5 12 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



all, merely recording certain physiological processes, or else they 

 indicate the existence of mentation which does not belong to any 

 recognized human being. The first would seem to deny the doc- 

 trine of parallelism, according to which physiological processes 

 of the degree of complexity requisite to the production of writing 

 necessarily generate mental states, and this would lead us toward 

 the old theory of the soul, or something like it. The second would 

 compel the assumption either of personalities distinct from that 

 of the subject, which is the theory of possession, or of segregated 

 mental states. The latter is the theory which I am. developing in 

 these pages, and although I am far from satisfied with it, it is 

 more in line with our present scientific conceptions than others, 

 and accounts for some of the facts fairly well. 



But this dilemma presents itself only when it can be shown 

 that the subject's upper consciousness has nothing to do with the 



Fig. 1. 



production of the writing. I am convinced that experimenters 

 do not pay sufficient attention to this point, and consequently 

 much of the recorded material is to my mind of little significance. 

 As my space is limited, I wish to lay especial stress upon this aspect 

 of the problem. 



A few years ago I had the opportunity of studying at leisure 

 a remarkably good case of automatism. The subject, whom I 



shall call B , was a man of intelligence and education, with 



whom I had long been on terms of intimacy, and of whose good 

 faith I can therefore speak with some confidence. The writing 

 was at first a mere scrawl, accompanied by quite violent twist- 

 ing of the arm ; little by little it became intelligible, wrote " Yes " 



