Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/513

 500 H. MAUDSLEY : perhaps actual vertigo ; the suddenly-produced numbness of a part of the body, even if it be of a finger only, occasions a singular embarrassment and sense of incompleteness of self for a time, accompanied by a difficulty in realising one's personality and its relations, because it cuts off a part of our habitual, although unconscious, hold on the environment ; a strong agitating emotion completely incapacitates any one from apprehending external objects, making him walk about among persons and things as if in a dream, because its internal commotion renders impossible his habitual motor adjustments. In all such cases there is functional disinte- gration of the framed neurotic patterns of habitual percep- tions and acts. When its habitual relations with the not-self are maimed, the self is lamed and incomplete. in. Without doubt the same tract of the brain is in action in the performance of a particular perception and in the memory of it ; and therefore there is the same kind of con- sciousness when there is consciousness. To revive that consciousness in any instance it is necessary to repeat more or less strongly the original function we cannot remember a perception without including the motor element which enters into its original composition. In regard of sight and hearing it is notably much easier to reproduce the reflex act of perception, and so to conceive in memory what we have experienced, than it is in regard of a smell or a taste ; the motor adjustments that accompany these latter experiences are not cultivated in man (it is different in some animals) definitely and persistently, and do not therefore enter into his intellectual structure as those of sight and sound do, either because they are not needed or because they lie nearer the organic life and are incapable of such cultivation. What- ever the cause, the result is that they are not available for conception : we cannot remember a smell or a taste in the realising way in which we remember what we have seen ; we can remember that we had such an experience, but we are obliged to make use of other sense-activities, especially that of sight, when we attempt to conceive a smell or a taste that is, to reproduce its consciousness ; and even then we do not obtain a vivid and definite success. From smell and taste alone, uncultivated as they are in us, we should hardly know that there was an external world. When a person talks rationally to us for a minute we go away and can recall to mind what he said ; the trains of