inconsistent_ with himself if he forgets his engagements, pledges,

knowledges, and habits; and it is merely a question of degree at

what point we shall say that his personality is changed. In the

pathological cases known as those of double or alternate personality

the lapse of memory is abrupt, and is usually preceded by a period of

unconsciousness or syncope lasting a variable length of time. In the

hypnotic trance we can easily produce an alteration of the personality,

either by telling the subject to forget all that has happened to him

since such or such a date, in which case he becomes (it may be) a child

again, or by telling him he is another altogether imaginary personage,

in which case all facts about himself seem for the time being to lapse

from out his mind, and he throws himself into the new character with a

vivacity proportionate to the amount of histrionic imagination which

he possesses.[307] But in the pathological cases the transformation is

spontaneous. The most famous case, perhaps, on record is that of Félida

X., reported by Dr. Azam of Bordeaux.[308] At the age of fourteen this

woman began to pass into a 'secondary' state characterized by a change

in her general disposition and character, as if certain 'inhibitions,'

previously existing, were suddenly removed. During the secondary state

she remembered the first state, but on emerging from it into the first

state she remembered nothing of the second. At the age of forty-four

the duration of the secondary state (which was on the whole superior in

quality to the original state) had gained upon the latter so much as to

occupy most of her time. During it she remembers the events belonging

to the original state, but her complete oblivion of the secondary state

when the original state recurs is often very distressing to her, as,

for example, when the transition takes place in a carriage on her way

to a funeral, and she hasn't the least idea which one of her friends

may be dead. She actually became pregnant during one of her early

secondary states, and during her first state had no knowledge of how it

had come to pass. Her distress at these blanks of memory is sometimes

intense and once drove her to attempt suicide.

To take another example, Dr. Rieger gives an account[309] of an

epileptic man who for seventeen years had passed his life alternately

free, in prisons, or in asylums, his character being orderly enough in

the normal state, but alternating with periods, during which he would

leave his home for several weeks, leading the life of a thief and

vagabond, being sent to jail, having epileptic fits and excitement,

being accused of malingering, etc., etc., and with never a memory of

the abnormal conditions which were to blame for all his wretchedness.

"I have never got from anyone," says Dr. Rieger, "so singular an

impression as from this man, of whom it could not be said that he

had any properly conscious past at all.... It is really impossible

to think one's self into such a state of mind. His last larceny had

been performed in Nürnberg, he knew nothing of it, and saw himself

before the court and then in the hospital, but without in the least

understanding the reason why. That he had epileptic attacks, he knew.

But it was impossible to convince him that for hours together he raved

and acted in an abnormal way."

Another remarkable case is that of Mary Reynolds, lately republished

again by Dr. Weir Mitchell.[310] This dull and melancholy young woman,

inhabiting the Pennsylvania wilderness in 1811,

"was found one morning, long after her habitual time for rising, in

a profound sleep from which it was impossible to arouse her. After

eighteen or twenty hours of sleeping she awakened, but in a state of

unnatural consciousness. Memory had fled. To all intents and purposes

she was as a being for the first time ushered into the world. 'All

of the past that remained to her was the faculty of pronouncing a

few words, and this seems to have been as purely instinctive as the

wailings of an infant; for at first the words which she uttered were

connected with no ideas in her mind.' Until she was taught their

significance they were unmeaning sounds.

"'Her eyes were virtually for the first time opened upon the world.

Old things had passed away; all things had become new.' Her parents,

brothers, sisters, friends, were not recognized or acknowledged as

such by her. She had never seen them before,--never known them,--was

not aware that such persons had been. Now for the first time she was

introduced to their company and acquaintance. To the scenes by which

she was surrounded she was a perfect stranger. The house, the fields,

the forest, the hills, the vales, the streams,--all were novelties.

The beauties of the landscape were all unexplored.

"She had not the slightest consciousness that she had ever existed

previous to the moment in which she awoke from that mysterious

slumber. 'In a word, she was an infant, just born, yet born in a

state of maturity, with a capacity for relishing the rich, sublime,

luxuriant wonders of created nature.'

"The first lesson in her education was to teach her by what ties

she was bound to those by whom she was surrounded, and the duties

devolving upon her accordingly. This she was very slow to learn, and,

'indeed, never did learn, or, at least, never would acknowledge the

ties of consanguinity, or scarcely those of friendship. She considered

those she had once known as for the most part strangers and enemies,

among whom she was, by some remarkable and unaccountable means,

transplanted, though from what region or state of existence was a

problem unsolved.'

"The next lesson was to re-teach her the arts of reading and writing.

She was apt enough, and made such rapid progress in both that _in a_

_few weeks_ she had readily re-learned to read and write. In copying

her name which her brother had written for her as a first lesson, she

took her pen in a very awkward manner and began to copy from right to

left in the Hebrew mode, as though she had been transplanted from an

Eastern soil....

"The next thing that is noteworthy is the change which took place in

her disposition. Instead of being melancholy she was now cheerful

to extremity. Instead of being reserved she was buoyant and social.

Formerly taciturn and retiring, she was now merry and jocose. Her

disposition was totally and absolutely changed. While she was, in

this second state, extravagantly fond of company, she was much more

enamoured of nature's works, as exhibited in the forests, hills,

vales, and water-courses. She used to start in the morning, either on

foot or horseback, and ramble until nightfall over the whole country;

nor was she at all particular whether she were on a path or in the

trackless forest. Her predilection for this manner of life may have

been occasioned by the restraint necessarily imposed upon her by

her friends, which caused her to consider them her enemies and not

companions, and she was glad to keep out of their way.

"She knew no fear, and as bears and panthers were numerous in the

woods, and rattlesnakes and copperheads abounded everywhere, her

friends told her of the danger to which she exposed herself, but it

produced no other effect than to draw forth a contemptuous laugh,

as she said, 'I know you only want to frighten me and keep me at

home, but you miss it, for I often see your bears and I am perfectly

convinced that they are nothing more than black hogs.'

"One evening, after her return from her daily excursion, she told the

following incident: 'As I was riding to-day along a narrow path a

great black hog came out of the woods and stopped before me. I never

saw such an impudent black hog before. It stood up on its hind feet

and grinned and gnashed its teeth at me. I could not make the horse

go on. I told him he was a fool to be frightened at a hog, and tried

to whip him past, but he would not go and wanted to turn back. I told

the hog to get out of the way, but he did not mind me. "Well," said

I, "if you won't for words, I'll try blows;" so I got off and took a

stick, and walked up toward it. When I got pretty close by, it got

down on all fours and walked away slowly and sullenly, stopping every

few steps and looking back and grinning and growling. Then I got on my

horse and rode on.'...

"Thus it continued for five weeks, when one morning, after a

protracted sleep, she awoke and was herself again. She recognized

the parental, the brotherly, and sisterly ties as though nothing

had happened, and immediately went about the performance of duties

incumbent upon her, and which she had planned five weeks previously.

Great was her surprise at the change which one night (as she supposed)

had produced. Nature bore a different aspect. Not a trace was left

in her mind of the giddy scenes through which she had passed. Her

ramblings through the forest, her tricks and humor, all were faded

from her memory, and not a shadow left behind. Her parents saw their

child; her brothers and sisters saw their sister. She now had all the

knowledge that she had possessed in her first state previous to the

change, still fresh and in as vigorous exercise as though no change

had been. But any new acquisitions she had made, and any new ideas

she had obtained, were lost to her now--yet not lost, but laid up

out of sight in safe-keeping for future use. Of course her natural

disposition returned; her melancholy was deepened by the information

of what had occurred. All went on in the old-fashioned way, and it was

fondly hoped that the mysterious occurrences of those five weeks would

never be repeated, but these anticipations were not to be realized.

After the lapse of a few weeks she fell into a profound sleep, and

awoke in her second state, taking up her new life again precisely

where she had left it when she before passed from that state. She was

not now a daughter or a sister. All the knowledge she possessed was

that acquired during the few weeks of her former period of second

consciousness. She knew nothing of the intervening time. Two periods

widely separated were brought into contact. She thought it was but one

night.

"In this state she came to understand perfectly the facts of her case,

not from memory, but from information. Yet her buoyancy of spirits was

so great that no depression was produced. On the contrary, it added to

her cheerfulness, and was made the foundation, as was everything else,

of mirth.

"These alternations from one state to another continued at intervals

of varying length for fifteen or sixteen years, but finally ceased

when she attained the age of thirty-five or thirty-six, leaving her

_permanently in her second state_. In this she remained without change

for the last quarter of a century of her life."

The emotional opposition of the two states seems, however, to have

become gradually effaced in Mary Reynolds:

"The change from a gay, hysterical, mischievous woman, fond of

jests and subject to absurd beliefs or delusive convictions, to

one retaining the joyousness and love of society, but sobered down

to levels of practical usefulness, was gradual. The most of the

twenty-five years which followed she was as different from her

melancholy, morbid self as from the hilarious condition of the early

years of her second state. Some of her family spoke of it as her

third state. She is described as becoming rational, industrious, and

very cheerful, yet reasonably serious; possessed of a well-balanced

temperament, and not having the slightest indication of an injured or

disturbed mind. For some years she taught school, and in that capacity

was both useful and acceptable, being a general favorite with old and

young.

"During these last twenty-five years she lived in the same house with

the Rev. Dr. John V. Reynolds, her nephew, part of that time keeping

house for him, showing a sound judgment and a thorough acquaintance

with the duties of her position.

"Dr. Reynolds, who is still living in Meadville," says Dr. Mitchell,

"and who has most kindly placed the facts at my disposal, states in

his letter to me of January 4, 1888, that at a later period of her

life she said she did sometimes seem to have a dim, dreamy idea of

a shadowy past, which she could not fully grasp, and could not be

certain whether it originated in a partially restored memory or in the

statements of the events by others during her abnormal state.

"Miss Reynolds died in January, 1854, at the age of sixty-one. On the

morning of the day of her death she rose in her usual health, ate her

breakfast, and superintended household duties. While thus employed she

suddenly raised her hands to her head and exclaimed: 'Oh! I wonder

what is the matter with my head!' and immediately fell to the floor.

When carried to a sofa she gasped once or twice and died."

In such cases as the preceding, in which the secondary character is

superior to the first, there seems reason to think that the first one

is the morbid one. The word _inhibition_ describes its dulness and

melancholy. Félida X.'s original character was dull and melancholy in

comparison with that which she later acquired, and the change may be

regarded as the removal of inhibitions which had maintained themselves

from earlier years. Such inhibitions we all know temporarily, when we

can not recollect or in some other way command our mental resources.

