682 PSYCHOLOGY. 



Hypnotic subjects as a rule forget all that lias happened 

 in their trance. But in a succeeding trance they will often 

 remember the events of a past one. This is like what 

 happens in those cases of ' double personality ' in which 

 no recollection of one of the lives is to be found in 

 the other. We have already seen in an earlier chapter 

 that the sensibility often diJBfers from one of the alternate 

 personalities to another, and we have heard M. Pierre Janet's 

 theorj' that anaesthesias carry amnesias with them (see 

 above, pp. 385 ff.). In certain cases this is evidently so ; 

 the throwing of certain functional brain-tracts out of gear 

 with others, so as to dissociate their consciousness from 

 that of the remaining brain, throws them out for both sen- 

 sorial and ideational service. M. Janet proved in various 

 ways that what his patients forgot when anaesthetic they 

 remembered when the sensibility returned. For instance, 

 he restored their tactile sense temporarily hj means of 

 electric currents, passes, etc., and then made them handle 

 various objects, such as keys and pencils, or make j^articu- 

 lar movements, like the sign of the cross. The moment the 

 anaesthesia returned they found it imiDossible to recollect 

 the objects or the acts. ' They had had nothing in their 

 hands, they had done nothing,' etc. The next day, how^ever, 

 sensibility being again restored by similar processes, they 

 remembered perfectly the circumstance, and told what 

 they had handled or had done. 



All these pathological facts are showing us that the 

 sphere of possible recollection may be wider than we think, 

 and that in certain matters apparent obli"saon is no proof 

 against possible recall under other conditions. They give 

 no countenance, however, to the extravagant opinion that 



Innately deficient, like this one, in the evidence of exact verification which 

 'psychical research 'demands). Compare also Th. Ribot, Diseases of Mem 

 ory. chap, vr. The knowledge of foreign words, etc., reported in trance 

 mediums, etc., may perhapj often be explained by exaltation of memory. 

 An hystero-epileptic girl, whose case I quoted in Proc. of Am. See. for 

 Psychical Research, automatically writes an * Ingoldsby Legend ' in se', eral 

 cantos, which her parents saj' she ' had never read.' Of course she must 

 have read or heard it. but perhaps never learned it. Of some macaronic 

 Latin-English verses about a sea-serpent which her hand alse wrote uncon 

 consciously, I have vainly sought the original 'see Proc, etc., p 553) 



