376 PSYCHOLOGY. 



With the beginnings of cerebral disease there ofteq 

 happens something quite comparable to this : 



"Masses of new sensation, hitherto foreign to the individual, im- 

 pulses and ideas of the same inexperienced kind, for example terrors, 

 representations of enacted crime, of enemies pursuing one, etc. At the 

 outset, these stand in contrast with the old familiar me, as a strange, 

 often astonishing and abhorrent thou. * Often their invasion into the 

 former circle of feelings is felt as if the old self were being taken pos- 

 session of by a dark overpowering might, and the fact of such ' posses- 

 sion' is described in fantastic images. Always this doubleness, thia 

 struggle of the old self against the new discordant forms of experience, 

 is accompanied with painful mental conflict, with passion, with violent 

 emotional excitement. This is in great part the reason for the common 

 experience, that the first stage in the immense majority of cases of 

 mental disease is an emotional alteration particularly of a melancholic 

 sort. If now the brain-affection, which is the immediate cause of the 

 new abnormal train of ideas, be not relieved, the latter becomes con- 

 firmed. It may gradually contract associations with the trains ot ideas 

 which characterized the old self, or portions of the latter may be ex- 

 tinguished and lost in the progress of the cerebral malady, so that little 

 by little the opposition of the two conscious me's abates, and the emo- 

 tional storms are calmed. But by that time the old me itself has been 

 falsified and turned into another by those associations, by that recep- 

 tion into itself of the abnormal elements of feeling and of will. The 

 patient may again be quiet, and his thought sometimes logically correct, 

 but in it the morbid erroneous ideas are always present, with the adhe- 

 sions they have contracted, as uncontrollable premises, and the man is 

 no longer the same, but a really new person, his old self trans- 

 formed." f 



Professor Stiumpell reports (in the Deutsches Archiv f. klin. Med., xxii. 

 S47, 1878). This boy, whom we shall later find instructive in many con- 

 nections, was totally anaesthetic without and (so far as could be tested) 

 within, save for the sight of one ej'e and the hearing of one ear. When 

 his eye was closed, he said : " Wenn ich nicht sehen kann, da bin ich gar 

 nichi — 1 no longer «?«," 



* " One can compare the state of the patient to nothing so well as to 

 that of a caterpillar, which, keeping all its caterpillar's ideas and remem- 

 brances, should suddenly become a butterfly with a butterfly's senses and 

 sensations. Between the old and the new state, between the first self, that 

 •of the caterpillar, and the second self, that of the butterfly, there is a deep 

 ■scission, a complete rupture. The new feelings find no anterior series to 

 which they can knit themselves on ; the patient can neither interpret nor 

 use them ; he does not recognize them ; they are unknown. Hence two 

 conclusions, the first which consists in his saying, I no longer am; the 

 second, somewhat later, which consists in his saying, I am another person." 

 (H. Taine: de ITntelligence, 3me edition (1878), p. 463. 



\ W. Griesinger : Mental Diseases, § 29. 



