284 ROUGH WAYS MADE S MOOT IT. 



his own thought.' It is important to notice the limit which 

 a scientific observer thus recognised in the range of the 

 subjects' perception. It has been stated that subjects in 

 this condition have been able to describe occurrences not 

 known to any person, which yet have been subsequently 

 verified. Although some narratives of the kind have come 

 from persons not likely to relate what they knew to be 

 untrue, the possibility of error outweighs the probability 

 that such narratives can really be true. There is a form of 

 unconscious cerebration by which untruthful narratives come 

 to be concocted in the mind. For instance, Dr. Carpenter 

 heard a scrupulously conscientious lady asseverate that a 

 table ' rapped ' when nobody was within a yard of ft ; but 

 the story was disproved by the lady herself, who found from 

 her note book, recording what really took p'ace, that the 

 hands of six persons rested on the table when it rapped. And 

 apart from the unconscious fiction-producing power of the 

 mind, there is always the possibility, nay, often the extreme 

 probability, that the facts of a case may be misunderstood. 

 Persons may be supposed to know nothing about an event 

 who have been conscious of its every detail ; nay, a person 

 may himself be unconscious of his having known, and in 

 fact of his really knowing, of a particular event. Dual 

 consciousness in this particular sense is a quite common 

 experience, as, for instance, when a story is told us which 

 we receive at first as new, until gradually the recollection 

 dawns upon us and becomes momentarily clearer and 

 clearer, not only that we have heard it before, but of the 

 circumstances under which we heard it, and even of details 

 which the narrator from whom a few moments before we 

 receive it as a new story has omitted to mention. 1 



1 An instance of the sort turns up in Pope's correspondence with 

 Addison, and serves to explain a discrepancy 1 etween Tick^H's edition 

 of the Spectator and the original. In No. 253, Addison had remarked 

 that none of the critics had taken notice of a peculiarity in the de- 

 scription of Sisyphus lifting his stone up the hill, which is no sooner 

 carried to tl e top of it but it immediately tumbles to the bottom. 



