Chapter X: The Consciousness of Self (6)

[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.