The systematized amnesias (losses of memory) of hypnotic subjects

ordered to forget all nouns, or all verbs, or a particular letter

of the alphabet, or all that is relative to a certain person, are

inhibitions of the sort on a more extensive scale. They sometimes

occur spontaneously as symptoms of disease.[311] Now M. Pierre Janet

has shown that such inhibitions when they bear on a certain class of

sensations (making the subject anæsthetic thereto) and also on the

memory of such sensations, are the basis of changes of personality.

The anæsthetic and 'amnesic' hysteric is one person; but when you

restore her inhibited sensibilities and memories by plunging her into

the hypnotic trance--in other words, when you rescue them from their

'dissociated' and split-off condition, and make them rejoin the other

sensibilities and memories--she is a different person. As said above

(p. 203), the hypnotic trance is one method of restoring sensibility

in hysterics. But one day when the hysteric anæsthetic named Lucie was

already in the hypnotic trance, M. Janet for a certain reason continued

to make passes over her for a full half-hour as if she were not already

asleep. The result was to throw her into a sort of syncope from which,

after half an hour, she revived in a second somnambulic condition

entirely unlike that which had characterized her thitherto--different

sensibilities, a different memory, a different person, in short. In

the waking state the poor young woman was anæsthetic all over, nearly

deaf, and with a badly contracted field of vision. Bad as it was,

however, sight was her best sense, and she used it as a guide in all

her movements. With her eyes bandaged she became entirely helpless, and

like other persons of a similar sort whose cases have been recorded,

she almost immediately fell asleep in consequence of the withdrawal

of her last sensorial stimulus. M. Janet calls this waking or primary

(one can hardly in such a connection say 'normal') state by the

name of Lucie 1. In Lucie 2, her first sort of hypnotic trance, the

anæsthesias were diminished but not removed. In the deeper trance,

'Lucie 3,' brought about as just described, no trace of them remained.

Her sensibility became perfect, and instead of being an extreme example

of the 'visual' type, she was transformed into what in Prof. Charcot's

terminology is known as a motor. That is to say, that whereas when

awake she had thought in visual terms exclusively, and could imagine

things only by remembering how they _looked_, now in this deeper trance

her thoughts and memories seemed to M. Janet to be largely composed of

images of movement and of touch.

Having discovered this deeper trance and change of personality in

Lucie, M. Janet naturally became eager to find it in his other

subjects. He found it in Rose, in Marie, and in Léonie; and his

brother, Dr. Jules Janet, who was _interne_ at the Salpétrière

Hospital, found it in the celebrated subject Wit.... whose trances had

been studied for years by the various doctors of that institution

without any of them having happened to awaken this very peculiar

individuality.[312]

With the return of all the sensibilities in the deeper trance, these

subjects turned, as it were, into normal persons. Their memories

in particular grew more extensive, and hereupon M. Janet spins a

theoretic generalization. _When a certain kind of sensation_, he says,

_is abolished in an hysteric patient, there is also abolished along

with it all recollection of past sensations of that kind_. If, for

example, hearing be the anæsthetic sense, the patient becomes unable

even to imagine sounds and voices, and has to speak (when speech is

still possible) by means of motor or articulatory cues. If the motor

sense be abolished, the patient must will the movements of his limbs

by first defining them to his mind in visual terms, and must innervate

his voice by premonitory ideas of the way in which the words are going

to sound. The practical consequences of this law would be great, for

all experiences belonging to a sphere of sensibility which afterwards

became anæsthetic, as, for example, touch, would have been stored away

and remembered in tactile terms, and would be incontinently forgotten

as soon as the cutaneous and muscular sensibility should come to be cut

out in the course of disease. Memory of them would be restored again,

on the other hand, so soon as the sense of touch came back. Now, in the

hysteric subjects on whom M. Janet experimented, touch did come back in

the state of trance. The result was that all sorts of memories, absent

in the ordinary condition, came back too, and they could then go back

and explain the origin of many otherwise inexplicable things in their

life. One stage in the great convulsive crisis of hystero-epilepsy,

for example, is what French writers call the _phase des attitudes

passionelles_, in which the patient, without speaking or giving any

account of herself, will go through the outward movements of fear,

anger, or some other emotional state of mind. Usually this phase is,

with each patient, a thing so stereotyped as to seem automatic, and

doubts have even been expressed as to whether any consciousness exists

whilst it lasts. When, however, the patient Lucie's tactile sensibility

came back in the deeper trance, she explained the origin of her

hysteric crisis in a great fright which she had had when a child, on

a day when certain men, hid behind the curtains, had jumped out upon

her; she told how she went through this scene again in all her crises;

she told of her sleep-walking fits through the house when a child, and

how for several months she had been shut in a dark room because of a

disorder of the eyes. All these were things of which she recollected

nothing when awake, because they were records of experiences mainly of

motion and of touch.

But M. Janet's subject Léonie is interesting, and shows best how with

the sensibilities and motor impulses the memories and character will

change.

"This woman, whose life sounds more like an improbable romance than

a genuine history, has had attacks of natural somnambulism since the

age of three years. She has been hypnotized constantly by all sorts of

persons from the age of sixteen upwards, and she is now forty-five.

Whilst her normal life developed in one way in the midst of her poor

country surroundings, her second life was passed in drawing-rooms and

doctors' offices, and naturally took an entirely different direction.

To-day, when in her normal state, this poor peasant woman is a serious

and rather sad person, calm and slow, very mild with every one, and

extremely timid: to look at her one would never suspect the personage

which she contains. But hardly is she put to sleep hypnotically

when a metamorphosis occurs. Her face is no longer the same. She

keeps her eyes closed, it is true, but the acuteness of her other

senses supplies their place. She is gay, noisy, restless, sometimes

insupportably so. She remains good-natured, but has acquired a

singular tendency to irony and sharp jesting. Nothing is more curious

than to hear her after a sitting when she has received a visit from

strangers who wished to see her asleep. She gives a word-portrait of

them, apes their manners, pretends to know their little ridiculous

aspects and passions, and for each invents a romance. To this

character must be added the possession of an enormous number of

recollections, whose existence she does not even suspect when awake,

for her amnesia is then complete.... She refuses the name of Léonie

and takes that of Léontine (Léonie 2) to which her first magnetizers

had accustomed her. 'That good woman is not myself,' she says, 'she

is too stupid!' To herself, Léontine or Léonie 2, she attributes

all the sensations and all the actions, in a word all the conscious

experiences which she has undergone _in somnambulism_, and knits them

together to make the history of her already long life. To Léonie 1 [as

M. Janet calls the waking woman] on the other hand, she exclusively

ascribes the events lived through in waking hours. I was at first

struck by an important exception to the rule, and was disposed to

think that there might be something arbitrary in this partition of her

recollections. In the normal state Léonie has a husband and children;

but Léonie 2, the somnambulist, whilst acknowledging the children

as her own, attributes the husband to 'the other.' This choice, was

perhaps explicable, but it followed no rule. It was not till later

that I learned that her magnetizers in early days, as audacious

as certain hypnotizers of recent date, had somnambulized her for

her first _accouchements_, and that she had lapsed into that state

spontaneously in the later ones. Léonie 2 was thus quite right in

ascribing to herself the children--it was she who had had them, and

the rule that her first trance-state forms a different personality was

not broken. But it is the same with her second or deepest state of

trance. When after the renewed passes, syncope, etc., she reaches the

condition which I have called Léonie 3, she is another person still.

Serious and grave, instead of being a restless child, she speaks

slowly and moves but little. Again she separates herself from the

waking Léonie 1. 'A good but rather stupid woman,' she says, 'and not

me.' And she also separates herself from Léonie 2: 'How can you see

anything of me in that crazy creature?' she says. 'Fortunately I am

nothing for her.'"

Léonie 1 knows only of herself; Léonie 2, of herself and of Léonie 1;

Léonie 3 knows of herself and of both the others. Léonie 1 has a visual

consciousness; Léonie 2 has one both visual and auditory; in Léonie 3

it is at once visual, auditory, and tactile. Prof. Janet thought at

first that he was Léonie 3's discoverer. But she told him that she had

been frequently in that condition before. A former magnetizer had hit

upon her just as M. Janet had, in seeking by means of passes to deepen

the sleep of Léonie 2.

"This resurrection of a somnambulic personage who had been extinct

for twenty years is curious enough; and in speaking to Léonie 3, I

naturally now adopt the name of Léonore which was given her by her

first master."

The most carefully studied case of multiple personality is that of the

hysteric youth Louis V. about whom MM. Bourru and Burot have written a

book.[313] The symptoms are too intricate to be reproduced here with

detail. Suffice it that Louis V. had led an irregular life, in the

army, in hospitals, and in houses of correction, and had had numerous

hysteric anæsthesias, paralyses, and contractures attacking him

differently at different times and when he lived at different places.

At eighteen, at an agricultural House of Correction he was bitten by

a viper, which brought on a convulsive crisis and left _both of his

legs_ paralyzed for three years. During this condition he was gentle,

moral, and industrious. But suddenly at last, after a long convulsive

seizure, his paralysis disappeared, and with it his memory for all the

time during which it had endured. His character also changed: he became

quarrelsome, gluttonous, impolite, stealing his comrades' wine, and

money from an attendant, and finally escaped from the establishment

and fought furiously when he was overtaken and caught. Later, when

he first fell under the observation of the authors, his _right side_

was half paralyzed and insensible, and his character intolerable; the

application of metals transferred the paralysis to the _left_ side,

abolished his recollections of the other condition, and carried him

psychically back to the hospital of Bicêtre where he had been treated

for a similar physical condition. His character, opinions, education,

all underwent a concomitant transformation. He was no longer the

personage of the moment before. It appeared ere long that any present

nervous disorder in him could be temporarily removed by metals,

magnets, electric or other baths, etc.; and that any past disorder

could be brought back by hypnotic suggestion. He also went through a

rapid spontaneous repetition of his series of past disorders after

each of the convulsive attacks which occurred in him at intervals.

It was observed that each physical state in which he found himself,

excluded certain memories and brought with it a definite modification

of character.

"The law of these changes," say the authors, "is quite clear. There

exist precise, constant, and necessary relations between the bodily

and the mental state, such that it is impossible to modify the one

without modifying the other in a parallel fashion."[314]

The case of this proteiform individual would seem, then, nicely to

corroborate M. P. Janet's law that anæsthesias and gaps in memory go

together. Coupling Janet's law with Locke's that changes of memory

bring changes of personality, we should have an apparent explanation

of some cases at least of alternate personality. But mere anæsthesia

does not sufficiently explain the changes of disposition, which

are probably due to modifications in the perviousness of motor and

associative paths, co-ordinate with those of the sensorial paths rather

than consecutive upon them. And indeed a glance at other cases than M.

