and appropriating Thought incessantly renewed. In many respects Kant's meaning is obscure, but it will not be necessary for us to squeeze the texts in order to make sure what it actually and historically was. If we can define clearly two or three things which it may _possibly_ have been, that will help us just as much to clear our own ideas.
On the whole, a defensible interpretation of Kant's view would take somewhat the following shape. Like ourselves he believes in a Reality outside the mind of which he writes, but the critic who vouches for that reality does so on grounds of faith, for it is not a verifiable phenomenal thing. Neither is it manifold. The 'Manifold' which the intellectual functions combine is a mental manifold altogether, which thus _stands between_ the Ego of Apperception and the outer Reality, but still stands inside the mind. In the function of knowing there is a multiplicity to be connected, and Kant brings this multiplicity inside the mind. The Reality becomes a mere empty _locus_, or unknowable, the so-called Noumenon; the manifold phenomenon is in the mind. We, on the contrary, put the Multiplicity with the Reality outside, and leave the mind simple. Both of us deal with the same elements--thought and object--the only question is in which of them the multiplicity shall be lodged. Wherever it is lodged it must be 'synthetized' when it comes to be thought. And that particular way of lodging it will be the better, which, in addition to describing the facts naturally, makes the 'mystery of synthesis' least hard to understand.
Well, Kant's way of describing the facts is mythological. The notion of our thought being this sort of an elaborate internal machine-shop stands condemned by all we said in favor of its simplicity on pages 276 ff. Our Thought is not composed of parts, however so composed its objects may be. There is no originally chaotic manifold in it to be reduced to order. There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurly-burly in her womb. If we are to have a dualism of Thought and Reality at all, the multiplicity should be lodged in the latter and not in the former member of the couple of related terms. The parts and their relations surely belong less to the knower than to what is known.
But even were all the mythology true, the process of synthesis would in no whit be _explained_ by calling the inside of the mind its seat.
No mystery would be made lighter by such means. It is just as much a puzzle _how_ the 'Ego' can employ the productive Imagination to make the Understanding use the categories to combine the data which Recognition, Association, and Apprehension receive from sensible Intuition, as how the Thought can combine the objective facts.
Phrase it as one may, the difficulty is always the same: _the Many known by the One_. Or does one seriously think he understands better _how_ the knower 'connects' its objects, when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls them Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psychosis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling,--what you like--it must _know_. The best grammatical subject for the verb _know_ would, if possible, be one from whose other properties the knowing could be deduced. And if there be no such subject, the best one would be that with the fewest ambiguities and the least pretentious name. By Kant's confession, the transcendental Ego has no properties, and from it nothing can be deduced. Its name is pretentious, and, as we shall presently see, has its meaning ambiguously mixed up with that of the substantial soul. So on every possible account we are excused from using it instead of our own term of the present passing 'Thought,' as the principle by which the Many is simultaneously known.
* * * * * The _ambiguity_ referred to in the meaning of the transcendental Ego is as to whether Kant signified by it an _Agent_, and by the Experience it helps to constitute, an operation; or whether the experience is an event _produced_ in an unassigned way, and the Ego a mere indwelling _element_ therein contained. If an operation be meant, then Ego and Manifold must both be existent prior to that collision which results in the experience of one by the other. If a mere analysis is meant, there is no such prior existence, and the elements only _are_ in so far as they are in union. Now Kant's tone and language are everywhere the very words of one who is talking of operations and the agents by which they are performed.[288] And yet there is reason to think that at bottom he may have had nothing of the sort in mind.[289] In this uncertainty we need again do no more than decide what to think of his transcendental Ego _if it be_ an agent.
Well, if it be so, Transcendentalism is only Substantialism grown shame-faced, and the Ego only a 'cheap and nasty' edition of the soul.
All our reasons for preferring the 'Thought' to the 'Soul' apply with redoubled force when the Soul is shrunk to this estate. The Soul truly explained nothing; the 'syntheses,' which she performed, were simply taken ready-made and clapped on to her as expressions of her nature taken after the fact; but at least she had some semblance of nobility and outlook. She was called active; might select; was responsible, and permanent in her way. The Ego is simply _nothing_: as ineffectual and windy an abortion as Philosophy can show. It would indeed be one of Reason's tragedies if the good Kant, with all his honesty and strenuous pains, should have deemed this conception an important outbirth of his thought.
