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of Edinburgh, Session 1869 - 70 . 
clear that these conditions are necessary to a right belief in con¬ 
tinuous personal identity. These conclusions are strictly applicable 
to all hallucinations and beliefs of morbid origin. Many persons 
have delusive beliefs during the waking state as transient as 
dreams. This is very common in the brain-failure of old age. 
Delusive beliefs, more strictly insane, may come and go in like 
manner in the earlier stages of an insanity. I had a patient under 
my care, in whom they came on only when he was in a heated 
room, and who could recover from them by the cold douche applied 
to the face. In cases like G-eorge Elliot, the morbid state is best 
described as a fixed dream. When those molecular changes, which 
coincide with the mnemonical records of his daily life, of things done, 
succeed each other, he truly believes he is George Elliot, a house- 
carpenter; but when the mnemonical records of his dream-life, 
and which are wholly dissociated from the former, are presented to 
the consciousness, then the associated personality is presented also, 
and, for the time being, he believes as firmly he is another person 
than George Elliot. These delusive states may have every degree 
of duration. In certain kinds of waking somnambulism, the 
individual lives an actual life, as two wholly dissociated persona¬ 
lities, for hours or days alternately, the mnemonical records of 
the two being quite as dissociated as dreaming and waking life; or 
they may occupy only a few moments, as in the artificial somnam¬ 
bulism induced mesmerically, where the brain has been so acted 
on that the patient is made to hold the most absurd beliefs,—to 
believe, in short, whatever he is told is real. In this way Sir J. 
Young Simpson changed the personal identity of two ladies in 
regard to the husband of one of them, so that the unmarried 
believed she was the married, and vice versa. From these facts, 
and they might be multiplied to any extent, it is clear that the 
notion or belief of personal identity is not due to mind in the 
abstract, considered as an immaterial substance acting in entire 
independence of life and organisation, but to mind in the concrete, 
as inseparably associated, not with brute inert matter, but with 
the motions and forces upon which life depends. This, I need 
hardly say, is no new doctrine of philosophy, whether profane or 
biblical. The earliest record of Scripture affirms that man only 
became a living soul after the breath of life was breathed into his 
