492 THE FUNCTIONAL RELATIONS OP THE 



without obvious or sufficient reason at the moment ; these excesses 

 attended with loud screaming, execrations, and acts of violence in 

 striking or breaking things within reach. Here the patient himself 

 described to me the kind of separate consciousness he had when 

 these violent moods were upon him ; his desire, but feelings of 

 inability to resist them ; his satisfaction when he felt them to be 

 passing away. It was a painfully exaggerated picture of the 

 struggle between good and ill." 



Nothing much more definite could then be said upon 

 this subject, nor has there since been any appreciable 

 advance of our knowledge in regard to it.* It is, of 

 course, possible that two seemingly simultaneous states of 

 Mind may be never strictly coincident in time, so that in 

 the cases to which reference has just been made, there 

 may have been merely a rapidly alternating action of the 

 organ as a whole, rather than a simultaneous independent 

 action of the two hemispheres of the Brain. Some of the 

 phenomena of dreams present precisely the same difficul- 

 ties indeed the evidence in favour of a double Conscious- 

 ness is here even more striking, since most of us may be 

 able to add our own personal experience to the testimony 

 of others. We refer more especially to those cases in 

 which the dreamer appears to be carrying on a long con- 

 versation with some other person ; where two distinct trains 

 of thought are being evolved ; and where, occasionally, there 

 may be evidence to show that the whole dream has been so 

 rapidly produced as to make it more easy to explain the 

 phenomena by the supposition of a simultaneous and inde- 

 pendent action of the two Hemispheres than by an alter- 

 nating different action of the Brain as a whole.t 



* Dr. Wigan's work on " The Duality of the Mind," 1844, is a 

 diffuse and by no means well-arranged contribution dealing with 

 the same subject. 



f" The consciousness of the dreamer may be distinguished under 

 the name of Ideational Consciousness, from the ordinary conscious- 



