Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/514

 THE PHYSICAL CONDITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 501 his thought followed the established order of our trains of thought, and are therefore easily reproduced by us : the corresponding neurotic plexuses have discharged the same function, the formed patterns of them being the same. Listen, however, for a minute to the entirely incoherent talk of a voluble lunatic, it is utterly impossible immediately afterwards to bring to mind what he said. Why ? Because it is utterly impossible to reproduce or repeat in our brains, with their definitely organised neurotic patterns, the rapid succession of disordered ideas in their disorderly succession which went on in his brain impossible, that is, to re-collect them : trains of association will not enable us to do that, because the reproduction of the incoherence is the disinte- gration of such organised trains, and therefore incompatible with their helpful action. His mad whirl of words produced its proper consciousness at the time, but we can no more reproduce that consciousness than we can commonly re- member a complicated dream a few hours after it is past, or than we can remember exactly a pain. Most persons think they can remember a pain because they can remember the historical fact that they had it ; but to remember it really, to revive the pain as it was felt, it would be necessary to reproduce in greater or less degree the disorganisation which was the condition of it in fact, to have it again. It is a common experience that when we have intended to do some act, it may be a trivial one, and have forgotten what it was, we feel an obscure mental disquiet or dis- comfort, a sort of uneasy sense of want, which is eased immediately we remember what the intended act was. In such case there must be a subdued mental activity below the level of consciousness, a sub-conscious or infra-conscious tremor, which occasions the feeling of vague discomfort ; for it would seem impossible that there could be any such feeling were there not motion of some sort. Motion there is probably, but not of such degree of activity as to awaken consciousness, to make an induction of activity in related parts. How then to do in order to remember? How to raise the infra-conscious to the conscious ? How, in fact, to induce the required synergy or coaction of parts ? Now it is a well-known mental law of association that those states which have occurred once together or followed im- mediately are prone to occur together again or to follow one another immediately. In accordance with this principle we find the most helpful way to recall the forgotten intention is to go back to the act we were doing perhaps an essentially unrelated one when the intention came into our