THE STREAM OF THOUGHT, 229 



Beneath these tracts of thought, which, however rudi- 

 mentary, are still organized selves with a memory, habits, 

 and sense cf their own identity, M. Janet thinks that the 

 facts of catalef)sy in hysteric patients drive us to suppose 

 that there are thoughts quite unorganized and impersonaL 

 A patient in cataleptic trance (which can be produced arti- 

 ficially in certain hypnotized subjects) is without memory 

 on waking, and seems insensible and unconscious as long 

 as the cataleptic condition lasts. If, however, one raises 

 the arm of such a subject it stays in that position, and the 

 whole body can thus be moulded like wax under the hands 

 of the operator, retaining for a considerable time whatever 

 attitude he communicates to it. In hysterics whose arm, 

 for example, is anaesthetic, the same thing may hapi^en. 

 The anaesthetic arm may remain passively in positions which 

 it is made to assume ; or if the hand be taken and made to 

 hold a pencil and trace a certain letter, it will continue 

 tracing that letter indefinitely on the paper. These acts, 

 until recently, were supj)osed to be accompanied by no 

 consciousness at all : they were physiological reflexes. M. 

 Janet considers with much more plausibility that feeling 

 escorts them. The feeling is probably merely that of the 

 position or movement of the limb, and it produces no more 

 than its natural efi"ects when it discharges into the motor 

 centres which keep the position maintained, or the movement 

 incessantly renewed.* Such thoughts as these, says M. 

 Janet, "are known by no one, for disaggregated sensations 

 reduced to a state of mental dust are not synthetized in 

 any personality." f He admits, however, that these very 

 same unutterably stupid thoughts tend to develop memory, 

 — the cataleptic ere long moves her arm at a bare hint ; so 

 that they form no important exception to the law that all 

 thought tends to assume the form of personal conscious- 

 ness. 



2) Thought is in Constant Change. 



I do not mean necessarily that no one state of mind has 

 any duration — even if true, that would be hard to establish. 



* For the Physiology of this compare the chapter ou the Will 

 \ Loc. cit. p. 316. 