Janet's own, suffices to show us that sensibility and memory are not

coupled in any invariable way.[315] M. Janet's law, true of his own

cases, does not seem to hold good in all.

Of course it is mere guesswork to speculate on what may be the cause of

the amnesias which lie at the bottom of changes in the Self. Changes

of blood-supply have naturally been invoked. Alternate action of the

two hemispheres was long ago proposed by Dr. Wigan in his book on

the Duality of the Mind. I shall revert to this explanation after

considering the third class of alterations of the Self, those, namely,

which I have called 'possessions.'

I have myself become quite recently acquainted with the subject of a

case of alternate personality of the 'ambulatory' sort, who has given

me permission to name him in these pages.[316]

The Rev. Ansel Bourne, of Greene, R. I., was brought up to the trade

of a carpenter; but, in consequence of a sudden temporary loss,

of sight and hearing under very peculiar circumstances, he became

converted from Atheism to Christianity just before his thirtieth

year, and has since that time for the most part lived the life of an

itinerant preacher. He has been subject to headaches and temporary

fits of depression of spirits during most of his life, and has had a

few fits of unconsciousness lasting an hour or less. He also has a

region of somewhat diminished cutaneous sensibility on the left thigh.

Otherwise his health is good, and his muscular strength and endurance

excellent. He is of a firm and self-reliant disposition, a man whose

yea is yea and his nay, nay; and his character for uprightness is such

in the community that no person who knows him will for a moment admit

the possibility of his case not being perfectly genuine.

On January 17, 1887, he drew 551 dollars from a bank in Providence

with which to pay for a certain lot of land in Greene, paid certain

bills, and got into a Pawtucket horse-car. This is the last incident

which he remembers. He did not return home that day, and nothing

was heard of him for two months. He was published in the papers as

missing, and foul play being suspected, the police sought in vain his

whereabouts. On the morning of March 14th, however, at Norristown,

Pennsylvania, a man calling himself A. J. Brown, who had rented

a small shop six weeks previously, stocked it with stationery,

confectionery, fruit and small articles, and carried on his quiet

trade without seeming to any one unnatural or eccentric, woke up in a

fright and called in the people of the house to tell him where he was.

He said that his name was Ansel Bourne, that he was entirely ignorant

of Norristown, that he knew nothing of shop-keeping, and that the last

thing he remembered--it seemed only yesterday--was drawing the money

from the bank, etc., in Providence. He would not believe that two

months had elapsed. The people of the house thought him insane; and

so, at first, did Dr. Louis H. Read, whom they called in to see him.

But on telegraphing to Providence, confirmatory messages came, and

presently his nephew, Mr. Andrew Harris, arrived upon the scene, made

everything straight, and took him home. He was very weak, having lost

apparently over twenty pounds of flesh during his escapade, and had

such a horror of the idea of the candy-store that he refused to set

foot in it again.

The first two weeks of the period remained unaccounted for, as he had

no memory, after he had once resumed his normal personality, of any

part of the time, and no one who knew him seems to have seen him

after he left home. The remarkable part of the change is, of course,

the peculiar occupation which the so-called Brown indulged in. Mr.

Bourne has never in his life had the slightest contact with trade.

'Brown' was described by the neighbors as taciturn, orderly in his

habits, and in no way queer. He went to Philadelphia several times;

replenished his stock; cooked for himself in the back shop, where he

also slept; went regularly to church; and once at a prayer-meeting

made what was considered by the hearers a good address, in the course

of which he related an incident which he had witnessed in his natural

state of Bourne.

This was all that was known of the case up to June 1890, when I

induced Mr. Bourne to submit to hypnotism, so as to see whether, in

the hypnotic trance, his 'Brown' memory would not come back. It did

so with surprising readiness; so much so indeed that it proved quite

impossible to make him whilst in the hypnosis remember any of the

facts of his normal life. He had heard of Ansel Bourne, but "didn't

know as he had ever met the man." When confronted with Mrs. Bourne

he said that he had "never seen the woman before," etc. On the other

hand, he told of his peregrinations during the lost fortnight,[317]

and gave all sorts of details about the Norristown episode. The whole

thing was prosaic enough; and the Brown-personality seems to be

nothing but a rather shrunken, dejected, and amnesic extract of Mr.

Bourne himself. He gives no motive for the wandering except that there

was 'trouble back there' and he 'wanted rest.' During the trance he

looks old, the corners of his mouth are drawn down, his voice is slow

and weak, and he sits screening his eyes and trying vainly to remember

what lay before and after the two months of the Brown experience. "I'm

all hedged in," he says: "I can't get out at either end. I don't know

what set me down in that Pawtucket horse-car, and I don't know how I

ever left that store, or what became of it." His eyes are practically

normal, and all his sensibilities (save for tardier response) about

the same in hypnosis as in waking. I had hoped by suggestion, etc., to

run the two personalities into one, and make the memories continuous,

but no artifice would avail to accomplish this, and Mr. Bourne's skull

to-day still covers two distinct personal selves.

The case (whether it contain an epileptic element or not) should

apparently be classed as one of spontaneous hypnotic trance,

persisting for two months. The peculiarity of it is that nothing else

like it ever occurred in the man's life, and that no eccentricity of

character came out. In most similar cases, the attacks recur, and the

sensibilities and conduct markedly change.[318]

* * * * *

3. In '_mediumships_' or '_possessions_' the invasion and the passing

away of the secondary state are both relatively abrupt, and the

duration of the state is usually short--i.e., from a few minutes to a

few hours. Whenever the secondary state is well developed no memory for

aught that happened during it remains after the primary consciousness

comes back. The subject during the secondary consciousness speaks,

writes, or acts as if animated by a foreign person, and often names

this foreign person and gives his history. In old times the foreign

'control' was usually a demon, and is so now in communities which favor

that belief. With us he gives himself out at the worst for an Indian or

other grotesquely speaking but harmless personage. Usually he purports

to be the spirit of a dead person known or unknown to those present,

and the subject is then what we call a 'medium.' Mediumistic possession

in all its grades seems to form a perfectly natural special type of

alternate personality, and the susceptibility to it in some form is

by no means an uncommon gift, in persons who have no other obvious

nervous anomaly. The phenomena are very intricate, and are only just

beginning to be studied in a proper scientific way. The lowest phase

of mediumship is automatic writing, and the lowest grade of that is

where the Subject knows what words are coming, but feels impelled to

write them as if from without. Then comes writing unconsciously, even

whilst engaged in reading or talk. Inspirational speaking, playing on

musical instruments, etc., also belong to the relatively lower phases

of possession, in which the normal self is not excluded from conscious

participation in the performance, though their initiative seems to come

from elsewhere. In the highest phase the trance is complete, the voice,

language, and everything are changed, and there is no after-memory

whatever until the next trance comes. One curious thing about

trance-utterances is their generic similarity in different individuals.

The 'control' here in America is either a grotesque, slangy, and

flippant personage ('Indian' controls, calling the ladies 'squaws,'

the men 'braves,' the house a 'wigwam,' etc., etc., are excessively

common); or, if he ventures on higher intellectual flights, he abounds

in a curiously vague optimistic philosophy-and-water, in which phrases

about spirit, harmony, beauty, law, progression, development, etc.,

keep recurring. It seems exactly as if one author composed more than

half of the trance-messages, no matter by whom they are uttered.

Whether all sub-conscious selves are peculiarly susceptible to a

certain stratum of the _Zeitgeist_, and get their inspiration from it,

I know not; but this is obviously the case with the secondary selves

which become 'developed' in spiritualist circles. There the beginnings

of the medium trance are indistinguishable from effects of hypnotic

suggestion. The subject assumes the rôle of a medium simply because

opinion expects it of him under the conditions which are present;

and carries it out with a feebleness or a vivacity proportionate to

his histrionic gifts. But the odd thing is that persons unexposed to

spiritualist traditions will so often act in the same way when they

become entranced, speak in the name of the departed, go through the

motions of their several death-agonies, send messages about their happy

home in the summer-land, and describe the ailments of those present.

I have no theory to publish of these cases, several of which I have

personally seen.

As an example of the automatic writing performances I will quote from

an account of his own case kindly furnished me by Mr. Sidney Dean of

Warren, R I., member of Congress from Connecticut from 1855 to 1859,

who has been all his life a robust and active journalist, author, and

man of affairs. He has for many years been a writing subject, and has a

large collection of manuscript automatically produced.

"Some of it," he writes us, "is in hieroglyph, or strange compounded

arbitrary characters, each series possessing a seeming unity in

general design or character, followed by what purports to be a

translation or rendering into mother English. I never attempted the

seemingly impossible feat of copying the characters. They were cut

with the precision of a graver's tool, and generally with a single

rapid stroke of the pencil. Many languages, some obsolete and passed

from history, are professedly given. To see them would satisfy you

that no one could copy them except by tracing.

"These, however, are but a small part of the phenomena. The

'automatic' has given place to the _impressional_, and when the work

is in progress I am in the normal condition, and seemingly two minds,

intelligences, persons, are practically engaged. The writing is in my

own hand but the dictation not of my own mind and will, but that of

another, upon subjects of which I can have no knowledge and hardly a

theory; and I, myself, consciously criticise the thought, fact, mode

of expressing it, etc., while the hand is recording the subject-matter

and even the words impressed to be written. If _I_ refuse to write

the sentence, or even the word, the impression instantly ceases, and

my willingness must be mentally expressed before the work is resumed,

and it is resumed at the point of cessation, even if it should be in

the middle of a sentence. Sentences are commenced without knowledge

of mine as to their subject or ending. In fact, I have never known in

advance the subject of disquisition.

"There is in progress now, at uncertain times, not subject to my will,

a series of twenty-four chapters upon the scientific features of life,

moral, spiritual, eternal. Seven have already been written in the

manner indicated. These were preceded by twenty-four chapters relating

generally to the life beyond material death, its characteristics,

etc. Each chapter is signed by the name of some person who has lived

on earth,--some with whom I have been personally acquainted, others

known in history.... I know nothing of the alleged authorship of any

chapter until it is completed and the name impressed and appended....

I am interested not only in the reputed authorship,--of which I have

nothing corroborative,--but in the philosophy taught, of which I was

in ignorance until these chapters appeared. From my standpoint of

life--which has been that of biblical orthodoxy--the philosophy is

new, seems to be reasonable, and is logically put. I confess to an

inability to successfully controvert it to my own satisfaction.

