reflected. But even the unreflective must be impressed by the more striking phenomena which may be produced experimentally in hypnotic subjects, or which present themselves spontaneously, to the consternation of the family and friends of the unhappy victims of certain nervous diseases. A consciousness may be divided in time in such a way that whole sections of a life may be cut off and become purely ejective to the rest; a consciousness may also be divided in such a way that we are bound to refer to the one organism coexistent personalities, each of which is ejective to the other. The division may be, so to speak, either transverse or longitudinal. And we may have indubitable evidence of the subsequent coalescence of these separate consciousnesses to form one mind again.

I have said above that we have no single fact to prove that two different brains may become such a functional unit that the minds referred to them may coalesce to form a single consciousness. The question has but a speculative interest. Nevertheless, the fact remains that what was purely ejective to a given consciousness may, under certain conditions, become objectively known, may become a part of it; and in the present state of our knowledge (or of our ignorance) we should admit that it does not seem absurd to speak of the theoretic possibility of the coalescence of the consciousnesses of two different men.

Our consciousness consists of a very large number of successive states, and its content at any moment is highly complex. It is the mark of this great collection of psychic elements that each part of it is known both objectively and ejectively; that is, that it is known directly, and known in relation to its physical signs. How extended may be the consciousness known in this twofold way it is impossible to determine a priori, and it is equally impossible to say to how large a portion of the physical world such a consciousness may be related as we relate mind and brain. The question is simply a question of fact.

As things stand, we have no reason to relate in this way one consciousness to more than one organism, and we must accept the fact that the innumerable consciousnesses which we believe to exist in connection with the bodies of other men and of the brutes are certified to us only on ejective evidence. So far as we know, we shall never attain to any proof of their existence different in kind. from that which we possess now. Yet the mere fact that, even in

a single instance, what has been pure eject may come to be known also as object, is not without its significance for the whole doctrine of eject and object. It is one thing to say: we have only ejective evidence for the existence of other men's minds; and it is another thing to say that it is inconceivable that we ever should have any other evidence of the existence of what we now call other men's minds. We seem to find in the above reflections an added reason for repudiating the statement that our belief in the existence of other men's minds cannot be theoretically justified.

Does this obliterate the distinction between object and eject? Not in the least. For another mind, so long as it remains another mind, we can never have anything but ejective evidence there is but one argument for other minds. Should any other mind or fragment of mind become one with ours, we should know it, as we now know our own mind, in a twofold way. We should know it directly, and not merely through its physical signs.

It is important not to misunderstand this statement. When I maintain that it is not inconceivable that we may come to know directly what is now to us another mind, and is known only as eject, I do not mean that the mind in question may come to be perceived as an atom may, perhaps, come to be perceived. To be perceived thus it would have to be a material thing. I mean to maintain only that it may come to be known as my mind is now known, that it may form one consciousness with the latter. This explanation is not wholly unnecessary, for the words "object" and "objective" may easily be misleading. In saying that I may conceivably come to have objective knowledge of another mind, or rather, of what was another mind, I can only mean that I may come to know the phenomena in question as I know mental experiences, once forgotten-lost, cut off from my consciousness but which have been restored to me. Such experiences I do not perceive, and I do not expect to perceive, as I perceive another man's body. If I choose to say that I know them as object, I must bear in mind that this does not mean that I know them as external object. Similarly, any mind that I may come to know directly will not be known as external object. Could it be thus known, it would not be mind. When contrasted with "eject' and "ejective," the words "object" and "objective" are given a special sense, as the reader has, no doubt, remarked.

"

Pt

CHAPTER XXIX

THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

SUCH reflections as are contained in the preceding pages give a peculiar insistence to the question: What, after all, do we mean by one consciousness? How are we to conceive the difference between two consciousnesses, "sharing the objects of knowledge between them," and a single consciousness? The psychologist unhesitatingly draws the distinction. We may diagrammatically symbolize the difference by representing it as the difference between two halos and one. But what is it that leads us to call a certain number of psychic phenomena a consciousness, and to ascribe to them a certain unity?

