MULTIPLE CONSCIOUSNESS.*
WE do not think the " Society for Psychical Research " receive half the credit that they deserve for their industrious, patient, and moat candid. series of investigations. Those who think of
this Society as of a number of visionaries or dreamers who are trying to find justification for their own mystical ideas, do not know what the Society is doing in the least degree. For example, in the present number there is a paper fall of the most acute exposures of the trickery of so-called "spiritualistic sciences," and another paper of considerable care and patience on " The Possibilities of Malobservation and Lapse of Memory," which is fall of warning on the way in which, without the most careful discipline in observation of this kind, honest observers leap to mistaken conclusions. We call attention to these careful studies of the tricks of so-called " mediums," and the false impressions of truthful observers, because we are convinced that the Society is every bit as honest in taking guarantees against imposture and against hasty belief,as it is in recording those normal or abnormal facts by the accurate observation of which the area of our
psychical knowledge has been so much enlarged. The paper, however, which has most interest for us in the present number of the Society's Proceedings is the one with which the volume
opens, by Mr. Myers, which is chiefly a discussion of certain French cases of double or treble consciousness, where persons hypnotised by a physician have developed two or three different phases of memory and life, each of which is capable of a certain continuity of its own, and is yet so distinct from the other phases that the personality itself appears to be different, so long as the double or treble state can be reproduced. To take a case of the double refraction of consciousness, as we may call it, from Mr. Myers's paper :—
"I will conclude this series with a case which, though of a less unusual type than the last, shows in a clear and striking way how deeply post-hypnotic suggestion may modify the self-supposed per- sonality and, incidentally, the handwriting of the subject. I shall abbreviate the ease, but shall keep, as far as I can, the phraseology of the Commandant de Roches, to whom it is due.
"'Subject. Benoit; eighteen years old ; clerk in an office ; intelli- gent and healthy ; trained for some months to posthypnotic suggestion.—Suggestion. "Beginning with to-morrow, Thursday, you will come to my house for three days running at 6.30. When you enter my room you will believe that you are my son Henri ; when you leave the house you will be Benoit again."—Effect. On Thursday at 5.30 Benoit arrives ; he enters the house without ringing, runs upstairs and sits down in my study in Henri's place, saying, " I have just bad a good long walk," which is not tree, since he has just come from his office. " With whom do you walk ?" " With M."—a friend of my eon's whom he barely knows—"he has lent me this book." "Have you seen Benoit P" "No, not for three months." " Well, I shall try some experiments on you then." "It will be no use, papa, you know that you can't do anything with me." I make him rigid, insensible to pain, &C., which surprises him greatly. I road him the notes of my experiments with Benoit; he remembers some of them (those at which Henri was present), is sorry to have missed others. I make him write a sentence, and his writing resembles my 8012.5 (which is not the case with his normal writing), and this, although he does not know my son's writing, or has only seen it long ago and by chance. I then impose upon him various personalities and make him write in each case ; and thus obtain a series of handwritings differing one from the other.'
" This, it will be seen, is the important point for us. A handwriting supposed to be unknown, or at least unfamiliar, to the subject, is reproduced tolerably when the subject believes himself to be that Henri whose script he presumably could not have imitated in the normal state. A few more details will be of interest, as showing the way in which the personality is kept ,,p,—the evasive answers resorted to when puzzling questions are proposed. Note, also, Beuoit's ready familiarity with the family circle of which he supposes himself to be a member, which may remind us of the affectionate manners of certain ' communicating spirits,' which, nevertheless, are liable to sad blunders as to their relations' names.
