LITERARY NOTICES. 



557 



such a vocation and the thought of work- 

 ing by prescribed routine methods are 

 very apt to clash. Yet what is the man 

 or the woman with such a vocation to 

 do ? Set up in opposition to the State? 

 Well, sometimes they do, and in certain 

 parts of the country private schools are 

 gaining steadily on the State-supported 

 ones, but manifestly the competition of 

 the State is a serious thing to reckon 

 with, and quite sufficient to deter many 

 a one from following his or her strong 

 desire and bent. We are disposed to 

 believe that in this way the larger part 

 of the special talent which would other- 

 wise go into the work of education is 

 diverted into other channels. All we 

 can do, therefore, for the present is to 

 unfold and enforce right methods, as 

 President Eliot has done in his article, 

 hoping that here and there the good 

 seed may fall on good soil and yield 

 fruit abundantly. 



LITERARY NOTICES. 



Les Alterations de la Persoxalite (Disor- 

 ders of the Personality (or Conscious- 

 ness)). By Alfred Binet. Paris : Felix 

 Alcan. Pp. 325. Price, six francs. 



Physiologists and philosophers have 

 been much interested during the last fifteen 

 years in researches in pathological psycholo- 

 gy, based upon the study of hysteria and sug- 

 gestion ; and a considerable quantity of obser- 

 vations and experiments has been collected in 

 a very short time. Hallucinations, paralyses 

 by suggestion, morbid affections of the per- 

 sonality or consciousness, disorders of the 

 memory and of the muscular sense, sugges- 

 tions in the waking state and during hypnosis, 

 and unconscious suggestions, are some of the 

 principal questions that have been examined 

 and profoundly searched into. Numerous 

 discussions have arisen among the investi- 

 gators as the researches have multiplied and 

 extended ; discordant theories have been put 

 forth, and important assertions made by some 

 have been disputed by others, and school has 

 been arrayed against school. Such contro- 

 versies, which appear inseparable from new 

 systems and are useful in their way, have 

 cast some doubt on the real value of the col- 



lected material. The author's intention in 

 writing this book is not to continue contro- 

 versies or to oppose his own experiments to 

 those of other observers, but, collecting all 

 the results that have been reached, to inquire 

 what ones among them are in accord and 

 can be grouped under a common synthesis. 

 For this he retains only the experiments 

 which, repeated by many or all of the ob- 

 servers, have led to the same conclusion, 

 whatever might have been the object of the 

 experimenter, while he has put aside without 

 judging concerning them, phenomena which 

 have been observed by only a single person, 

 and which do not logically relate themselves 

 to an assemblage of known and acquired 

 facts — subjecting his own observations, too, 

 to the operation of this rule. The phenome- 

 na of double personality or consciousness in- 

 clude those in which the two states succeed 

 or alternate with one another — successive 

 personalities — and those in which they are 

 coexistent. The modifications or transfor- 

 mations in the former case are spontaneous 

 or provoked. It is mentioned as an advan- 

 tage in the study of the spontaneous phe- 

 nomena, and as a reason for beginning the 

 discussion with them, that they are influenced 

 only in the most insignificant degree, if at 

 all, by the persons who observe them. They 

 have not been prepared at long range and 

 unconsciously by an author wdiose opinion 

 was already formed ; they consequently re- 

 spond to no preconceived theory. They con- 

 sist of incidents of hysteria, dreaming, intoxi- 

 cation by various drugs, aberrations caused 

 by disordered circulation, and effects of epi- 

 lepsy. In these cases the patient has, psycho- 

 logical!}-, two lives, quite distinct from one 

 another — his usual normal life, and his life 

 under the influence of his aberration — in 

 either of which he has no consciousness or 

 recollection of his experiences in the other; 

 while, on the other hand, he often takes up 

 the thread of life in either stage, when he 

 resumes it, where it was dropped on coming 

 out from the last preceding spell. Somnam- 

 bulism affords the most familiar instances of 

 this form of double personality. The study 

 of provoked somnambulism, or hypnotism, is 

 more subject to error, and the distinction be- 

 tween the hypnotic and the normal state is 

 not so clearly marked as in spontaneous som. 

 nambulism. But experimentation has the 