"It is an intelligent _ego_ who writes, or else the influence

assumes individuality, which practically makes of the influence a

personality. It is _not_ myself; of that I am conscious at every step

of the process. I have also traversed the whole field of the claims

of 'unconscious cerebration,' so called, so far as I am competent

to critically examine it, and it fails, as a theory, in numberless

points, when applied to this strange work through me. It would be far

more reasonable and satisfactory for me to accept the silly hypothesis

of re-incarnation,--the old doctrine of metempsychosis,--as taught

by some spiritualists to-day, and to believe that I lived a former

life here, and that once in a while it dominates my intellectual

powers, and writes chapters upon the philosophy of life, or opens a

post-office for spirits to drop their effusions, and have them put

into English script. No; the easiest and most natural solution to me

is to admit the claim made, i.e., that it is a decarnated intelligence

who writes. But _who?_ that is the question. The names of scholars

and thinkers who once lived are affixed to the most ungrammatical and

weakest of _bosh_....

"It seems reasonable to me--upon the hypothesis that it is a person

using another's mind or brain--that there must be more or less of

that other's style or tone incorporated in the message, and that to

the unseen personality, i.e., the power which impresses, the thought,

the fact, or the philosophy, and not the style or tone, belongs. For

instance, while the influence is impressing my brain with the greatest

force and rapidity, so that my pencil fairly flies over the paper to

record the thoughts, I am conscious that, in many cases, the vehicle

of the thought, i.e., the language, is very natural and familiar to

me, as if, somehow, _my_ personality as a writer was getting mixed

up with the message. And, again, the style, language, everything, is

entirely foreign to my own style."

I am myself persuaded by abundant acquaintance with the trances of

one medium that the 'control' may be altogether different from any

_possible_ waking self of the person. In the case I have in mind,

it professes to be a certain departed French doctor; and is, I am

convinced, acquainted with facts about the circumstances, and the

living and dead relatives and acquaintances, of numberless sitters

whom the medium never met before, and of whom she has never heard the

names. I record my bare opinion here unsupported by the evidence, not,

of course, in order to convert anyone to my view, but because I am

persuaded that a serious study of these trance-phenomena is one of the

greatest needs of psychology, and think that my personal confession

may possibly draw a reader or two into a field which the _soi-disant_

'scientist' usually refuses to explore.

Many persons have found evidence conclusive to their minds that in some

cases the control is really the departed spirit whom it pretends to be.

The phenomena shade off so gradually into cases where this is obviously

absurd, that the presumption (quite apart from _a priori_ 'scientific'

prejudice) is great against its being true. The case of Lurancy Vennum

is perhaps as extreme a case of 'possession' of the modern sort as one

can find.[319] Lurancy was a young girl of fourteen, living with her

parents at Watseka, Ill., who (after various distressing hysterical

disorders and spontaneous trances, during which she was possessed by

departed spirits of a more or less grotesque sort) finally declared

herself to be animated by the spirit of Mary Roff (a neighbor's

daughter, who had died in an insane asylum twelve years before) and

insisted on being sent 'home' to Mr. Roff's house. After a week of

'homesickness' and importunity on her part, her parents agreed, and the

Roffs, who pitied her, and who were spiritualists into the bargain,

took her in. Once there, she seems to have convinced the family that

their dead Mary had exchanged habitations with Lurancy. Lurancy was

said to be temporarily in heaven, and Mary's spirit now controlled her

organism, and lived again in her former earthly home.

"The girl, now in her new home, seemed perfectly happy and content,

knowing every person and everything that Mary knew when in her

original body, twelve to twenty-five years ago, recognizing and

calling by name those who were friends and neighbors of the family

from 1852 to 1865, when Mary died, calling attention to scores, yes,

hundreds of incidents that transpired during her natural life. During

all the period of her sojourn at Mr. Roff's she had no knowledge of,

and did not recognize, any of Mr. Vennum's family, their friends or

neighbors, yet Mr. and Mrs. Vennum and their children visited her and

Mr. Roff's people, she being introduced to them as to any strangers.

After frequent visits, and hearing them often and favorably spoken

of, she learned to love them as acquaintances, and visited them with

Mrs. Roff three times. From day to day she appeared natural, easy,

affable, and industrious, attending diligently and faithfully to her

household duties, assisting in the general work of the family as a

faithful, prudent daughter might be supposed to do, singing, reading,

or conversing as opportunity offered, upon all matters of private or

general interest to the family."

The so-called Mary whilst at the Roffs' would sometimes 'go back to

heaven,' and leave the body in a 'quiet trance,' i.e., without the

original personality of Lurancy returning. After eight or nine weeks,

however, the memory and manner of Lurancy would sometimes partially,

but not entirely, return for a few minutes. Once Lurancy seems to

have taken full possession for a short time. At last, after some

fourteen weeks, conformably to the prophecy which 'Mary' had made

when she first assumed 'control,' she departed definitively and the

Lurancy-consciousness came back for good. Mr. Roff writes:

"She wanted me to take her home, which I did. She called me Mr. Roff,

and talked with me as a young girl would, not being acquainted. I

asked her how things appeared to her--if they seemed natural. She said

it seemed like a dream to her. She met her parents and brothers in a

very affectionate manner, hugging and kissing each one in tears of

gladness. She clasped her arms around her father's neck a long time,

fairly smothering him with kisses. I saw her father just now (eleven

o'clock). He says she has been perfectly natural, and seems entirely

well."

Lurancy's mother writes, a couple of months later, that she was

"perfectly and entirely well and natural. For two or three weeks after

her return home, she seemed a little strange to what she had been

before she was taken sick last summer, but only, perhaps, the natural

change that had taken place with the girl, and except it seemed to

her as though she had been dreaming or sleeping, etc. Lurancy has

been smarter, more intelligent, more industrious, more womanly, and

more polite than before. We give the credit of her complete cure and

restoration to her family, to Dr. E. W. Stevens, and Mr. and Mrs.

Roff, by their obtaining her removal to Mr. Roff's, where her cure was

perfected. We firmly believe that, had she remained at home, she would

have died, or we would have been obliged to send her to the insane

asylum; and if so, that she would have died there; and further, that

I could not have lived but a short time with the care and trouble

devolving on me. Several of the relatives of Lurancy, including

ourselves, now believe she was cured by spirit power, and that Mary

Roff controlled the girl."

Eight years later, Lurancy was reported to be married and a mother, and

in good health. She had apparently outgrown the mediumistic phase of

her existence.[320]

* * * * *

On the condition of the sensibility during these invasions, few

observations have been made. I have found the hands of two automatic

writers anæsthetic during the act. In two others I have found this not

to be the case. Automatic writing is usually preceded by shooting pains

along the arm-nerves and irregular contractions of the arm-muscles.

I have found one medium's tongue and lips apparently insensible to

pin-pricks during her (speaking) trance.

* * * * *

If we speculate on the brain-condition during all these different

perversions of personality, we see that it must be supposed capable of

successively changing all its modes of action, and abandoning the use

for the time being of whole sets of well-organized association-paths.

In no other way can we explain the loss of memory in passing from one

alternating condition to another. And not only this, but we must admit

that organized systems of paths can be thrown out of gear with others,

so that the processes in one system give rise to one consciousness,

and those of another system to another _simultaneously_ existing

consciousness. Thus only can we understand the facts of automatic

writing, etc., whilst the patient is out of trance, and the false

anæsthesias and amnesias of the hysteric type. But just what sort of

dissociation the phrase 'thrown out of gear' may stand for, we cannot

even conjecture; only I think we ought not to talk of the doubling of

the self as if it consisted in the failure to combine on the part of

certain systems of _ideas_ which usually do so. It is better to talk

of _objects_ usually combined, and which are now divided between the

two 'selves,' in the hysteric and automatic cases in question. Each of

the selves is due to a system of cerebral paths acting by itself. If

the brain acted normally, and the dissociated systems came together

again, we should get a new affection of consciousness in the form of a

third 'Self' different from the other two, but knowing their objects

together, as the result.--After all I have said in the last chapter,

this hardly needs further remark.

Some peculiarities in the lower automatic performances suggest that

the systems thrown out of gear with each other are contained one in

the right and the other in the left hemisphere. The subjects, e.g.,

often write backwards, or they transpose letters, or they write

mirror-script. All these are symptoms of agraphic disease. The left

hand, if left to its natural impulse, will in most people write

mirror-script more easily than natural script. Mr. F. W. H. Myers has

laid stress on these analogies.[321] He has also called attention

to the usual inferior moral tone of ordinary planchette writing. On

Hughlings Jackson's principles, the left hemisphere, being the more

evolved organ, at ordinary times inhibits the activity of the right

one; but Mr. Myers suggests that during the automatic performances the

usual inhibition may be removed and the right hemisphere set free to

act all by itself. This is very likely to some extent to be the case.

But the crude explanation of 'two' selves by 'two' hemispheres is of

course far from Mr. Myers's thought. The selves may be more than two,

and the brain-systems severally used for each must be conceived as

interpenetrating each other in very minute ways.

SUMMARY.

To sum up now this long chapter. The consciousness of Self involves

a stream of thought, each part of which as 'I' can 1) remember

those which went before, and know the things they knew; and 2)

emphasize and care paramountly for certain ones among them as 'me,'

and _appropriate to these_ the rest. The nucleus of the '_me_' is

always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time. Whatever

remembered-past-feelings _resemble_ this present feeling are deemed to

belong to the same _me_ with it. Whatever other things are perceived to

be _associated_ with this feeling are deemed to form part of that me's

_experience_; and of them certain ones (which fluctuate more or less)

are reckoned to be themselves _constituents_ of the me in a larger

sense,--such are the clothes, the material possessions, the friends,

the honors and esteem which the person receives or may receive. This me

is an empirical aggregate of things objectively known. The _I_ which

knows them cannot itself be an aggregate, neither for psychological

purposes need it be considered to be an unchanging metaphysical entity

like the Soul, or a principle like the pure Ego, viewed as 'out of

time.' It is a _Thought_, at each moment different from that of the

last moment, but _appropriative_ of the latter, together with all that

the latter called its own. All the experiential facts find their place

in this description, unencumbered with any hypothesis save that of the

existence of passing thoughts or states of mind. The same brain may

subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexisting; but by

what modifications in its action, or whether ultra-cerebral conditions

may intervene, are questions which cannot now be answered.

If anyone urge that I assign no _reason_ why the successive passing

thoughts should inherit each other's possessions, or why they and the

brain-states should be functions (in the mathematical sense) of each

other, I reply that the reason, if there be any, must lie where all

real reasons lie, in the total sense or meaning of the world. If there

be such a meaning, or any approach to it (as we are bound to trust

there is), it alone can make clear to us why such finite human streams

of thought are called into existence in such functional dependence

upon brains. This is as much as to say that the special natural

science of _psychology_ must stop with the mere functional formula.

