Chapter xiii

of Hering's contribution to Hermann's Handbuch der Physiologie, vol. iii.

[107] In the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, pp. 253-4, I have tried to account for some of the variations in this consciousness. Out of 140 persons whom I found to feel their lost foot, some did so _dubiously_. "Either they only feel it occasionally, or only when it pains them, or only when they try to move it; or they only feel it when they 'think a good deal about it' and make an effort to conjure it up. When they 'grow inattentive,' the feeling 'flies back' or 'jumps back,' to the stump. Every degree of consciousness, from complete and permanent hallucination down to something hardly distinguishable from ordinary fancy, seems represented in the sense of the missing extremity which these patients say they have. Indeed I have seldom seen a more plausible lot of evidence for the view that imagination and sensation are but differences of vividness in an identical process than these confessions, taking them altogether, contain. Many patients say they can hardly tell whether they feel or fancy the limb."

[108] Pflüger's Archiv, xxxvii. 1.

[109] Not all patients have this additional illusion.

[110] I ought to say that in _almost_ all cases the volition is followed by actual contraction of muscles in the _stump_.

[111] Cf. Herbart, Psychol. als. Wissenschaft, § 125.

[112] Compare the historical reviews by K. Lange: Ueber Apperception (Plauen, 1879), pp. 12-14; by Staude in Wundt's Philosophische Studien, i. 149; and by Marty in Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil., x. 347 ff.

[113] Problems, vol. i. p. 118 ff.

[114] See his Einleitung in die Psychologie u. Sprachwissenschaft (1881) p. 166 ff.

[115] One of my colleagues, asking himself the question after reading the anecdote, tells me that he replied 'Harvard College,' the faculty of that body having voted, a few days previously, to keep back the degrees of members of the graduating class who might be disorderly on class-day night. W. J.

[116] _Op. cit._ pp. 166-171.

[117] The great maxim in pedagogy is to knit every new piece of knowledge on to a pre-existing curiosity--i.e., to assimilate its matter in some way to what is already known. Hence the advantage of "comparing all that is far off and foreign to something that is near home, of making the unknown plain by the example of the known, and of connecting all the instruction with the personal experience of the pupil.... If the teacher is to explain the distance of the sun from the earth, let him ask.... 'If anyone there in the sun fired off a cannon straight at you, what should you do?' 'Get out of the way' would be the answer. 'No need of that,' the teacher might reply. 'You may quietly go to sleep in your room, and get up again, you may wait till your confirmation-day, you may learn a trade, and grow as old as I am,--_then_ only will the cannon-ball be getting near, _then_ you may jump to one side! See, so great as that is the sun's distance!'" (K. Lange, Ueber Apperception, 1879, p. 76--a charming though prolix little work.)

[118] A. Schopenhauer, Satz vom Grunde, chap. iv. H. Spencer, Psychol.,

## part vi. chaps. ix, x. E. v. Hartmann, Phil. of the Unconscious (B),

chaps. vii, viii. W. Wundt, Beiträge, pp. 422 ff.; Vorlesungen, iv, xiii. H. Helmholtz, Physiol. Optik, pp. 430, 447. A. Binet, Psychol. du Raisonnement, chaps. iii, v. Wundt and Helmholtz have more recently 'recanted.' See above, vol i. p. 169 note.

[119] When not all M, but only some M, is A, when, in other words, M is 'undistributed' the conclusion is liable to error. Illusions would thus be _logical fallacies_, if true perceptions were valid syllogisms. They would draw false conclusions from undistributed middle terms.

[120] See Spencer, Psychol., ii. p. 250, note, for a physiological hypothesis to account for this fact.

[121] Here is another good example, taken from Helmholtz's Optics, p. 435: "The sight of a man walking is a familiar spectacle to us. We perceive it as a connected whole, and at most notice the most striking of its peculiarities. Strong attention is required, and a special choice of the point of view, in order to feel the perpendicular and lateral oscillations of such a walking figure. We must choose fitting points or lines in the background with which to compare the positions of its head, but if a distant walking man be looked at through an astronomical telescope (which inverts the object), what a singular hopping and rocking appearance he presents! No difficulty now in seeing the body's oscillations, and many other details of the gait.... But, on the other hand, its total character, whether light or clumsy, dignified or graceful, is harder to perceive than in the upright position."

