Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/249

229 TEE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 229 Beneath these tracts of thought, which, however rudi- mentary, are still organized selves with a memory, habits, and sense of their own identity, M. Janet thinks that the facts of catalepsy in hysteric patients drive us to suppose that there are thoughts quite unorganized and impersonal. A patient in cataleptic trance (which can be produced arti- ficially in certain hypnotized subjects) is without memory on waking, and seems insensible and unconscious as long as the cataleptic condition lasts. If, however, one raises the arm of such a subject it stays in that position, and the whole body can thus be moulded like wax under the hands of the operator, retaining for a considerable time whatever attitude he communicates to it. In hysterics whose arm, for example, is anaesthetic, the same thing may happen. The anaesthetic arm may remain passively in positions which it is made to assume ; or if the hand be taken and made to hold a pencil and trace a certain letter, it will continue tracing that letter indefinitely on the paper. These acts, until recently, were supposed to be accompanied by no consciousness at all : they were physiological refiexes. M. Janet considers with much more plausibility that feeling escorts them. The feeling is probably merely that of the position or movement of the limb, and it produces no more than its natural effects when it discharges into the motor centres which keep the position maintained, or the movement incessantly renewed.* Such thoughts as these, says M. Janet, " are known by no one, for disaggregated sensations reduced to a state of mental dust are not synthetized in any personality." f He admits, however, that these very same unutterably stupid thoughts tend to develop memory, — the cataleptic ere long moves her arm at a bare hint ; so that they form no important exception to the law that all thought tends to assume the form of personal conscious- ness. 2) Thought is in Constant Change. I do not mean necessarily that no one state of mind has any duration — even if true, that would be hard to establisL Loe. cit. p. 316.
 * For the Physiology of this compare the chapter ou the Will.