Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/492

 480 EDMUND GUBNEY : simply because it is taking its own path unsolicited from moment to moment by new sensory impressions, seems very misleading. ' Automatism,' if it is to serve Dr. Carpenter's purpose and to embrace hypnotic facts, must mean some- thing quite distinct from spontaneous and unsolicited origi- nation of ideas ; it must mean nothing less than temporary paralysis of the directive power of the will ; and there is nothing to warrant the assumption of this paralysis in the fact that the mind's action for the moment is unimpeded and effortless. But even if we waive this objection and extend the mean- ing of ' automatism ' to cover what is properly expressed by spontaneity, the automatism in the described condition of the poet and that displayed by the absent-minded mathematician are surely so far from identity that they present an absolute contrast. The spontaneity or ' automatism ' of the poetic day-dreamer, in the sense of a free and aimless play of mind, belongs to the essence of his activity ; so far as it is a correct description at all, it is a description covering the whole ground of what his mind is doing. The mathemati- cian's mental activity, on the other hand, is just exactly not free and aimless, and just exactly not automatic. It is the most conscious and strenuously-directed effort, concen- trated on successive points in an argument which it may require all the strength of his will to stick to and grapple with ; and any automatism that he may display is a mere accident of this state, showing itself if external demands happen to solicit an attention which is already irresistibly set in one particular channel. The condition described as ' automatic ' in the case of the poet is charged with con- sciousness, which may be of the most vital and delightful kind ; it is, in fact, itself the stream of consciousness in a particular aspect i.e., winding hither and thither in a roving and easy way. The automatism of the mathematician who does or says odd things while solving a problem, is essentially remote from the stream of his consciousness ; that is engrossed with other things, and his automatic sayings and doings are distinctly reflex actions, the result of sug- gestions which may never reach even the threshold of con- scious perception. Having thus observed the total dissimilarity, or rather opposition, of the two mental states whose fundamental characteristics Dr. Carpenter treats as identical, we shall not be much surprised to find that the hypnotic state, which he goes on to identify with them in order by that means to obtain an expression for the less known in terms of the