But we have seen that Kant deemed it of next to no importance at all.
It was reserved for his Fichtean and Hegelian successors to call it the first Principle of Philosophy, to spell its name in capitals and pronounce it with adoration, to act, in short, as if they were going up in a balloon, whenever the notion of it crossed their mind. Here again, however, I am uncertain of the facts of history, and know that I may not read my authors aright. The whole lesson of Kantian and post-Kantian speculation is, it seems to me, the lesson of simplicity.
With Kant, complication both of thought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced by the musty academicism of his Königsberg existence. With Hegel it was a raging fever. Terribly, therefore, do the sour grapes which these fathers of philosophy have eaten set our teeth on edge. We have in England and America, however, a contemporary continuation of Hegelism from which, fortunately, somewhat simpler deliverances come; and, unable to find any definite psychology in what Hegel, Rosenkranz, or Erdmann tells us of the Ego, I turn to Caird and Green.
* * * * * The great difference, practically, between these authors and Kant is their complete abstraction from the onlooking Psychologist and from the Reality he thinks he knows; or rather it is the absorption of both of these outlying terms into the proper topic of Psychology, viz., the mental experience of the mind under observation. The Reality coalesces with the connected Manifold, the Psychologist with the Ego, knowing becomes 'connecting,' and there results no longer a finite or criticisable, but an 'absolute' Experience, of which the Object and the Subject are always the same. Our finite 'Thought' is virtually and potentially this eternal (or rather this 'timeless'), absolute Ego, and only provisionally and speciously the limited thing which it seems _prima facie_ to be. The later 'sections' of our 'Stream,' which come and appropriate the earlier ones, _are_ those earlier ones, just as in substantialism the Soul is throughout all time the same.[290] This 'solipsistic' character of an Experience conceived as absolute really annihilates psychology as a distinct body of science.
Psychology is a natural science, an account of particular finite streams of thought, coexisting and succeeding in time. It is of course conceivable (though far from clearly so) that in the last metaphysical resort all these streams of thought may be thought by one universal All-thinker. But in this metaphysical notion there is no profit for psychology; for grant that one Thinker does think in all of us, still what He thinks in me and what in you can never be deduced from the bare idea of Him. The idea of Him seems even to exert a positively paralyzing effect on the mind. The existence of finite thoughts is suppressed altogether. Thought's characteristics, as Professor Green says, are "not to be sought in the incidents of individual lives which last but for a day...No knowledge, nor any mental act involved in knowledge, can properly be called a 'phenomenon of consciousness.'...For a phenomenon is a sensible event, related in the way of antecedence or consequence to other sensible events, but the consciousness which constitutes a knowledge...is not an event so related nor made up of such events."
Again, if "we examine the constituents of any perceived object,...we shall find alike that it is only for consciousness that they can exist, and that the consciousness for which they thus exist cannot be merely a series of phenomena or a succession of states...It then becomes clear that there is a function of consciousness, as exercised in the most rudimentary experience [namely, the function of _synthesis_] which is incompatible with the definition of consciousness as any sort of succession of any sort of phenomena."[291] Were we to follow these remarks, we should have to abandon our notion of the 'Thought' (perennially renewed in time, but always cognitive thereof), and to espouse instead of it an entity copied from thought in all essential respects, but differing from it in being 'out of time.' What psychology can gain by this barter would be hard to divine.
Moreover this resemblance of the timeless Ego to the Soul is completed by other resemblances still. The monism of the post-Kantian idealists seems always lapsing into a regular old-fashioned spiritualistic dualism. They incessantly talk as if, like the Soul, their All-thinker were an Agent, operating on detached materials of sense. This may come from the accidental fact that the English writings of the school have been more polemic than constructive, and that a reader may often take for a positive profession a statement _ad hominem_ meant as part of a reduction to the absurd, or mistake the analysis of a bit of knowledge into elements for a dramatic myth about its creation. But I think the matter has profounder roots. Professor Green constantly talks of the 'activity' of Self as a 'condition' of knowledge taking place. Facts are said to become incorporated with other facts only through the '_action_ of a combining self-consciousness upon data of sensation.'