_If the passing thought be the directly verifiable existent which no

school has hitherto doubted it to be, then that thought is itself the

thinker_, and psychology need not look beyond. The only pathway that I

can discover for bringing in a more transcendental thinker would be to

_deny_ that we have any _direct_ knowledge of the thought as such. The

latter's existence would then be reduced to a postulate, an assertion

that there _must be_ a _knower_ correlative to all this _known_; and

the problem _who that knower is_ would have become a metaphysical

problem. With the question once stated in these terms, the spiritualist

and transcendentalist solutions must be considered as _prima facie_ on

a par with our own psychological one, and discussed impartially. But

that carries us beyond the psychological or naturalistic point of view.

FOOTNOTES:

[257] See, for a charming passage on the Philosophy of Dress, H.

Lotze's Microcosmus, Eng. tr. vol. i, p. 592 ff.

[258] "Who filches from me my good name," etc.

[259] "He who imagines commendation and disgrace not to be strong

motives on men ... seems little skilled in the nature and history of

mankind; the greatest part whereof he shall find to govern themselves

chiefly, if not solely, by this law of fashion; and so they do that

which keeps them in reputation with their company, little regard

the laws of God or the magistrate. The penalties that attend the

breach of God's laws some, nay, most, men seldom seriously reflect

on; and amongst those that do, many, whilst they break the laws,

entertain thoughts of future reconciliation, and making their peace

for such breaches: and as to the punishments due from the laws of the

commonwealth, they frequently flatter themselves with the hope of

impunity. But no man escapes the punishment of _their_ censure and

dislike who offends against the fashion and opinion of the company he

keeps, and would recommend himself to. Nor is there one in ten thousand

who is stiff and insensible enough to bear up under the constant

dislike and condemnation of his own club. He must be of a strange

and unusual constitution who can content himself to live in constant

disgrace and disrepute with his own particular society. Solitude

many men have sought and been reconciled to; but nobody that has the

least thought or sense of a man about him can live in society under

the constant dislike and ill opinion of his familiars and those he

converses with. This is a burden too heavy for human sufferance: and he

must be made up of irreconcilable contradictions who can take pleasure

in company and yet be insensible of contempt and disgrace from his

companions." (Locke's Essay, book ii, ch. xxviii, § 12.)

[260] For some farther remarks on these feelings of movement see the

next chapter.

[261] Wundt's account of Self-consciousness deserves to be compared

with this. What I have called 'adjustments' he calls processes of

'Apperception.' "In this development (of consciousness) one particular

group of percepts claims a prominent significance, namely, those

of which the spring lies in ourselves. The images of feelings we

get from our own body, and the representations of our own movements

distinguish themselves from all others by forming a _permanent_

group. As there are always some muscles in a state either of tension

or of activity it follows that we never lack a sense, either dim or

clear, of the positions or movements of our body.... This permanent

sense, moreover, has this peculiarity, that we are aware of our power

at any moment voluntarily to arouse any one of its ingredients. We

excite the sensations of movement immediately by such impulses of

the will as shall arouse the movements themselves; and we excite the

visual and tactile feelings of our body by the voluntary movement of

our organs of sense. So we come to conceive this permanent mass of

feeling as immediately or remotely subject to our will, and call it

the _consciousness of ourself_. This self-consciousness is, at the

outset, thoroughly sensational,... only gradually the second-named

of its characters, its subjection to our will, attains predominance.

In proportion as the apperception of all our mental objects appears

to us as an inward exercise of will, does our self-consciousness

begin both to widen itself and to narrow itself at the same time. It

widens itself in that every mental act whatever comes to stand in

relation to our will; and it narrows itself in that it concentrates

itself more and more upon the inner activity of apperception, over

against which our own body and all the representations connected with

it appear as external objects, different from our proper self. This

consciousness, contracted down to the process of apperception, we

call our Ego; and the apperception of mental objects in general, may

thus, after Leibnitz, be designated as the raising of them into our

self-consciousness. Thus the natural development of self-consciousness

implicitly involves the most abstract forms in which this faculty

has been described in philosophy; only philosophy is fond of placing

the abstract ego at the outset, and so reversing the process of

development. Nor should we overlook the fact that the completely

abstract ego [as pure activity], although suggested by the natural

development of our consciousness, is never actually found therein.

The most speculative of philosophers is incapable of disjoining his

ego from those bodily feelings and images which form the incessant

background of his awareness of himself. The notion of his ego as such

is, like every notion, derived from sensibility, for the process of

apperception itself comes to our knowledge chiefly through those

feelings of tension [what I have above called inward adjustments] which

accompany it." (Physiologische Psychologie, 2te Aufl. Bd. ii, pp.

217-19.)

[262] The only exception I know of is M. J. Souriau, in his important

article in the Revue Philosophique, vol. xxi, p. 449. M. Souriau's

conclusion is 'que la conscience n'existe pas' (p. 472).

[263] See the excellent remarks by Prof. Bain on the 'Emotion of Power'

in his 'Emotions and the Will.'

[264] Cf. Carlyle: _Sartor Resartus_, 'The Everlasting Yea.' "I tell

thee, blockhead, it all comes of thy vanity; of what thou fanciest

those same deserts of thine to be. Fancy that thou deservest to be

hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only

shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair halter, it will

be a luxury to die in hemp.... What act of legislature was there that

_thou_ shouldst be happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to

_be_ at all." etc., etc.

[265] T. W. Higginson's translation (1866), p. 105.

[266] "The usual mode of lessening the shock of disappointment or

disesteem is to contract, if possible, a low estimate of the persons

that inflict it. This is our remedy for the unjust censures of party

spirit, as well as of personal malignity." (Bain: Emotion and Will, p.

209.)

[267] It must be observed that the qualities of the Self thus ideally

constituted are all qualities approved by my actual fellows in the

first instance; and that my reason for now appealing from their verdict

to that of the ideal judge lies in some outward peculiarity of the

immediate case. What once was admired in me as courage has now become

in the eyes of men 'impertinence'; what was fortitude is obstinacy;

what was fidelity is now fanaticism. The ideal judge alone, I now

believe, can read my qualities, my willingnesses, my powers, for what

they truly are. My fellows, misled by interest and prejudice, have gone

astray.

[268] The _kind_ of selfishness varies with the self that is sought.

If it be the mere bodily self; if a man grabs the best food, the warm

corner, the vacant seat; if he makes room for no one, spits about, and

belches in our faces,--we call it hoggishness. If it be the social

self, in the form of popularity or influence, for which he is greedy,

he may in material ways subordinate himself to others as the best means

to his end; and in this case he is very apt to pass for a disinterested

man. If it be the 'other-worldly' self which he seeks, and if he seeks

it ascetically,--even though he would rather see all mankind damned

eternally than lose his individual soul,--'saintliness' will probably

be the name by which his selfishness will be called.

[269] Lotze, Med. Psych. 498-501; Microcosmos, bk. ii, chap. v, §§ 3, 4.

[270] Psychologische Analysen auf Physiologischer Grundlage. Theil ii,

2te Hälfte, § 11. The whole section ought to be read.

[271] Professor Bain, in his chapter on 'Emotions of Self,' does scant

justice to the primitive nature of a large part of our self-feeling,

and seems to reduce it to reflective self-estimation of this sober

intellectual sort, which certainly _most_ of it is not. He says that

when the attention is turned inward upon self as a Personality, "we

are putting forth towards ourselves the kind of exercise that properly

accompanies our contemplation of other persons. We are accustomed to

scrutinize the actions and conduct of those about us, to set a higher

_value_ upon one man than upon another, by comparing the two; to _pity_

one in distress; to feel _complacency_ towards a particular individual;

to _congratulate_ a man on some good fortune that it pleases us to see

him gain; to _admire_ greatness or excellence as displayed by any of

our fellows. All these exercises are intrinsically social, like Love

and Resentment; an isolated individual could never attain to them, nor

exercise them. By what means, then, through what fiction [!] can we

turn round and play them off upon self? Or how comes it that we obtain

any satisfaction by putting self in the place of the other party?

Perhaps the simplest form of the reflected act is that expressed by

Self-worth and Self-estimation, based and begun upon observation of

the ways and conduct of our fellow-beings. We soon make comparisons

among the individuals about us; we see that one is stronger and does

more work than another, and, in consequence perhaps, receives more

pay. We see one putting forth perhaps more kindness than another, and

in consequence receiving more love. We see some individuals surpassing

the rest in astonishing feats, and drawing after them the gaze and

admiration of a crowd. We acquire a series of fixed associations

towards persons so situated; favorable in the case of the superior, and

unfavorable to the inferior. To the strong and laborious man we attach

an estimate of greater reward, and feel that to be in his place would

be a happier lot than falls to others. Desiring, as we do, from the

primary motives of our being, to possess good things, and observing

these to come by a man's superior exertions, we feel a respect for

such exertion and a wish that it might be ours. We know that we also

put forth exertions for our share of good things; and on witnessing

others, we are apt to be reminded of ourselves and to make comparisons

with ourselves, which comparisons derive their interest from the

substantial consequences. Having thus once learned to look at other

persons as performing labors, greater or less, and as realizing fruits

to accord; being, moreover, in all respects like our fellows,--we

find it an exercise neither difficult nor unmeaning to contemplate

self as doing work and receiving the reward.... As we decide between

one man and another,--which is worthier,... so we decide between self

and all other men; being, however, in this decision under the bias of

our own desires." A couple of pages farther on we read: "By the terms

Self-complacency. Self-gratulation, is indicated a positive enjoyment

in dwelling upon our own merits and belongings. As in other modes, so

here, the starting point is the contemplation of excellence or pleasing

qualities _in another person_, accompanied more or less with fondness

or love." Self-pity is also regarded by Professor Bain, in this place,

as an emotion diverted to ourselves from a more immediate object, "in

a manner that we may term fictitious and unreal. Still, as we can view

self in the light of another person, we can feel towards it the emotion

of pity called forth by others in our situation."

This account of Professor Bain's is, it will be observed, a good

specimen of the old-fashioned mode of explaining the several emotions

as rapid calculations of results, and the transfer of feeling from one

object to another, associated by contiguity or similarity with the

first. Zoological evolutionism, which came up since Professor Bain

first wrote, has made us see, on the contrary, that many emotions must

be _primitively_ aroused by special objects. None are more worthy

of being ranked primitive than the self-gratulation and humiliation

attendant on our own successes and failures in the main functions of

life. We need no borrowed reflection for these feelings. Professor

Bain's account applies to but that small fraction of our self-feeling

which reflective criticism can add to, or subtract from, the total

mass.--Lotze has some pages on the modifications of our self-regard by

universal judgments, in Microcosmus, book v, chap. v, § 5.

