DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 275 



On the whole, it appears reasonable to conclude, as 

 Professor Huxley does, that though F. may be conscious in 

 his abnormal state, he may also be a mere automaton for 

 the time being. The only circumstance which seems to 

 oppose itself very markedly to the latter view is the letter- 

 writing. Everything else that this man did was what he had 

 already done prior to the accident. If it could be shown 

 that the letters written in his abnormal state were transcripts, 

 not merely verbatim et literatim, but exact in every point, of 

 some which he had written before he was wounded, then a 

 strong case would be made out for the automaton theory. 

 Certainly, few instances have come under the experience of 

 scientific men where a human being has so closely re- 

 sembled a mere machine as this man appears to do in his 

 abnormal condition. 



The moral nature of F. in his abnormal condition is for 

 this reason a matter of less interest than it would be, did 

 he show more of the semblance of conscious humanity. 

 Still it is worthy of notice, that, whereas in his normal 

 condition he is a perfectly honest man, in his abnormal 

 state 'he is an inveterate thief, stealing and hiding away 

 whatever he can lay hands on with much dexterity, and with 

 an absolutely absurd indifference as to whether the property 

 is his own or not/ 



It will be observed that the cases of dual consciousness 

 thus far considered, though alike in some respects, present 

 characteristic divergences. In that of the boy at Norwood, 

 the two characters were very similar, so far as can be judged, 

 and each life was distinct from the other. The next case 

 was only introduced to illustrate the resemblance in certain 

 respects between the phenomena of somnambulism and 

 those of double or rather alternating consciousness. The 

 woman Felida X. changed markedly in character when she 

 passed from one state to the other. Her case was also dis- 

 tinguished from that of the boy by the circumstance that in 

 one state she was conscious of what had passed in the other, 

 but while in this other state was unconscious of what had 



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