Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/229

209 THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 209 experience an hallucination after waking, will wlien the time comes, obey the command. How is the command regis- tered ? How is its performance so accurately timed ? These problems were long a mystery, for the primary per- sonality remembers nothing of the trance or the suggestion, and will often trump up an improvised pretext for yielding to the unaccountable impulse which possesses the man so suddenly and which he cannot resist. Edmund Gurney was the first to discover, by means of automatic writing, that the secondary self is awake, keeping its attention con- stantly fixed on the command and watching for the signal of its execution. Certain trance-subjects who were also automatic writers, when roused from trance and put to the planchette, — not knowing then what they wrote, and having their upper attention fully engrossed by reading aloud, talk- ing, or solving problems in mental arithmetic, — would in. scribe the orders which they had received, together with notes relative to the time elapsed and the time yet to run before the execution. * It is therefore to no ' automatism ' in the mechanical sense that such acts are due : a self pre- sides over them, a split-off, limited and buried, but yet a fully conscious, self. More than this, the buried self often comes to the surface and drives out the other self whilst the acts are performing. In other words, the subject lapses into trance again when the moment arrives for exe- cution, and has no subsequent recollection of the act which he has done. Gurney and Beaunis established this fact, which has since been verified on a large scale ; and Gurney also showed that the patient became suggestible again during the brief time of the performance. M. Janet's observa- tions, in their turn, well illustrate the phenomenon. "I tell Lucie to keep her arms raised after she shall have awakened. Hardly is she in the normal state, when up go her arms above her head, but she pays no attention to them. She goes, comes, converses, holding her arms high in the air. If asked what her arms are doing, she is surprised at such a question, and says very sincerely: 'My hands are doing nothing; they are just like yours.' ... I com- 268 ff.
 * Proceediugs of the (London) Soc. for Psych. Research, May 1887, p