526 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In some of these unfortunates the upper consciousness is not 

 only of very narrow range and liable to frequent disordination, 

 but is of such unstable composition that, after being disordinated, 

 it is reconstructed out of a quite different set of elements. Mr. 

 F. W. H. Myers has proposed to call this phenomenon an " allo- 

 tropic crystallization " of the elements of mind, which seems to 

 me a highly appropriate simile. The patient can then scarcely 

 be said to have any permanent self at all. He is, as it were, 

 broken to pieces and rebuilt out of different memories, desires, 

 and aptitudes at every hysterical crisis. It seems as if his body 

 were successively possessed by totally different persons. But we 

 have no reason for believing that the different persons all coexist. 

 Probably the emergence of one is only made possible by the de- 

 struction of another. In some of the extreme forms of hysteria 

 it is possible to take advantage of this principle to reconstruct 

 the lost normal individual. Pierre Janet has taken a hysterical 

 woman who had lost many of her memories and sensations, and 

 to some degree her power of movement ; disordinating the upper 

 consciousness by hypnotizing her, he has grasped, as it were, by 

 suggestion the lost mental elements, restored them to the upper 

 consciousness, and made her for the time being quite normal. 

 But, unfortunately, the enlarged upper consciousness seems of very 

 unstable composition, and the patient soon sinks into trance and 

 awakens in her former state. 



I have briefly outlined this conception of consciousness as a 

 system of elements capable of disintegration and of various 

 novel recombinations. And let me repeat what I have already 

 said, that although I have preferred, for the sake of brevity, to 

 develop it deductively from certain fundamental hypotheses, it 

 has been attained by the opposite process from a study of facts. 

 Confessedly it is as yet only a theory, and will doubtless be essen- 

 tially modified before being accepted as the foundation of the 

 science of psychology. In its present form I can not myself 

 regard it as more than a good working hypothesis. But it is 

 something to have even a good working hypothesis in a field 

 in which the constructive conceptions of current psychology 

 prove absolutely useless. 



A GREAT nebula has been discovered by Prof. Barnard in the constella- 

 tion Scorpio, including Antares and a region extending two or three degrees 

 southward. It is described as vast and magnificent, intricate in shape, and 

 gathered in cloudlike forms. Prof. Barnard pronounces it one of the 

 finest nebulae in the sky, and says that, as it involves so many of the bright 

 stars of the region, it would imply that they are essentially at the same 

 distance from us. 



