384 PSYCHOLOGY. 



time keeping house for him, sliow ing a sound judgment and a thorough 

 acquaintance with the duties of her position. 



"Dr. Reynolds, who is still living in Meadville," says hv. Mitchell, 

 " and who lias most kindly placed the facts at my disi)osal, states in 

 his letter to me of January 4, 1888, that at a later period of her life she 

 said she did sometimes seem to have a dim, dreamy idea of a shadowy 

 past, which she could not fully grasp, and could not be certain whet4ier 

 it originated in a partially restored memory or in the statements of the 

 events by others during her abnormal state. 



" Miss Reynolds di<!d in January, 1854, at the age of sixty-one. On 

 the morning of the day of her death she rose in her usual health, ate 

 her breakfast, and superintended household duties. While thus em- 

 ployed she suddenly raised her hands to her head and exclaimed : 

 ' Oh ! I wonder what is the matter with my head ! ' and immediately 

 fell to the floor. When carried to a sofa she gasped once or twice and 

 died." 



In such cases as the preceding, in which the secondary 

 character is superior to the first, there seems reason to 

 think that the first one is the morbid one. The word inhi- 

 hition describes its duhiess and melancholy. Felida X.'s 

 original character was dull and melancholy in comparison 

 with that which she later acquired, and the change may be 

 regarded as the removal of inhibitions which had main- 

 tained themselves from earlier years. Such inhibitions we 

 all know temporarily, when we can not recollect or in some 

 other way command our mental resources. The systema- 

 tized amnesias (losses of memory) of hypnotic subjects or- 

 dered to forget all nouns, or all verbs, or a particular letter 

 of the alphabet, or all that is relative to a certain person, 

 are inhibitions of the sort on a more extensive scale. They 

 sometimes occur spontaneously as symptoms of disease.* 

 Now M. Pierre Janet has shown that such inhibitions when 

 they bear on a certain class of sensations (making the sub- 

 ject anesthetic thereto) and also on the memory of such 

 sensations, are the basis of changes of personality. The 

 anaesthetic and ' amnesic ' hysteric is one person ; but when 

 you restore her inhibited sensibilities and memories by 

 plunging her into the hypnotic trance — in other words, when 



* Cf. Ribot's Diseases of Memory for cases See also a large ininil)er of 

 them in Forbes Wiuslow's Obscure Diseases of the liraiu and ^liud. 

 chapters XIII-x^^I. 