[272] "Also nur dadurch, dass ich ein Mannigfaltiges gegehener

Vorstellungen in _einem Bewusstsein_ verbinden kann, ist es möglich

dass ich die _Identität des Bewusstseins_ in diesen _Vorstellungen_

selbst vorstelle, d. h. die analytische Einheit der Apperception ist

nur unter der Voraussetzung irgend einer synthetischen möglich." In

this passage (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2te Aufl. § 16) Kant calls

by the names of analytic and synthetic apperception what we here mean

by objective and subjective synthesis respectively. It were much to

be desired that some one might invent a good pair of terms in which

to record the distinction--those used in the text are certainly very

bad, but Kant's seem to me still worse. 'Categorical unity' and

'transcendental synthesis' would also be good Kantian, but hardly good

human, speech.

[273] So that we might say, by a sort of bad pun, "only a connected

world can be known as disconnected." I say bad pun, because the point

of view shifts between the connectedness and the disconnectedness. The

disconnectedness is of the realities known; the connectedness is of

the knowledge of them; and reality and knowledge of it are, from the

psychological point of view held fast to in these pages, two different

facts.

[274] Some subtle reader will object that the Thought cannot call any

part of its Object 'I' and knit other parts on to it, without first

knitting that part on to _Itself_; and that it cannot knit it on to

Itself without knowing Itself;--so that our supposition (above, p.

304) that the Thought may conceivably have no immediate knowledge of

Itself is thus overthrown. To which the reply is that we must take

care not to be duped by words. The words _I_ and _me_ signify nothing

mysterious and unexampled--they are at bottom only names of _emphasis_;

and Thought is always emphasizing something. Within a tract of space

which it cognizes, it contrasts a _here_ with a _there_; within a

tract of time a _now_ with a _then_; of a pair of things it calls one

_this_, the other _that_. I and _thou_, I and _it_, are distinctions

exactly on a par with these,--distinctions possible in an exclusively

_objective_ field of knowledge, the 'I' meaning for the Thought nothing

but the bodily life which it momentarily feels. The sense of my bodily

existence, however obscurely recognized as such, _may_ then be the

absolute original of my conscious selfhood, the fundamental perception

that _I am_. All appropriations _may_ be made _to_ it, _by_ a Thought

not at the moment immediately cognized by itself. Whether these are

not only logical possibilities but actual facts is something not yet

dogmatically decided in the text.

[275] Metaphysik, § 245 _fin_. This writer, who in his early work, the

Medizinische Psychologie, was (to my reading) a strong defender of the

Soul-Substance theory, has written in §§ 243-5 of his Metaphysik the

most beautiful criticism of this theory which exists.

[276] On the empirical and transcendental conceptions of the self's

unity, see Lotze, Metaphysic, § 244.

[277] Appendix to book i of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature.

[278] Herbart believed in the Soul, too; but for him the 'Self' of

which we are 'conscious' is the empirical Self--not the soul.

[279] Compare again the remarks on pp. 158-162 above.

[280] System of Psychology (1884). vol. i, p. 114.

[281] 'Distinct only to _observation_,' he adds. To whose observation?

the outside psychologist's, the Ego's, their own, or the plank's?

_Darauf kommt es an!_

[282] Analysis, etc., J. S. Mill's Edition, vol. i, p. 331. The 'as it

were' is delightfully characteristic of the school.

[283] J. Mill's Analysis, vol. ii, p. 175.

[284] Examination of Hamilton. 4th ed. p. 263.

[285] His chapter on the Psychological Theory of Mind is a beautiful

case in point, and his concessions there have become so celebrated

that they must be quoted for the reader's benefit. He ends the chapter

with these words (_loc. cit._ p. 247): "The theory, therefore,

which resolves Mind into a series of feelings, with a background of

possibilities of feeling, can effectually withstand the most invidious

of the arguments directed against it. But groundless as are the

extrinsic objections, the theory has intrinsic difficulties which

we have not set forth, and which it seems to me beyond the power of

metaphysical analysis to remove....

"The thread of consciousness which composes the mind's phenomenal

life consist not only of present sensations, but likewise, in part,

of memories and expectations. Now what are these? In themselves,

they are present feelings, states of present consciousness, and in

that respect not distinguished from sensations. They all, moreover,

resemble some given sensations or feelings, of which we have previously

had experience. But they are attended with the peculiarity that each

of them involves a belief in more than its own present existence. A

sensation involves only this; but a remembrance of sensation, even if

not referred to any particular date, involves the suggestion and belief

that a sensation, of which it is a copy or representation, actually

existed in the past; and an expectation involves the belief, more or

less positive, that a sensation or other feeling to which it directly

refers will exist in the future. Nor can the phenomena involved in

these two states of consciousness be adequately expressed, without

saying that the belief they include is, that I myself formerly had,

or that I myself, and no other, shall hereafter have, the sensations

remembered or expected. The fact believed is, that the sensations did

actually form, or will hereafter form, part of the self-same series

of states, or thread of consciousness, of which the remembrance or

expectation of those sensations is the part now present. If, therefore,

we speak of the mind as a series of feelings we are obliged to complete

the statement by calling it a series of feelings which is aware of

itself as past and future; and we are reduced to the alternative of

believing that the mind, or Ego, is something different from any series

of feelings, or possibilities of them, or of accepting the paradox that

something which _ex hypothesi_ is but a series of feelings, can be

aware of itself as a series.

"The truth is, that we are here face to face with that final

inexplicability, at which, as Sir W. Hamilton observes, we inevitably

arrive when we reach ultimate facts; and in general, one mode of

stating it only appears more incomprehensible than another, because

the whole of human language is accommodated to the one, and is so

incongruous with the other that it cannot be expressed in any terms

which do not deny its truth. The real stumbling-block is perhaps

not in any theory of the fact, but in the fact itself. The true

incomprehensibility perhaps is, that something which has ceased, or is

not yet in existence, can still be, in a manner, present; that a series

of feelings, the infinitely greater part of which is past or future,

can be gathered up, as it were, into a simple present conception,

accompanied by a belief of reality. I think by far the wisest thing we

can do is to accept the inexplicable fact, without any theory of how

it takes place; and when we are obliged to speak of it in terms which

assume a theory, to use them with a reservation as to their meaning."

In a later place in the same book (p. 561) Mill, speaking of what may

rightly be demanded of a theorist, says: "He is not entitled to frame

a theory from one class of phenomena, extend it to another class which

it does not fit, and excuse himself by saying that if we cannot make

it fit, it is because ultimate facts are inexplicable." The class of

phenomena which the associationist school takes to frame its theory

of the Ego are feelings unaware of each other. The class of phenomena

the Ego presents are feelings of which the later ones are intensely

aware of those that went before. The two classes do not 'fit,' and no

exercise of ingenuity can ever make them fit. No _shuffling_ of unaware

feelings can make them aware. To get the awareness we must openly beg

it by postulating a new feeling which has it. This new feeling is no

'Theory' of the phenomena, but a simple statement of them; and as

such I postulate in the text the present passing Thought as a psychic

integer, with its knowledge of so much that has gone before.

[286] Kritik d. reinen Vernunft, 2te Aufl. § 17.

[287] It must be noticed, in justice to what was said above on page 274

ff., that neither Kant nor his successors anywhere discriminate between

the _presence_ of the apperceiving Ego to the combined object, and the

_awareness by_ that Ego _of_ its own presence and of its distinctness

from what it apperceives. That the Object must be known to something

which _thinks_, and that it must be known to something which _thinks

that it thinks_, are treated by them as identical necessities,--by what

logic, does not appear. Kant tries to soften the jump in the reasoning

by saying the thought _of itself_ on the part of the Ego need only

be _potential_--"the 'I think' must _be capable_ of accompanying all

other knowledge"--but a thought which is only potential is actually no

thought at all, which practically gives up the case.

[288] "As regards the soul, now, or the 'I,' the 'thinker,' the whole

drift of Kant's advance upon Hume and sensational psychology is towards

the demonstration that the subject of knowledge is an _Agent_." (G. S.

Morris, Kant's Critique, etc. (Chicago, 1882), p. 224.)

[289] "In Kant's Prolegomena," says H. Cohen,--I do not myself find

the passage,--"it is expressly said that the problem is not to show

how experience arises (ensteht), but of what it consists (besteht)."

(Kant's Theorie d. Erfahrung (1871), p. 138.)

[290] The contrast between the Monism thus reached and our own

psychological point of view can be exhibited schematically thus,

the terms in squares standing for what, for us, are the ultimate

irreducible data of psychological science, and the vincula above it

symbolizing the reductions which post-Kantian idealism performs:

Absolute Self-consciousness

Reason or

Experience.

/ \

Transcendental Ego World

/ \ / \

Psychologist Thought Thought's Object Psychologist's Reality

\ \ / /

Psychologist's Object.

These reductions account for the ubiquitousness of the 'psychologist's

fallacy (bk. ii, ch. i, p. 32) in the modern monistic writings. For

_us_ it is an unpardonable logical sin, when talking of a thought's

knowledge (either of an object or of itself), to change the terms

without warning, and, substituting the psychologist's knowledge

therefor, still make as if we were continuing to talk of the same

thing. For monistic idealism, this is the very enfranchisement of

philosophy, and of course cannot be too much indulged in.

[291] T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, §§ 57, 61, 64.

[292] _Loc. cit._ § 64.

[293] E. Caird: Hegel (1883), p. 149.

[294] One is almost tempted to believe that the pantomime-state of mind

and that of the Hegelian dialectics are, emotionally considered, one

and the same thing. In the pantomime all common things are represented

to happen in impossible ways, people jump down each other's throats,

houses turn inside out, old women become young men, everything 'passes

into its opposite' with inconceivable celerity and skill; and this, so

far from producing perplexity, brings rapture to the beholder's mind.

And so in the Hegelian logic, relations elsewhere recognized under

the insipid name of distinctions (such as that between knower and

object, many and one) must first be translated into impossibilities and

contradictions, then 'transcended' and identified by miracle, ere the

proper temper is induced for thoroughly enjoying the spectacle they

show.

[295] The reader will please understand that I am quite willing to

leave the hypothesis of the transcendental Ego as a substitute for the

passing Thought open to discussion on _general speculative grounds_.

