Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/80

68 rise to secondary states of all kinds, such as somnambulisms and successive modifications of the self.

The very conception of disordination involves the notion that mind may exist in forms very different from those with which we are familiar. For the present I shall limit the word "consciousness" to such an orderly system as yours or mine. The disordinated condition I would describe as "amorphous mind"—what I mean by that I will try to show a little further on.

In my last paper I discussed three typical cases in which the elements of personality seemed to have recombined in new forms, but throughout that discussion I tacitly assumed that the elements which were peculiar to one system became extinct upon the formation of another. From our present point of view this is the most natural assumption, and there was, in those cases, no evidence to the contrary. But that assumption is not essential to the theory, and often seems inconsistent with the facts.

Apparent evidence for the existence of mind in connection with a body of which the consciousness belonging to that body has no knowledge is not unusual, and I have given some illustrations of it in my recent papers. But the interpretation of such phenomena is not easy.

Since our first-hand knowledge of mind is nearly always in the form of a personal consciousness or self, one is at first inclined to ascribe such manifestations to a self. But since they are denied by the normal self, it would then be necessary to assume the existence of a second self in order to account for them, and this second self is conceived by some as existing beneath the level of the normal self and as having its own memories, interests, hopes, and fears, as acquainted with the existence of the upper self, and as bearing to it a relation sometimes hostile, sometimes benignant.

Of this theory and its congeners I shall have more to say at another time; for the present I must confine myself to that which I am developing. According to it the evidence which is sufficient to establish the existence of a mental event may be and usually is wholly insufficient to establish that of a personality or self. When an automatic hand writes a message of which the upper consciousness knows nothing a point, by the way, very hard to prove—we have evidence for the existence of a mental event; but if we ascribe it to a person of any sort, we are practically adding to it, without evidence, a multitude of mental events combined in definite ways.

Yet if a personality is no more than a system of mental states organized in a certain way, why should not the elements dissociated from the upper consciousness recombine and form a