[122] Illusions and hallucinations must both be distinguished from _delusions_. A delusion is a false opinion about a matter of fact, which need not necessarily involve, though it often does involve, false perceptions of sensible things. We may, for example, have religious delusions, medical delusions, delusions about our own importance, about other peoples' characters, etc., _ad libitum_. The delusions of the insane are apt to affect certain typical forms, often very hard to explain. But in many cases they are certainly theories which the patients invent to account for their abnormal bodily sensations. In other cases they are due to hallucinations of hearing and of sight. Dr. Clouston (Clinical Lectures on Mental Disease, lecture iii _ad fin._) gives the following special delusions as having been found in about a hundred melancholy female patients who were afflicted in this way. There were delusions of

general persecution; being destitute; general suspicion; being followed by the police; being poisoned; being very wicked; being killed; impending death; being conspired against; impending calamity; being defrauded; the soul being lost; being preached against in church; having no stomach; being pregnant; having no inside; having a bone in the throat; having neither stomach nor brains; having lost much money; being covered with vermin; being unfit to live; letters being written about her; that she will not recover; property being stolen; that she is to be murdered; her children being killed; that she is to be boiled alive; having committed theft; that she is to be starved; the legs being made of glass; that the flesh is boiling; having horns on the head; that the head is severed from being chloroformed; the body; having committed murder; that children are burning; fear of being hanged; that murders take place around; being called names by person; that it is wrong to take food; being acted on by spirits; being in hell; being a man; being tempted of the devil; the body being transformed; being possessed of the devil; insects coming from the body; having committed an rape being practised on her; unpardonable sin; having a venereal disease; unseen agencies working; being a fish; her own identity; being dead; being on fire; having committed suicide of the soul.

[123] V. Kandinsky: Kritische u. Klinische Betrachtungen im Gebiete d. Sinnestäuschungen (1886), p. 42.

[124] See Proceedings of Soc. for Psych. Research, Dec. 1889, pp. 7, 183. The International Congress for Experimental Psychology has now charge of the Census, and the present writer is its agent for America.

[125] This case is of the class which Mr. Myers terms 'veridical.' In a subsequent letter the writer informs me that his vision occurred some five hours _before_ the child was born.

[126] Le Sommeil et les Rêves (1865), chaps. iii, iv.

[127] This theory of incomplete rectification of the inner images by their usual reductives is most brilliantly stated by M. Taine in his work on Intelligence, book ii. chap. i.

[128] Not, of course, in all cases, because the cells remaining active are themselves on the way to be overpowered by the general (unknown) condition to which sleep is due.

[129] For a full account of Jackson's theories, see his 'Croonian Lectures' published in the Brit. Med. Journ. for 1884. Cf. also his remarks in the Discussion of Dr. Mercier's paper on Inhibition in 'Brain,' xi. 361.

The loss of vivacity in the images in the process of waking, as well as the gain of it in falling asleep, are both well described by M. Taine, who writes (on Intelligence, i. 50, 58) that often in the daytime, when fatigued and seated in a chair, it is sufficient for him to close one eye with a handkerchief, when, "by degrees, the sight of the other eye becomes vague, and it closes. All external sensations are gradually effaced, or cease, at all events, to be remarked; the internal images, on the other hand, feeble and rapid during the state of complete wakefulness, become intense, distinct, colored, steady, and lasting: there is a sort of ecstasy, accompanied by a feeling of expansion and of comfort. Warned by frequent experience, I know that sleep is coming on, and that I must not disturb the rising vision; I remain passive, and in a few minutes it is complete. Architecture, landscapes, moving figures, pass slowly by, and sometimes remain, with incomparable clearness of form and fulness of being; sleep comes on, and I know no more of the real world I am in. Many times, like M. Maury, I have caused myself to be gently roused at different moments of this state, and have thus been able to mark its characters.--The intense image which seems an external object is but a more forcible continuation of the feeble image which an instant before I recognized as internal; some scrap of a forest, some house, some person which I vaguely imagined on closing my eyes, has in a minute become present to me with full bodily details, so as to change into a complete hallucination. Then, waking up on a hand touching me, I feel the figure decay, lose color, and evaporate: what had appeared a substance is reduced to a shadow.... In such a case, I have often seen, for a passing moment, the image _grow pale_, waste away, and evaporate; sometimes, on opening the eyes, a fragment of landscape or the skirt of a dress appears still to float over the fire-irons or on the black hearth." This persistence of dream-objects for a few moments after the eyes are opened seems to be no extremely rare experience. Many cases of it have been reported to me directly. Compare Müller's Physiology, Baly's tr., p. 945.

[130] I say the 'normal' paths, because hallucinations are not incompatible with _some_ paths of association being left. Some hypnotic patients will not only have hallucinations of objects suggested to them, but will amplify them and act out the situation. But the paths here seem excessively narrow, and the reflections which ought to make the hallucination incredible do not occur to the subject's mind. In general, the narrower a train of 'ideas' is, the vivider the consciousness is of each. Under ordinary circumstances, the entire brain probably plays a part in draining any centre which may be ideationally active. When the drainage is reduced in any way it probably makes the active process more intense.

[131] M. A. Maury gives a number: _op. cit._ pp. 126-8.

[132] M. Binet's highly important experiments, which were first published in vol. XVII of the Revue Philosophique (1884), are also given in full in