Only _in this book_ I prefer to stick by the common sense assumption

that we have successive conscious states, because all psychologists

make it, and because one does not see how there can be a Psychology

written which does not postulate such thoughts as its ultimate data.

The data of all natural sciences become in turn subjects of a critical

treatment more refined than that which the sciences themselves

accord; and so it may fare in the end with our passing Thought. We

have ourselves seen (pp. 299-305) that the _sensible_ certainty of

its existence is less strong than is usually assumed. My quarrel with

the transcendental Egoists is mainly about their _grounds_ for their

belief. Did they consistently propose it as a _substitute_ for the

passing Thought, did they consistently _deny the latter's existence_,

I should respect their position more. But so far as I can understand

them, they habitually believe in the passing Thought also. They seem

even to believe in the Lockian stream of separate ideas, for the chief

glory of the Ego in their pages is always its power to 'overcome'

this separateness and unite the naturally disunited, _'synthetizing,'

'connecting,' or 'relating' the ideas together_ being used as synonyms,

by transcendentalist writers, for _knowing various objects at once_.

Not the being conscious at all, but the being conscious of _many things

together_ is held to be the difficult thing, in our psychic life, which

only the wonder-working Ego can perform. But on what slippery ground

does one get the moment one changes the definite notion of _knowing an

object_ into the altogether vague one of _uniting or synthetizing the

ideas_ of its various parts!--In the chapter on Sensation we shall come

upon all this again.

[296] "When we compare the listless inactivity of the infant,

slumbering from the moment at which he takes his milky food to the

moment at which he wakes to require it again, with the restless

energies of that mighty being which he is to become in his maturer

years, pouring truth after truth, in rapid and dazzling profusion, upon

the world, or grasping in his single hand the destiny of empires, how

few are the circumstances of resemblance which we can trace, of all

that intelligence which is afterwards to be displayed; how little more

is seen than what serves to give feeble motion to the mere machinery

of life!... Every age, if we may speak of many ages in the few years

of human life, seems to be marked with a distinct character. Each has

its peculiar objects which excite lively affections; and in each,

exertion is excited by affections, which in other periods terminate

without inducing active desire. The boy finds a world in less space

than that which bounds his visible horizon; he wanders over his range

of field and exhausts his strength in the pursuit of objects which,

in the years that follow, are seen only to be neglected; while to

him the objects that are afterwards to absorb his whole soul are

as indifferent as the objects of his present passions are destined

then to appear.... How many opportunities must every one have had of

witnessing the progress of intellectual decay, and the coldness that

steals upon the once benevolent heart! We quit our country, perhaps at

an early period of life, and after an absence of many years we return

with all the remembrances of past pleasure which grow more tender as

they approach their objects. We eagerly seek him to whose paternal

voice we have been accustomed to listen with the same reverence as

if its predictions had possessed oracular certainty,--who first led

us into knowledge, and whose image has been constantly joined in our

mind with all that veneration which does not forbid love. We find him

sunk, perhaps, in the imbecility of idiotism, unable to recognize

us,--ignorant alike of the past and of the future, and living only in

the sensibility of animal gratification. We seek the favorite companion

of our childhood, whose tenderness of heart, etc.... We find him

hardened into a man, meeting us scarcely with the cold hypocrisy of

dissembled friendship--in his general relations to the world careless

of the misery _he_ is not to feel.... When we observe all this,... do

we use only a metaphor of little meaning when we say of him that he is

become a different person, and that his mind and character are changed?

In what does the identity consist?... The supposed test of identity,

when applied to the mind in these cases, completely fails. It neither

affects, nor is affected, in the same manner in the same circumstances.

It therefore, if the test be a just one, is not the same identical

mind." (T. Brown: Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 'on

Mental Identity.')

[297] "Sir John Cutler had a pair of black worsted stockings, which

his maid darned so often with silk that they became at last a pair of

silk stockings. Now, supposing these stockings of Sir John's endued

with some degree of consciousness at every particular darning, they

would have been sensible that they were the same individual pair of

stockings both before and after the darning; and this sensation would

have continued in them through all the succession of darnings; and yet

after the last of all, there was not perhaps one thread left of the

first pair of stockings: but they were grown to be silk stockings, as

was said before." (Pope's Martinus Scriblerus, quoted by Brown, _ibid._)

[298] Hours of Work and Play, p. 100.

[299] For a careful study of the errors in narratives, see E. Gurney:

Phantasms of the Living, vol. i, pp. 126-158. In the Proceedings of

the Society for Psychical Research for May 1887 Mr. Richard Hodgson

shows by an extraordinary array of instances how utterly inaccurate

everyone's description from memory of a rapid series of events is

certain to be.

[300] See Josiah Royce (Mind, vol. 13, p. 244, and Proceedings of Am.

Soc. of Psych. Research, vol. i, p. 366), for evidence that a certain

sort of hallucination of memory which he calls 'pseudo-presentiment' is

no uncommon phenomenon.

[301] Maladies de la Mémoire, p. 85. The little that would be left

of personal consciousness if _all_ our senses stopped their work is

ingenuously shown in the remark of the extraordinary anæsthetic youth

whose case Professor Strümpell reports (in the Deutsches Archiv f.

klin. Med., xxii, 847, 1878). This boy, whom we shall later find

instructive in many connections, was totally anæsthetic without and (so

far as could be tested) within, save for the sight of one eye and the

hearing of one ear. When his eye was closed, he said: "_Wenn ich nicht

sehen kann, da_ BIN _ich gar nicht_--I no longer _am_."

[302] "One can compare the state of the patient to nothing so well as

to that of a caterpillar, which, keeping all its caterpillar's ideas

and remembrances, should suddenly become a butterfly with a butterfly's

senses and sensations. Between the old and the new state, between the

first self, that of the caterpillar, and the second self, that of

the butterfly, there is a deep scission, a complete rupture. The new

feelings find no anterior series to which they can knit themselves on;

the patient can neither interpret nor use them; he does not recognize

them; they are unknown. Hence two conclusions, the first which

consists in his saying, _I no longer am_; the second, somewhat later,

which consists in his saying, _I am another person._" (H. Taine: de

l'Intelligence, 3me édition (1878), p. 462).

[303] W. Griesinger: Mental Diseases, § 29.

[304] See the interesting case of 'old Stump' in the Proceedings of the

Am. Soc. for Psych. Research, p. 552.

[305] De l'Intelligence, 3me édition (1878), vol. ii, note, p. 461.

Krishaber's book (La Névropathie Cérébro-cardiaque, 1873) is full of

similar observations.

[306] Sudden alterations in outward fortune often produce such a

change in the empirical _me_ as almost to amount to a pathological

disturbance of self-consciousness. When a poor man draws the big prize

in a lottery, or unexpectedly inherits an estate; when a man high in

fame is publicly disgraced, a millionaire becomes a pauper, or a loving

husband and father sees his family perish at one fell swoop, there

is temporarily such a rupture between all past habits, whether of an

active or a passive kind, and the exigencies and possibilities of the

new situation, that the individual may find no medium of continuity or

association to carry him over from the one phase to the other of his

life. Under these conditions mental derangement is no unfrequent result.

[307] The number of subjects who can do this with any fertility and

exuberance is relatively quite small.

[308] First in the Revue Scientifique for May 26, 1876, then in his

book, Hypnotisme, Double Conscience, et Altérations de la Personnalité

(Paris, 1887).

[309] Der Hypnotismus (1884), pp. 109-15.

[310] Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, April

4, 1888. Also, less complete, in Harper's Magazine, May 1860.

[311] Cf. Ribot's Diseases of Memory for cases. See also a large number

of them in Forbes Winslow's Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Mind,

chapters xiii-xvii.

[312] See the interesting account by M. J. Janet in the Revue

Scientifique, May 19, 1888.

[313] Variations de la Personnalité (Paris, 1888).

[314] _Op. cit._ p. 84. In this work and in Dr. Azam's (cited on

a previous page), as well as in Prof. Th. Ribot's Maladies de la

Personnalité (1885), the reader will find information and references

relative to the other known cases of the kind.

[315] His own brother's subject Wit...., although in her anæsthetic

waking state she recollected nothing of either of her trances, yet

remembered her deeper trance (in which her sensibilities became

perfect--see above, p. 207) when she was in her lighter trance.

Nevertheless in the latter she was as anæsthetic as when awake. (_Loc.

cit._ p. 619.)--It does not appear that there was any important

difference in the sensibility of Félida X. between her two states--as

far as one can judge from M. Azam's account she was to some degree

anæsthetic in both (_op. cit._ pp. 71, 96).--In the case of double

personality reported by M. Dufay (Revue Scientifique, vol. xviii,

p. 69), the memory seems to have been best in the more anæsthetic

condition.--Hypnotic subjects made blind do not necessarily lose their

visual ideas. It appears, then, both that amnesias may occur without

anæsthesias, and anæsthesias without amnesias, though they may also

occur in combination. Hypnotic subjects made blind by suggestion will

tell you that they clearly imagine the things which they can no longer

see.

[316] A full account of the case, by Mr. R. Hodgson, will be found in

the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research for 1891.

[317] He had spent an afternoon in Boston, a night in New York, an

afternoon in Newark, and ten days or more in Philadelphia, first

in a certain hotel and next in a certain boarding-house, making

no acquaintances, 'resting,' reading, and 'looking round.' I have

unfortunately been unable to get independent corroboration of these

details, as the hotel registers are destroyed, and the boarding-house

named by him has been pulled down. He forgets the name of the two

ladies who kept it.

[318] The details of the case, it will be seen, are all _compatible_

with simulation. I can only say of that, that no one who has examined

Mr. Bourne (including Dr. Read, Dr. Weir Mitchell, Dr. Guy Hinsdale,

and Mr. R. Hodgson) practically doubts his ingrained honesty, nor, so

far as I can discover, do any of his personal acquaintances indulge in

a sceptical view.

[319] The Watseka Wonder, by E. W. Stevens. Chicago,

Religio-Philosophical Publishing House, 1887.

[320] My friend Mr. R. Hodgson informs me that he visited Watseka in

April 1890, and cross-examined the principal witnesses of this case.

His confidence in the original narrative was strengthened by what

he learned; and various unpublished facts were ascertained, which

increased the plausibility of the spiritualistic interpretation of the

phenomenon.

[321] See his highly important series of articles on Automatic Writing,

etc., in the Proceedings of the Soc. for Psych. Research, especially

Article ii (May 1885). Compare also Dr. Maudsley's instructive article

in Mind, vol. xiv, p. 161, and Luys's essay, 'Sur le Dédoublement,'

etc., in l'Encéphale for 1889.

