Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/844

820 this state and bring him gently to a consciousness of his true situation, but he soon fell into a convulsive attack and passed out of it.

I have no comments to make upon the reported efficacy of magnets and other physical agents in producing these phenomena. Most neurologists maintain, I believe, that they act only through suggestion, but a few claim that they have in some cases a specific effect. I have never seen any such phenomena myself, but the evidence is strong and the field seems to me one of the most promising for psycho-physiological investigation.

Quite apart from that, there can be no doubt that this constant shifting and redistribution of the elements of Louis V's personality rest at bottom upon a physiological foundation. Especially significant is the impairment of speech, when the paralysis was transferred from the left to the right side. The right side of the body is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, and vice versa. Now, it is known that in right-handed people the organ of speech is situated upon the left side of the brain. If these phenomena were wholly dependent upon suggestion, the patient's mental symptoms would correspond to what he thought they ought to be. But he would scarcely know that a right-sided paralysis ought to be accompanied by disorders of speech. It seems to me quite certain that in one of these states the right hemisphere was chiefly active and in the other the left; it is fair to infer that his other states depended also upon the functioning of definite portions of his brain, although one can not specify what those portions were.

Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in commenting upon this case, conjectures that possibly in all of us the right hemisphere is less highly evolved than the left, and that, "just as certain of our visceral arrangements retain the traces of our prehuman ancestry, and just as our dextro-cerebral speech centers are often stammering, childish, or wholly inefficient, so also our dextro-cerebral 'character-forming' centers—the centers which on that side of the brain sum up or represent our highest activities—may retain, in their inferior evolution, traces of that savage ancestry which forms the somber background of the refinements and felicities of civilized men."

Louis V's states, although more complex than those of Félida X and Ansel Bourne, do not differ from them in kind.

In all we have an apparent dissolution of the conscious self and the reconstruction of its elements into a new form. But one of these forms calls for special comment. In his last state Louis seemed to have fallen back into the condition in which he was