"Every object we perceive...requires, in order to its presentation, the _action_ of a principle of consciousness, not itself subject to conditions of time, upon successive appearances, such action as may _hold the appearances together_, without fusion, in an apprehended fact."[292] It is needless to repeat that the connection of things in our knowledge is in no whit _explained_ by making it the deed of an agent whose essence is self-identity and who is out of time. The agency of phenomenal thought coming and going in time is just as easy to _understand_. And when it is furthermore said that the agent that combines is the same 'self-distinguishing subject' which 'in another mode of its activity' presents the manifold object to itself, the unintelligibilities become quite paroxysmal, and we are forced to confess that the entire school of thought in question, in spite of occasional glimpses of something more refined, still dwells habitually in that mythological stage of thought where phenomena are explained as results of dramas enacted by entities which but reduplicate the characters of the phenomena themselves. The self must not only _know_ its object,--that is too bald and dead a relation to be written down and left in its static state. The knowing must be painted as a 'famous victory' in which the object's distinctness is in some way 'overcome.'
"The self exists as one self only as it opposes itself, as object, to itself as subject, and immediately denies and transcends that opposition. Only because it is such a concrete unity, which has in itself a resolved contradiction, can the intelligence cope with all the manifoldness and division of the mighty universe, and hope to master its secrets. As the lightning sleeps in the dew-drop, so in the simple and transparent unity of self-consciousness there is held in equilibrium that vital antagonism of opposites which...seems to rend the world asunder. The intelligence is able to understand the world, or, in other words, to break down the barrier between itself and things and find itself in them, just because its own existence is implicitly the solution of all the division and conflict of things."[293] This dynamic (I had almost written dynamitic) way of representing knowledge has the merit of not being tame. To turn from it to our own psychological formulation is like turning from the fireworks, trap-doors, and transformations of the pantomime into the insipidity of the midnight, where "ghastly through the drizzling rain, On the bald street breaks the blank day!"[294] And yet turn we must, with the confession that our 'Thought'--a cognitive phenomenal event in time--is, if it exist at all, itself the only Thinker which the facts require. The only service that transcendental egoism has done to psychology has been by its protests against Hume's 'bundle'-theory of mind. But this service has been ill-performed; for the Egoists themselves, let them say what they will, believe in the bundle, and in their own system merely _tie it up_, with their special transcendental string, invented for that use alone.
Besides, they talk as if, with this miraculous tying or 'relating,' the Ego's duties were done. Of its far more important duty of choosing some of the things it ties and appropriating them, to the exclusion of the rest, they tell us never a word. To sum up, then, my own opinion of the transcendentalist school, it is (whatever ulterior metaphysical truth it may divine) a school in which psychology at least has naught to learn, and whose deliverances about the Ego in particular in no wise oblige us to revise our own formulation of the Stream of Thought.[295] * * * * * With this, all possible rival formulations have been discussed. The literature of the Self is large, but all its authors may be classed as radical or mitigated representatives of the three schools we have named, substantialism, associationism, or transcendentalism. Our own opinion must be classed apart, although it incorporates essential elements from all three schools. _There need never have been a quarrel between associationism and its rivals if the former had admitted the indecomposable unity of every pulse of thought, and the latter been willing to allow that 'perishing' pulses of thought might recollect and know._ We may sum up by saying that personality implies the incessant presence of two elements, an objective person, known by a passing subjective Thought and recognized as continuing in time. _Hereafter let us use the words_ ME _and_ I _for the empirical person and the judging Thought._ * * * * * _Certain vicissitudes in the me demand our notice._ In the first place, although its changes are gradual, they become in time great. The central part of the _me_ is the feeling of the body and of the adjustments in the head; and in the feeling of the body should be included that of the general emotional tones and tendencies, for at bottom these are but the habits in which organic activities and sensibilities run. Well, from infancy to old age, this assemblage of feelings, most constant of all, is yet a prey to slow mutation.