" ' We pea into the adjoining room, where my family are assembled. He sits down by the fire, talks with his " mamma," with his sister, with his little brother, tutoyant them all. Seeing that I am standing, he jumps op and offers me his seat with, " I beg your pardon, papa." As soon as we have crossed the threshold of the house he becomes Benoit again, calls me " mon oommandant," and tells me that he has passed the day at his office desk. Next day Benoit comes in again without knocking, sits down by the fire, and begins to read. 1 ques- tion him on his studies of the day; he becomes confused, and answers that his head is stupid, and he cannot remember On Satur- day at 5.30 I see Benoit from the window, running bareheaded through the street; I go to meet him and find him in the vestibule, puzzling himself as to what he can have done with his bat. When he had some in, be says, and wanted to hang it up, he found it was not there. I take him out into the garden (where he becomes Benoit again) and ask him what he has done with his hat ; he tells me that his chief at the office had tried to prevent him from leaving, and had hidden his hat to keep him, but that he felt that I wanted him, and ran off without his hat, so as not to be late. We re-enter the bones, • Proceedingsof the Society for Psychical Research. Part XI. Lando), Trabner and Co. and at once he begins to nozzle himself again as to what on earth be has done with his hat. We enter my study, and I show him the sen- tences which he wrote the day before; he has no recollection of them, and is astonished to find that he has become as good a subject as Benoit. He is insensible to pinches or pricks, but feels heat and cold. I try to destroy the suggestion by placing my hand on his head, " en beteronome ;" the only result whit* I obtain is to make him think of Benoit. I pass a voltaic current through his neck ; the thought of Benoit recurs more strongly ; I tell him that I was trying to make him think that he was Benoit. " Ob, you won't get quite as far as that !" he replies with a laugh. We go to dinner; he had never eat at my table before. He site down in an easy way ; I remark that that is not his usual place. " True ! what was I thinking of ?" He criticises the food and orders the servants about. Suddenly I put him to sleep again, and say, "You are no longer Henri; you are Benoit ; you will remember that you have been dining here." I wake him; he shakes his head ; opens his eyes wide ; rises timidly and con- fusedly, thanks me and takes his leave.'
"This case, strange though it sounds, is but a well-developed sped- men of the post-hypnotic suggestions which during these last few years have been inspired in so many subjects, in more and more com- plex forme. But it deserves to be remembered when we come to con- eider the relative value of the various items—similarity of style, demeanour, handwriting, knowledge, which go to makeup the evidence that an apparent personality is really what it assumes to be."
The condition of mind which was due in this case to external suggestion by one who had a mesmeric kind of influence over the patient, is in other cases the result of fever or of epileptic fits. Mr. Myers produces other cases of the same nature,—some of them of a still more complicated kind,—and one in which no less than three different personalities were apparently centred in the same patient, and he insists that a great many of the so-called phenomena of spiritualism, in which one person who in his ordinary state knows nothing of that which, under the influence as he believes of some quite different intelligence, he has written, professes to write down the thoughts of an invisible epiritnal agent, may be explained very simply as nothing but two distinct planes of memory existing in the same mind when placed under different physical or moral influences. Mr. Myers infers from a good number of cases of this kind which he has collected, and which appear to occur much oftener in the practice of French physicians than in our own,—though there are some very cele- brated English cases,—that man's consciousness may, under certain exceptional conditions, be broken into two or three different strata, the mind which penetrates any one of these strata being apparently quite detaclad from the mind which penetrates another of them,—just as in the case of a dream which is taken up night after night, or sleep after sleep, at the point at which it left off in the previous sleep, so that the dreamer is one person in his dream and another quite different person while he is awake. In this case we know that neither need the man, when awake, remember his dream, nor, as a rule, used the dreamer, in hie dream, show any knowledge of the mind of the man when he is awake. Mr. Myers holds that the conscionsnes of men is often liable to this same dislocation into separate series, though it is always possible that these separate series of conscionenesses will be reunited. in one, whenever the organisation recovers its normal state. We say only that it is always possible, for even in health we are usually profoundly unconscious of our dreams, while as dreamers we are profoundly unconscious of our waking states, so that it is by no means necessary that these states of multiple con- sciousness should ever be reunited. Still, the evidence that this state of multiple consciousness can be artificially produced in the mind by the operation of a magnetiser or hypnotiser, is a matter of the greatest possible interest ; and those of our readers who care to study the subject will find the most valuable materials in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, as well in the present as in the past numbers of its publication.
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