Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/353

Rh some fashion, two lives, and the hypothesis dreamed of by Pascal is very near to being realized: "If we dreamed every night the same things, it would affect us as much as objects that we see every day; and if an artisan were sure to dream during the twelve hours of every night that he was a king, I believe that he would be almost as happy as a king who should dream for twelve hours that he was an artisan," Pascal speaks here only of dreaming, but it must not be forgotten that somnambulism is composed both of dream and reality. The somnambulist performs actions that take place in the real world; he walks, he writes, he does nearly everything that he does while awake, and is even able to speak and reply. Hence we have only to represent to ourselves somnambulism gaining more and more upon the waking condition, encroaching upon it, and at last becoming a second waking alternating with the other, and retaining only one feature of somnambulism—the loss of recollection on waking. Take the case of Felida, the celebrated subject on whom this double personality was observed for the first time. She (who I believe is still living) has two succeeding and alternating existences, in each of which she has a different character and different trains of thought; but above all remains the characteristic fact that, in the part of her life that corresponds with the former normal condition (for we can now hardly detect a difference between the two states), she does not recollect from her other existence, while in the latter she often remembers from the former. From this we have the expressions secondary condition applied to the second waking, and primary condition applied to the first waking, or original normal state. There are then two selves superposed in a fashion and alternating with one another. If at any moment the memory should disappear from the former state, the rupture would be absolute, and we should be in the situation imagined by Leibnitz : "If we could suppose that two separate, distinct, and incommunicable consciousnesses were acting by turns in the same body, the one during the day and the other during the night, I ask if, in such a case, the man of the day and the man of the night would not be two persons as distinct as Socrates and Plato?"

To the phenomena of succession, are added those of simultaneous doubling of the personality. M. Taine cites an example of this in his work on "Intelligence," from the observations of Dr. Krishaben. A patient had lost the consciousness of his own existence, and had afterward reached the feeling that he was some other one than himself. "It seemed to me," he said, speaking of his first state, "that I was no longer of this world, that I no longer existed; but I had not then the feeling of being another." Of the