Our powers, bodily and mental, change at least as fast.[296] Our possessions notoriously are perishable facts. The identity which the _I_ discovers, as it surveys this long procession, can only be a relative identity, that of a slow shifting in which there is always some common ingredient retained.[297] The commonest element of all, the most uniform, is the possession of the same memories. However different the man may be from the youth, both look back on the same childhood, and call it their own.
Thus the identity found by the _I_ in its _me_ is only a loosely construed thing, an identity 'on the whole,' just like that which any outside observer might find in the same assemblage of facts. We often say of a man 'he is so changed one would not know him'; and so does a man, less often, speak of himself. These changes in the _me_, recognized by the I, or by outside observers, may be grave or slight.
They deserve some notice here.
THE MUTATIONS OF THE SELF may be divided into two main classes: 1. Alterations of memory; and 2. Alterations in the present bodily and spiritual selves.
In either case the _me_ is changed. Should a man be punished for what he did in his childhood and no longer remembers? Should he be punished for crimes enacted in post-epileptic unconsciousness, somnambulism, or in any involuntarily induced state of which no recollection is retained? Law, in accord with common-sense, says: "No; he is not the same person forensically now which he was then." These losses of memory are a normal incident of extreme old age, and the person's _me_ shrinks in the ratio of the facts that have disappeared.
In dreams we forget our waking experiences; they are as if they were not. And the converse is also true. As a rule, no memory is retained during the waking state of what has happened during mesmeric trance, although when again entranced the person may remember it distinctly, and may then forget facts belonging to the waking state. We thus have, within the bounds of healthy mental life, an approach to an alternation of _me's_.
False memories are by no means rare occurrences in most of us, and, whenever they occur, they distort the consciousness of the me. Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so. The content of a dream will oftentimes insert itself into the stream of real life in a most perplexing way. The most frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experiences. Such accounts we almost always make both more simple and more interesting than the truth. We quote what we should have said or done, rather than what we really said or did; and in the first telling we may be fully aware of the distinction. But ere long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns in its stead alone. This is one great source of the fallibility of testimony meant to be quite honest. Especially where the marvellous is concerned, the story takes a tilt that way, and the memory follows the story. Dr. Carpenter quotes from Miss Cobbe the following, as an instance of a very common sort: "It happened once to the Writer to hear a most scrupulously conscientious friend narrate an incident of table-turning, to which she appended an assurance that the table rapped when _nobody was within a yard of it_. The writer being confounded by this latter fact, the lady, though fully satisfied of the accuracy of her statement, promised to look at the note she had made ten years previously of the transaction. The note was examined, and was found to contain the distinct statement that the table rapped when _the hands of six persons rested on it!_ The lady's memory as to all other points proved to be strictly correct; and in this point she had erred in entire good faith."[298] It is next to impossible to get a story of this sort accurate in all its details, although it is the inessential details that suffer most change.[299] Dickens and Balzac were said to have constantly mingled their fictions with their real experiences. Every one must have known _some_ specimen of our mortal dust so intoxicated with the thought of his own person and the sound of his own voice as never to be able even to think the truth when his autobiography was in question. Amiable, harmless, radiant J. V.! mayst thou ne'er wake to the difference between thy real and thy fondly-imagined self![300] 2. When we pass beyond alterations of memory to abnormal _alterations in the present self_ we have still graver disturbances. These alterations are of three main types, from the descriptive point of view. But certain cases unite features of two or more types; and our knowledge of the elements and causes of these changes of personality is so slight that the division into types must not be regarded as having any profound significance. The types are: (1) Insane delusions; (2) Alternating selves; (3) Mediumships or possessions.
* * * * * 1) In insanity we often have delusions projected into the past, which are melancholic or sanguine according to the character of the disease.
But the worst alterations of the self come from present perversions of sensibility and impulse which leave the past undisturbed, but induce the patient to think that the present _me_ is an altogether new personage. Something of this sort happens normally in the rapid expansion of the whole character, intellectual as well as volitional, which takes place after the time of puberty. The pathological cases are curious enough to merit longer notice.