Perhaps the best way for me to approach this question is to show how the problem of the unity of consciousness has presented itself to an acute psychologist whose studies have forced it into a position of peculiar prominence. After a careful examination of the phenomena of catalepsy, where the consciousness of the individual appears to be reduced to a single sensation or a very limited group of such; of the phenomena of the somnambulistic states, with which we are all familiar as illustrated in hypnotic subjects; and of the curious curtailings of the normal consciousness in certain hysterical patients, who may lose out of their lives various groups of sensations or the memory of whole weeks, months, or years, — M. Janet, whose admirable work on "Psychological Automatism" I have cited in the preceding chapter, feels impelled to conceive of the phenomena of consciousness and of their unity as is indicated in the following extract : —

"The phenomenon produced in our consciousness when an impression has been made on our senses and which is betrayed by the phrases: 'I see a light; I feel a prick,' is already a very complex phenomenon. It is not constituted by the mere brute sensation alone; but it includes in addition an operation of active synthesis, present at every moment, which connects this sensation

with the group of images and of anterior judgments which constitute the ego or the personality. The apparently simple fact which is expressed by the words 'I see; I hear,' is, even if we leave out of account the ideas of externality, distance, and localization, already a complex perception. I have insisted upon this idea before, when studying automatic acts performed in the cataleptic state. I there adopted the opinion of Maine de Biran, who distinguishes in the human mind a purely affective life of mere sensations, phenomena conscious but not attributed to a personality, and a perceptive life of sensations united, systematized, and attached to a personality.

"We may, while attaching to the figure only a purely symbolic value, represent to ourselves our conscious perception as a double process; as including: (1) the simultaneous existence of a certain number of conscious sensations, tactual (T T" T"), muscular (M M' M"), visual (VVV), and auditory (A A' A").

P

These sensations exist simultaneously and in a state of isolation from each other, like a number of little lights which might be lit in all the corners of a dark hall. These primitive conscious phenomena may, anterior to perception, be of different kindssensations, memories, images, and may have different sources. Some may come from an actual impression made upon the senses; others may be introduced by the automatic play of association in the wake of other phenomena. But, not to complicate a problem already too complex, let us consider at first only the simplest case, and let us suppose all those elementary phenomena to be simple sensations produced by an external modification of the organs of sense.

"(2) An operation of active and actual synthesis by which these sensations connect themselves with one another, form a

group, fuse, and are lost in a unique state, to which a principal sensation gives its tone, but which probably does not wholly resemble any one of its constituent elements. This new phenomenon is the perception P. Since this perception comes into being at every instant, as a consequence of each new group, and since it contains memories as well as sensations, it forms the idea that we have of our personality, and after that it can be said that some one perceives the images T T T", M M' M', etc. The activity that thus synthetizes at every moment of life the different psychological phenomena, and that forms our personal perception, must not be confounded with the automatic association of ideas. The latter, as I have said before, is not an actual activity: it is the result of a former activity which once synthetized certain phenomena into an emotion or a unique perception, and which has left them with a tendency to reproduce themselves in the same order. The perception of which I am now speaking is the synthesis at the moment of its formation, at the moment when it unites new phenomena into a unity at each instant new.

". . . In a theoretically perfect case, which probably does not exist, all the sensations comprised in the first operation, T T" T", etc., would be united in the perception P, and the man would be able to say 'I feel' with reference to all the phenomena which take place in him. But this is never the case, and, in the most perfectly constituted of men, there must be a mass of sensations produced by the first operation which escape the influence of the second. I do not mean sensations which escape the voluntary attention and are not comprised in what I may call the field of clear vision. I mean sensations which are absolutely unattached to the personality and of which the ego does not recognize that it is conscious, because, as a matter of fact, it does not contain them. In order to represent this to ourselves, let us suppose that, while the first operation remains the same, the second operation is modified. The power of synthesis can exercise itself, at each moment of life, on only a certain number of phenomena, on five, for example, and not on twelve. Thus out of the twelve supposed sensations, T T TMMM", etc., the ego will perceive only the five, T T MV A. Touching these sensations it will say, 'I have felt them; I have been conscious of them.' But if we speak to it of the other phenomena, of T" VA', etc., which, according to our hypothesis, have also been conscious sensations,