THE SELF AND ITS DERANGEMENTS. 817 



I have already alluded to the fact tliat Ansel Bourne early in 

 life suffered a sudden loss of sight, hearing, and speech, and as 

 suddenly regained them ; and in the case of F^lida I also alluded 

 to her hysterical condition and to her third state. Now, all these 

 }.)henomena from the purely psychological point of view belong 

 under the same category. The sudden splitting off from the true 

 Ansel Bourne of a mass of states and tendencies which took a new 

 name and called themselves a new person is precisely analogous 

 to the equally sudden splitting off from Ansel Bourne's conscious- 

 ness of his powers of sight, hearing, and speech. In my first three 

 papers I have developed at length the conception of consciousness 

 as a co-ordinated system capable of greater or less dissolution or 

 disordination without the destruction of its component elements. 

 These two cases are illustrations in point. In both the period of 

 complete disordination or " unconsciousness " was very brief and 

 was followed by a recombination of the elements which had 

 formerly constituted a personality into a dist nctly new system, 

 which in one case assumed a new name. In Fdlida's third state 

 we have a third recombination of some of these elements, but it is 

 apparently very imperfect, for it is accompanied by hallucinations, 

 and hallucinations depend in large measure upon defective co- 

 ordination. In the case of A. J. Brown the new system seemed 

 relatively quite stable, for it was evoked three years afterward by 

 simply disordinating Mr. Bourne's consciousness. Yet in its later 

 occurrences it appeared to be disintegrating. 



I have sjient a good deal of time upon these three cases be- 

 cause their relative simplicity, their similarity, and the care with 

 which they have been observed make it easy to form a concep- 

 tion of the way in which the successive states were related to one 

 another. The next which I shall take up does not differ from 

 these in kind, but is much more complex. In it we see the pa- 

 tient's memory-store split into at least five groups, among which 

 the use of his sense organs and muscles is repartitioned in a most 

 curious manner, while his character presents in each state certain 

 distinctive traits. 



Louis V was born in Paris, February 12, 1863, of a dissolute 



and hysterical mother and an unknown father. Even in his early 

 childhood he was hysterical, had haemorrhages from the stomach 

 and transient paralyses. His mother maltreated him, and he be- 

 came a vagabond. At eight years and a half he was committed 

 to the house of correction at Saint-Urbain. His health was fairly 

 good until March 23, 1877, when he was frightened by a viper, 

 which wound itself around his arm while he was gathering wood. 

 That night he had a violent attack of convulsions; when they 

 passed away, his lower limbs seemed permanently paralyzed. 

 His character was gentle and timid. Three years later he was 



VOL. XLIX. — 63 



