304 THE PLAY OF ANIMALS. 



division of our consciousness. The child is wholly ab- 

 sorbed in his play, and yet under all the ebb and flow 

 of thought and feeling, like still water under wind- 

 swept waves, he has the knowledge that it is only a pre- 

 tence, after all. Behind the sham I, that takes part in 

 the game, stands the unchanging I of real life, which 

 regards the sham I with quiet superiority.* 



If now we ask how this phenomenon is related to 

 the other condition of mind known to us, we find that 

 it occupies a position between the ordinary waking 

 state of consciousness and the abnormal conditions of 

 hypnosis and hysteria, which is rather daringly called 

 double personality, f 



Many things, it is true, in our waking life suggest 

 a divided consciousness, but the cleft is not so deep 

 as in the abnormal condition. I am not now speaking 

 of the alternation of two psychic existences — that phe- 

 nomenon is perhaps best illustrated in the everyday life 

 of many heads of families who are unsupportable ty- 

 rants at home, while at the club they are the very 

 types of a " jolly old boy " — but I refer rather to simul- 

 taneously existing divisions of consciousness, examples of 

 which are not uncommon with us. We may state the 

 case somewhat in this way: It is a formulated scientific 

 fact that a certain economy governs our consciousness. 

 It takes note of but a limited number of the countless 

 physiological stimuli that continually set our brains 



* See E. von Hartmann, Aesthetik, vol. ii, p. 59. 



f Pierre Janet, L'automatisme psychologique, 1894, p. 132. 

 Max Dessoir, Das Doppel-Ich. 1890. Kant referred to this idea 

 as far back as 1838 in his Trfiumen eines Geistersehers. Land- 

 mann's criticism on The Plurality of Psychic Personalities in One 

 Individual contains much of importance, but his work labours un- 

 der too sharp a distinction of " cortical " from " subcortical " as 

 used by Meynert. 



