340 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



second state : " I felt myself so completely changed that I seemed 

 to have become another being. This thought imposed itself upon 

 me without my forgetting for an instant that it was illusory." We 

 once saw, in the asylum of Stephansf eld, near Strasburg, a patient 

 who was in the first state and had not yet reached the second, or 

 who had perhaps passed it and had no longer strength enough to 

 believe himself other than himself, for, according to his fancy, he 

 had died in the night. He said to us : " You are very happy, you 

 other people ; you have a me, I have no longer a w.e'' He did not 

 even perceive the contradiction, and then we reminded him that 

 he was living, and existed as much as we did. " No,^^ he said, " it 

 is the external powers that sustain me and cause me to live, but 

 not myself." The poor fellow felt that life was escaping him and 

 held only by a thread, that it was hung to some external condi- 

 tion, and expressed the thought in metaphysical terms, having 

 probably made some studies in philosophy ; he had at last ex- 

 teriorized his consciousness, and was very near being some one 

 else than himself. An example occurs in Gratiolet of a patient 

 who imagined that he was in two beds at the same time. In cases 

 of suicidal mania, it is not rare to see the subject doubling himself 

 and hearing voices commanding him to kill himself. He resists ; 

 he replies, making the objection and the response at the same 

 time, but he does not believe that it is himself doing both. This 

 is what happens also in spiritualism and in the case of writing or 

 speaking mediums. But in all the preceding cases we perceive 

 that, of the two personalities, one is illusory. A case is presented 

 of optical illusion of the consciousness as there is an optical illu- 

 sion of the senses ; a false interpretation of the phenomena of con- 

 sciousness, which refutes itself. In the recent experiments in 

 provoked somnambulism, however, we have come to the point of 

 separating distinctly two consciousnesses, one of which seems to 

 be as real as the other. A person converses with you while he is 

 writing a letter, or making a complicated calculation, one of the 

 two personalities not knowing what the other is doing, but each 

 being aware of what itselt is doing. This is the most advanced 

 and at the same time the most obscure point of the question. * 



These are the principal facts with which psycho-physiological 

 science occupies itself. There are many others which it would be 

 tedious to recite ; the law of association between ideas and motions, 

 the unconscious motions, the theory of which M. Chevreul began in 

 his work on turning tables ; the theory of physiognomy, of which 

 Duchesne de Boulogne has established the physiological basis, and 

 from which Gratiolet and Darwin have drawn psychological 

 results ; researches on memory, the theory of hallucination, and 



* See the remarkable experiments of M. Pierre Janet, Professor of Pliilosophy at Havre ; 

 " Revue Philosophique," December, 1886; May, IBS'?; and March, 1888. 



