68 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 " con- 

 sciousness" 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 illustra- 

 tions 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 de- 

 nied 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 be- 

 nignant. 



Of this theory and its congeners I shall have more to say at an- 

 other 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 conscious- 

 ness 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 defi- 

 nite ways. 



Yet if a personality is no more than a system of mental states 

 organized in a certain way, why should not the elements dissoci- 

 ated from the upper consciousness recombine and form a second- 



