THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 377 



But the patieut liimself rarely continues to describe the 

 change in just these terms unless new bodily sensations in 

 him or the loss of old ones play a predominant part. 

 Mere perversions of sight and hearing, or even of impulse, 

 soon cease to be felt as contradictions of the unity of the 

 me. 



What the particular perversions of the bodily sensibil- 

 ity may be, which give rise to these contradictions, is for the 

 most part impossible for a sound-minded person to con- 

 ceive. One patient has another self that repeats all his 

 thoughts for him. Others, among whom are some of the 

 first characters in history, have familiar daemons who speak 

 with them, and are replied to. In another someone 

 * makes ' his thoughts for him. Another has two bodies, 

 lying in different beds. Some patients feel as if they had 

 lost parts of their bodies, teeth, brain, stomach, etc. In 

 some it is made of wood, glass, butter, etc. In some it 

 does not exist any longer, or is dead, or is a foreign object 

 quite separate from the speaker's self. Occasionally, parts 

 of the body lose their connection for consciousness with 

 the rest, and are treated as belonging to another j^erson 

 and moved by a hostile will. Thus the right hand may 

 fight with the left as with an enemy.* Or the cries of the 

 patient himself are assigned to another person with whom 

 the patient exjjresses sympathy. The literature of insan- 

 ity is filled with narratives of such illusions as these. M. 

 Taine quotes from a patient of Dr. Krishaber an account of 

 sufferings, from which it will be seen how completely aloof 

 from what is normal a man's experience may suddenly be- 

 come : 



" After the first or second clay it was for some weeks impossible to 

 observe or analyze myself. The suffering — angina pectoris — was too 

 overwhelming. It was not till the first days of January that I could 

 give an account to myself of what I experienced. . . . Here is the first 

 thing of which I retain a clear remembrance. I was alone, and already 

 a prey to permanent visual trouble, when I was suddenly seized with a 

 visual trouble infinitely more pronounced. Objects grew small and re- 

 ceded to infinite distances — men and things together. I was myself im- 



* See the interesting case of ' old Stump ' iu the Proceedings of the Am. 

 Soc. for Psych. Research, p. 552. 



