ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 59 



snake has bitten him. It must then have awakened 

 an under-current of awareness, or consciousness. 

 Again, if a patient sees the surgeon's needle approach 

 his eye, he cannot by any effort prevent himself 

 from winking. Drop in the eye a little cocaine. 

 This renders the touch of the needle painless, but 

 produces no awareness of this in the brain. Yet 

 the patient, before he has actually discovered 

 that the needle will not hurt him, will, un- 

 winkingly, permit it to come up to the eye's 

 surface and touch it. He must, apparently, be 

 influenced by some local feeling of consciousness 

 in which the brain has no part. Minor derange- 

 ments of the internal organs of the body which 

 do not make themselves apparent to the conscious- 

 ness of the brain, will, nevertheless, be felt, and 

 will influence the mood in which, for instance, we 

 come to the breakfast table. Our views of life, 

 as we awake of mornings, depend very often upon 

 happenings within us that have escaped con- 

 scious detection. Hypnotic patients not infre- 

 quently exhibit the most extraordinary shiftings 

 and subdivisions of consciousness. Not only do 

 they appear at times to change their personalities ; 

 on some occasions their behaviour can only be 

 explained on the supposition that two separate 

 centres of consciousness are operating within them, 

 one of which may be localized in some part of the 

 body outside the brain. Thus, in one well-known 

 case, Professor William James was persuaded that 

 the patient had developed a separate conscious- 

 ness in one arm. There are then good reasons for 

 concluding that consciousness, or awareness, is 

 not monopolized by the brain, but pervades our 

 bodies and may very well be possessed in some 

 degree by each nerve cell. In the brain there is a 

 concentration of consciousness ; but there exists 

 also a diffused consciousness which, under the 