CHAPTER XI.

ATTENTION.

Strange to say, so patent a fact as the perpetual presence of selective

attention has received hardly any notice from psychologists of the

English empiricist school. The Germans have explicitly treated of it,

either as a faculty or as a resultant, but in the pages of such writers

as Locke, Hume, Hartley, the Mills, and Spencer the word hardly occurs,

or if it does so, it is parenthetically and as if by inadvertence.[322]

The motive of this ignoring of the phenomenon of attention is obvious

enough. These writers are bent on showing how the higher faculties of

the mind are pure products of 'experience;' and experience is supposed

to be of something simply _given_. Attention, implying a degree of

reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through the circle of pure

receptivity which constitutes 'experience,' and hence must not be

spoken of under penalty of interfering with the smoothness of the tale.

But the moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how false a notion

of experience that is which would make it tantamount to the mere

presence to the senses of an outward order. Millions of items of the

outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter

into my experience. Why? Because they have no _interest_ for me. _My

experience is what I agree to attend to._ Only those items which I

_notice_ shape my mind--without selective interest, experience is

an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and

shade, background and foreground--intelligible perspective, in a word.

It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of

every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible

for us even to conceive. Such an empiricist writer as Mr. Spencer,

for example, regards the creature as absolutely passive clay, upon

which 'experience' rains down. The clay will be impressed most deeply

where the drops fall thickest, and so the final shape of the mind

is moulded. Give time enough, and all sentient things ought, at

this rate, to end by assuming an identical mental constitution--for

'experience,' the sole shaper, is a constant fact, and the order of

its items must end by being exactly reflected by the passive mirror

which we call the sentient organism. If such an account were true, a

race of dogs bred for generations, say in the Vatican, with characters

of visual shape, sculptured in marble, presented to their eyes, in

every variety of form and combination, ought to discriminate before

long the finest shades of these peculiar characters. In a word, they

ought to become, if time were given, accomplished _connoisseurs_ of

sculpture. Anyone may judge of the probability of this consummation.

Surely an eternity of experience of the statues would leave the dog as

inartistic as he was at first, for the lack of an original interest to

knit his discriminations on to. Meanwhile the odors at the bases of

the pedestals would have organized themselves in the consciousness of

this breed of dogs into a system of 'correspondences' to which the most

hereditary caste of _custodi_ would never approximate, merely because

to them, as human beings, the dog's interest in those smells would

for ever be an inscrutable mystery. These writers have, then, utterly

ignored the glaring fact that subjective interest may, by laying its

weighty index-finger on particular items of experience, so accent them

as to give to the least frequent associations far more power to shape

our thought than the most frequent ones possess. The interest itself,

though its genesis is doubtless perfectly _natural, makes_ experience

more than it is made by it.

* * * * *

Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by

the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several

simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization,

concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies

withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others,

and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed,

scatter-brained state which in French is called _distraction_, and

_Zerstreutheit_ in German.

We all know this latter state, even in its extreme degree. Most people

probably fall several times a day into a fit of something like this:

The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into

confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is

felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is

filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to

the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know

meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves,

answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next

step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot _start_; the _pensée de

derrière la tête_ fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our

state about. Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know

no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after

pulse, and we float with it, until--also without reason that we can

discover--an energy is given, something--we know not what--enables us

to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads,

the background-ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round

again.

This curious state of inhibition can for a few moments be produced at

will by fixing the eyes on vacancy. Some persons can voluntarily empty

their minds and 'think of nothing.' With many, as Professor Exner

remarks of himself, this is the most efficacious means of falling

asleep. It is difficult not to suppose something like this scattered

condition of mind to be the usual state of brutes when not actively

engaged in some pursuit. Fatigue, monotonous mechanical occupations

that end by being automatically carried on, tend to produce it in men.

It is not sleep; and yet when aroused from such a state, a person

will often hardly be able to say what he has been thinking about

Subjects of the hypnotic trance seem to lapse into it when left to

themselves; asked what they are thinking of, they reply, 'of nothing

particular'![323]

The abolition of this condition is what we call the awakening of

the attention. One principal object comes then into the focus of

consciousness, others are temporarily suppressed. The awakening

may come about either by reason of a stimulus from without, or in

consequence of some unknown inner alteration; and the change it

brings with it amounts to a concentration upon one single object with

exclusion of aught besides, or to a condition anywhere between this and

the completely dispersed state.

TO HOW MANY THINGS CAN WE ATTEND AT ONCE?

The question of _the 'span' of consciousness_ has often been asked and

answered--sometimes _a priori_, sometimes by experiment. This seems the

proper place for us to touch upon it; and our answer, according to the

principles laid down in Chapter IX, will not be difficult. The number

of _things_ we may attend to is altogether indefinite, depending on the

power of the individual intellect, on the form of the apprehension, and

on what the things are. When apprehended conceptually as a connected

system, their number may be very large. But however numerous the

things, they can only be known in a single pulse of consciousness for

which they form one complex 'object' (p. 276 ff.), so that properly

speaking there is before the mind at no time a plurality of _ideas_,

properly so called.

The 'unity of the soul' has been supposed by many philosophers, who

also believed in the distinct atomic nature of 'ideas,' to preclude the

presence to it of more than one objective fact, manifested in one idea,

at a time. Even Dugald Stuart opines that every _minimum visibile_ of a

pictured figure

"constitutes just as distinct an object of attention to the mind as if

it were separated by an interval of empty space from the rest.... It

is impossible for the mind to attend to more than one of these points

at once; and as the perception of the figure implies a knowledge of

the relative situation of the different points with respect to each

other, we must conclude that the perception of figure by the eye is

the result of a number of different acts of attention. These acts

of attention, however, are performed with such rapidity, that the

effect, with respect to us, is the same as if the perception were

instantaneous."[324]

Such glaringly artificial views can only come from fantastic

metaphysics or from the ambiguity of the word 'idea,' which, standing

sometimes for mental state and sometimes for thing known, leads men to

ascribe to the thing, not only the unity which belongs to the mental

state, but even the simplicity which is thought to reside in the Soul.

When the things are apprehended by the _senses_, the number of them

that can be attended to at once is small, "_Pluribus intentus, minor

est ad singula sensus_."

"By Charles Bonnet the Mind is allowed to have a distinct notion

of six objects at once; by Abraham Tucker the number is limited to

four; while Destutt Tracy again amplifies it to six. The opinion

of the first and last of these philosophers" [continues Sir Wm.

Hamilton] "seems to me correct. You can easily make the experiments

for yourselves, but you must beware of grouping the objects into

classes. If you throw a handful of marbles on the floor, you will find

it difficult to view at once more than six, or seven at most, without

confusion; but if you group them into twos, or threes, or fives, you

can comprehend as many groups as you can units; because the mind

considers these groups only as units--it views them as wholes, and

throws their parts out of consideration."[325]

Professor Jevons, repeating this observation, by counting

instantaneously beans thrown into a box, found that the number 6

was guessed correctly 120 times out of 147, 5 correctly 102 times

out of 107, and 4 and 3 always right.[326] It is obvious that such

observations decide nothing at all about our attention, properly

so called. They rather measure in part the distinctness of our

vision--especially of the primary-memory-image[327]--in part the amount

of association in the individual between seen arrangements and the

names of numbers.[328]

Each number-name is a way of grasping the beans as one total object.

In such a total object, all the parts converge harmoniously to the one

resultant concept; no single bean has special discrepant associations

of its own; and so, with _practice_, they may grow quite numerous ere

we fail to estimate them aright. But where the 'object' before us

breaks into parts disconnected with each other, and forming each as it

were a separate object or system, not conceivable in union with the

rest, it becomes harder to apprehend all these parts at once, and the

mind tends to let go of one whilst it attends to another. Still, within

limits this can be done. M. Paulhan has experimented carefully on the

matter by declaiming one poem aloud whilst he repeated a different one

mentally, or by writing one sentence whilst speaking another, or by

performing calculations on paper whilst reciting poetry.[329] He found

that

"the most favorable condition for the doubling of the mind was its

simultaneous application to two easy and heterogeneous operations. Two

operations of the same sort, two multiplications, two recitations, or

the reciting one poem and writing another, render the process more

uncertain and difficult."

The attention often, but not always, oscillates during these

performances; and sometimes a word from one part of the task slips

into another. I myself find when I try to simultaneously recite one

thing and write another that the beginning of each word or segment of

a phrase is what requires the attention. Once started, my pen runs on

for a word or two as if by its own momentum. M. Paulhan compared the

time occupied by the same two operations done simultaneously or in

succession, and found that there was often a considerable gain of time

from doing them simultaneously. For instance:

"I write the first four verses of Athalie, whilst reciting eleven of

Musset. The whole performance occupies 40 seconds. But reciting alone

takes 22 and writing alone 31, or 53 altogether, so that there is a

difference in favor of the simultaneous operations."

Or again:

"I multiply 421 312 212 by 2; the operation takes 6 seconds; the

recitation of 4 verses also takes 6 seconds. But the two operations

done at once only take 6 seconds, so that there is no loss of time

from combining them."

Of course these time-measurements lack precision. With three systems of

object (writing with _each_ hand whilst reciting) the operation became

much more difficult.

If, then, by the original question, how many ideas or things can we

attend to at once, be meant how many entirely disconnected systems or

processes of conception can go on simultaneously, the answer is, _not

easily more than one, unless the processes are very habitual; but then

two, or even three,_ without very much oscillation of the attention.

Where, however, the processes are less automatic, as in the story of

Julius Cæsar dictating four letters whilst he writes a fifth,[330]

there must be a rapid oscillation of the mind from one to the next, and

no consequent gain of time. Within any one of the systems the parts may

be numberless, but we attend to them collectively when we conceive the

whole which they form.

* * * * *

When the things to be attended to are small sensations, and when the

effort is to be exact in noting them, it is found that attention to one

interferes a good deal with the perception of the other. A good deal

of fine work has been done in this field, of which I must give some

account.

It has long been noticed, when expectant attention is concentrated

upon one of two sensations, that the other one is apt to be displaced

from consciousness for a moment and to appear subsequent; although in

reality the two may have been contemporaneous events. Thus, to use

the stock example of the books, the surgeon would sometimes see the

blood flow from the arm of the patient whom he was bleeding, _before_

he saw the instrument penetrate the skin. Similarly the smith may see

the sparks fly _before_ he sees the hammer smite the iron, etc. There

is thus a certain difficulty in perceiving the exact _date_ of two

impressions when they do not interest our attention equally, and when

they are of a disparate sort.