The basis of our personality, as M. Ribot says, is that feeling of our vitality which, because it is so perpetually present, remains in the background of our consciousness.
"It is the basis because, always present, always acting, without peace or rest, it knows neither sleep nor fainting, and lasts as long as life itself, of which it is one form. It serves as a support to that self-conscious _me_ which memory constitutes, it is the medium of association among its other parts...Suppose now that it were possible at once to change our body and put another into its place: skeleton, vessels, viscera, muscles, skin, everything made new, except the nervous system with its stored-up memory of the past. There can be no doubt that in such a case the afflux of unaccustomed vital sensations would produce the gravest disorders. Between the old sense of existence engraved on the nervous system, and the new one acting with all the intensity of its reality and novelty, there would be irreconcilable contradiction."[301] With the beginnings of cerebral disease there often happens something quite comparable to this: "Masses of new sensation, hitherto foreign to the individual, impulses 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_.[302] Often their invasion into the former circle of feelings is felt as if the old self were being taken possession of by a dark overpowering might, and the fact of such 'possession' is described in fantastic images.
Always this doubleness, this 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 confirmed.
It may gradually contract associations with the trains of ideas which characterized the old self, or portions of the latter may be extinguished 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 emotional storms are calmed. But by that time _the old me itself has been falsified and turned into another_ by those associations, by that reception 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 adhesions they have contracted, as uncontrollable premises, and the man is no longer the same, but a really new person, his old self transformed."[303] But the patient himself 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 sensibility may be, which give rise to these contradictions, is for the most part impossible for a sound-minded person to conceive. 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 dæmons 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 person and moved by a hostile will. Thus the right hand may fight with the left as with an enemy.[304] Or the cries of the patient himself are assigned to another person with whom the patient expresses sympathy. The literature of insanity 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 become: "After the first or second day 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 receded to infinite distances--men and things together.
I was myself immeasurably far away, I looked about me with terror and astonishment; _the world was escaping from me_...I remarked at the same time that my voice was extremely far away from me, that it sounded no longer as if mine. I struck the ground with my foot, and perceived its resistance; but this resistance seemed illusory--not that the soil was soft, but that the weight of my body was reduced to almost nothing...I had the feeling of being without weight..." In addition to being so distant, "objects appeared to me _flat_. When I spoke with anyone, I saw him like an image cut out of paper with no relief...This sensation lasted intermittently for two years...Constantly it seemed as if my legs did not belong to me. It was almost as bad with my arms. As for my head, it seemed no longer to exist...I appeared to myself to act automatically, by an impulsion foreign to myself...There was inside of me a new being, and another part of myself, the old being, which took no interest in the new-comer.
I distinctly remember saying to myself that the sufferings of this new being were to me indifferent. I was never really dupe of these illusions, but my mind grew often tired of incessantly correcting the new impressions, and I let myself go and lived the unhappy life of this new entity. I had an ardent desire to see my old world again, to get back to my old self. This desire kept me from killing myself...I was another, and I hated, I despised this other; he was perfectly odious to me; it was certainly another who had taken my form and assumed my functions."[305] In cases similar to this, it is as certain that the _I_ is unaltered as that the _me_ is changed. That is to say, the present Thought of the patient is cognitive of both the old _me_ and the new, so long as its memory holds good. Only, within that objective sphere which formerly lent itself so simply to the judgment of recognition and of egoistic appropriation, strange perplexities have arisen. The present and the past both seen therein will not unite. Where is my old me? What is this new one? Are they the same? Or have I two? Such questions, answered by whatever theory the patient is able to conjure up as plausible, form the beginning of his insane life.[306] A case with which I am acquainted through Dr. C. J. Fisher of Tewksbury has possibly its origin in this way. The woman, Bridget F., "has been many years insane, and always speaks of her supposed self as 'the rat,' asking me to 'bury the little rat,' etc. Her real self she speaks of in the third person as 'the good woman,' saying, 'The good Woman knew Dr. F. and used to work for him,' etc. Sometimes she sadly asks: 'Do you think the good woman will ever come back?' She works at needlework, knitting, laundry, etc., and shows her work, saying, 'Isn't that good for only a rat?' She has, during periods of depression, hid herself under buildings, and crawled into holes and under boxes. 'She was only a rat, and wants to die,' she would say when we found her."
