Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/718

698  of external force, answers to the conclusion drawn that space-ideas are built out of experiences of resistant positions, the relations among which are measured by sensations of muscular effort. Further, there is meaning in the fact that a vague sense of relative position within the body survived; since we concluded that by mutual exploration there is gained that knowledge of the relations among the parts of the body which gives measures through which the developed knowledge of surrounding space is reached. Once more we get evidence that the ego admits of being progressively shorn of its higher components, until finally the sensations produced by the beating of the heart remain alone to constitute the conscious self: showing, in the first place, that the conscious self, at any moment, is really compounded of all the states of consciousness, presentative and representative, then existing, and showing, in the second place, that it admits of being simplified so far as to lose most of the elements composing the consciousness of corporeal existence. Whence it is inferable that self-consciousness begins as a mere rudiment consisting of present sensations, without past or future. Lastly, we have the striking testimony that there exists a form of consciousness lower than that which the lowest kind of thought shows us. The simplest intellectual act implies the knowing something as such or such—implies the consciousness of it as like something previously experienced, or, otherwise, as belonging to a certain class of experiences. But we here get evidence of a stage so low that a received impression remains in consciousness unclassed: there is a passive reception of it, and an absence of the activity required to know it as such or such.



Y hallucination is meant, in scientific phraseology, such a false perception of one or other of the senses as a person has when he sees, hears, or otherwise perceives as real what has no outward existence—that is to say, has no existence outside his own mind, is entirely subjective. The subject is one which has special medical interest; but it will be seen to have also a large general interest, when it is remembered how momentous a part hallucinations have played sometimes at critical periods of human history. Take, for example, the mighty work which was done in the deliverance of France from English dominion by a peasant-girl of eighteen—Joan of Arc, the famous Maid of Orleans, who was inspired to her mission by the vision which she saw, and the commands which she heard, of St. Michael and other holy persons. Now, as there are few persons nowadays who believe that St. Michael 