THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 209 



experience an hallucination after waking, will wlien the time 

 comes, obey the command. How is the command regis- 

 tered ? How is its performance so accurately timed ? 

 These problems were long a mystery, for the primary per- 

 sonality remembers nothing of the trance or the suggestion, 

 and will often trump up an improvised pretext for yielding 

 to the unaccountable impulse which possesses the man so 

 suddenly and which he cannot resist. Edmund Gurney 

 w^as the first to discover, by means of automatic writing, that 

 the secondary self is awake, keeping its attention con- 

 stantly fixed on the command and watching for the signal 

 of its execution. Certain trance-subjects who were also 

 automatic writers, when roused from trance and put to the 

 planchette, — not knowing then what they wrote, and having 

 their uj^per attention fully engrossed by reading aloud, talk- 

 ing, or solving problems in mental arithmetic, — would in- 

 scribe the orders which they had received, together with 

 notes relative to the time elapsed and the time yet to run 

 before the execution. * It is therefore to no * automatism ' 

 in the mechanical sense that such acts are due : a self pre- 

 sides over them, a split-oft', limited and buried, but yet a 

 fully conscious, self. More than this, the buried self often 

 comes to the surface and drives out the other self whilst 

 the acts are performing. In other words, the subject 

 lapses into trance again when the moment arrives for exe- 

 cution, and has no subsequent recollection of the act which 

 he has done. Gurney and Beaunis established this fact, 

 w^hich has since been verified on a large scale ; and Gurney 

 also showed that the patient became sv.ggestihle again during 

 the brief time of the performance. M. Janet's observa- 

 tions, in their turn, well illustrate the phenomenon. 



" I tell Lucie to keep her arms raised after she shaH have 

 awakened. Hardly is she in the normal state, when up go her arms 

 above her head, but she pays no attention to them. She goes, comes, 

 converses, holding her arms high in the air. If asked what her arms 

 are doing, she is surprised at such a question, and says very sincerely : 

 ' My hands are doing nothing; they are just like yours.' ... I com- 



* Proceedings of the (London) Soc for Psych. Research, IMay, 1887, p. 

 268 ff. 



