Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/354

340 second state: "I felt myself so completely changed that I seemed to have become another being. This thought imposed itself upon me without my forgetting for an instant that it was illusory." We once saw, in the asylum of Stephansfeld, near Strasburg, a patient who was in the first state and had not yet reached the second, or who had perhaps passed it and had no longer strength enough to believe himself other than himself, for, according to his fancy, he had died in the night. He said to us: "You are very happy, you other people; you have a me, I have no longer a me." He did not even perceive the contradiction, and then we reminded him that he was living, and existed as much as we did. "No," he said, "it is the external powers that sustain me and cause me to live, but not myself." The poor fellow felt that life was escaping him and held only by a thread, that it was hung to some external condition, and expressed the thought in metaphysical terms, having probably made some studies in philosophy; he had at last exteriorized his consciousness, and was very near being some one else than himself. An example occurs in Gratiolet of a patient who imagined that he was in two beds at the same time. In cases of suicidal mania, it is not rare to see the subject doubling himself and hearing voices commanding him to kill himself. He resists; he replies, making the objection and the response at the same time, but he does not believe that it is himself doing both. This is what happens also in spiritualism and in the case of writing or speaking mediums. But in all the preceding cases we perceive that, of the two personalities, one is illusory. A case is presented of optical illusion of the consciousness as there is an optical illusion of the senses; a false interpretation of the phenomena of consciousness, which refutes itself. In the recent experiments in provoked somnambulism, however, we have come to the point of separating distinctly two consciousnesses, one of which seems to be as real as the other. A person converses with you while he is writing a letter, or making a complicated calculation, one of the two personalities not knowing what the other is doing, but each being aware of what itself is doing. This is the most advanced and at the same time the most obscure point of the question.

These are the principal facts with which psycho-physiological science occupies itself. There are many others which it would be tedious to recite; the law of association between ideas and motions, the unconscious motions, the theory of which M. Chevreul began in his work on turning tables; the theory of physiognomy, of which Duchesne de Boulogne has established the physiological basis, and from which Gratiolet and Darwin have drawn psychological results; researches on memory, the theory of hallucination, and