2. The phenomenon of _alternating personality_ in its simplest phases seems based on lapses of memory. Any man becomes, as we say, _inconsistent_ with himself if he forgets his engagements, pledges, knowledges, and habits; and it is merely a question of degree at what point we shall say that his personality is changed. In the pathological cases known as those of double or alternate personality the lapse of memory is abrupt, and is usually preceded by a period of unconsciousness or syncope lasting a variable length of time. In the hypnotic trance we can easily produce an alteration of the personality, either by telling the subject to forget all that has happened to him since such or such a date, in which case he becomes (it may be) a child again, or by telling him he is another altogether imaginary personage, in which case all facts about himself seem for the time being to lapse from out his mind, and he throws himself into the new character with a vivacity proportionate to the amount of histrionic imagination which he possesses.[307] But in the pathological cases the transformation is spontaneous. The most famous case, perhaps, on record is that of Félida X., reported by Dr. Azam of Bordeaux.[308] At the age of fourteen this woman began to pass into a 'secondary' state characterized by a change in her general disposition and character, as if certain 'inhibitions,' previously existing, were suddenly removed. During the secondary state she remembered the first state, but on emerging from it into the first state she remembered nothing of the second. At the age of forty-four the duration of the secondary state (which was on the whole superior in quality to the original state) had gained upon the latter so much as to occupy most of her time. During it she remembers the events belonging to the original state, but her complete oblivion of the secondary state when the original state recurs is often very distressing to her, as, for example, when the transition takes place in a carriage on her way to a funeral, and she hasn't the least idea which one of her friends may be dead. She actually became pregnant during one of her early secondary states, and during her first state had no knowledge of how it had come to pass. Her distress at these blanks of memory is sometimes intense and once drove her to attempt suicide.
To take another example, Dr. Rieger gives an account[309] of an epileptic man who for seventeen years had passed his life alternately free, in prisons, or in asylums, his character being orderly enough in the normal state, but alternating with periods, during which he would leave his home for several weeks, leading the life of a thief and vagabond, being sent to jail, having epileptic fits and excitement, being accused of malingering, etc., etc., and with never a memory of the abnormal conditions which were to blame for all his wretchedness.
"I have never got from anyone," says Dr. Rieger, "so singular an impression as from this man, of whom it could not be said that he had any properly conscious past at all...It is really impossible to think one's self into such a state of mind. His last larceny had been performed in Nürnberg, he knew nothing of it, and saw himself before the court and then in the hospital, but without in the least understanding the reason why. That he had epileptic attacks, he knew.
But it was impossible to convince him that for hours together he raved and acted in an abnormal way."
Another remarkable case is that of Mary Reynolds, lately republished again by Dr. Weir Mitchell.[310] This dull and melancholy young woman, inhabiting the Pennsylvania wilderness in 1811, "was found one morning, long after her habitual time for rising, in a profound sleep from which it was impossible to arouse her. After eighteen or twenty hours of sleeping she awakened, but in a state of unnatural consciousness. Memory had fled. To all intents and purposes she was as a being for the first time ushered into the world. 'All of the past that remained to her was the faculty of pronouncing a few words, and this seems to have been as purely instinctive as the wailings of an infant; for at first the words which she uttered were connected with no ideas in her mind.' Until she was taught their significance they were unmeaning sounds.
"'Her eyes were virtually for the first time opened upon the world.
Old things had passed away; all things had become new.' Her parents, brothers, sisters, friends, were not recognized or acknowledged as such by her. She had never seen them before,--never known them,--was not aware that such persons had been. Now for the first time she was introduced to their company and acquaintance. To the scenes by which she was surrounded she was a perfect stranger. The house, the fields, the forest, the hills, the vales, the streams,--all were novelties.