Adventurings in the Psychical Part 20

"'I think I am getting insane. At dinner time I would wear my hat during the meal.'

"On further inquiry, I obtained the following story, which I give substantially in the original language:

"'As I was going in to dinner, my girl asked me what I was going out for. "I am not," says I. "I am going to eat my dinner." "Then what have you got your hat on for?" says she. I put my hand to my head, and there was my bonnet. "Lord, Mamie!" says I, "am I going crazy?" "No, mother,"

she says, "you often do foolish things." I began to get frightened, but took off my bonnet and went into the next room to dinner.'

"Then the younger child similarly asked her where she was going, and called attention to her having her bonnet on. A second time she raised her hand to her head, and to her surprise found that her bonnet was really there. She again took it off, and later, when her husband entered, the same thing was repeated; but when she found her bonnet on her head for the third time, she made excuse of the stormy words that ensued to declare she would 'keep it on now till she was through.' After dinner, being alarmed, she consulted a neighbor about it."

But the longest time on record for the carrying out of a post-hypnotic suggestion was made by a subject of Doctor Liegeois, another of the early French investigators. Doctor Liegeois hypnotized a young man, and said to him:

"A year from to-day this is what you are going to do, and what you are going to see: You will call at Doctor Liebeault's office in the morning, and tell him that you have come to thank him and Doctor Liegeois for all they have done to improve your health. While you are talking to him, you will see enter the room a dog with a monkey riding on its back. They will perform a thousand tricks that will amuse you very much.

"Then you will see a man come in, leading a great American grizzly bear, which will also perform tricks. It will be a tame bear, so that you will not be at all frightened. The man will be delighted at recovering his trained dog and monkey, which he thought he had lost. Before he leaves you will borrow a few cents from Doctor Liebeault to give to him."

Doctor Liegeois, after repeating these complicated and absurd directions, awoke the young man, and by cautious questioning ascertained that his memory was a perfect blank for all that had been said to him while he was hypnotized. Great care was taken not to recall to his mind at any time the command given to him, and which his hypnotic self was expected to remember and perform on the appointed day.

Exactly a year later, at nine in the morning, Doctor Liegeois went to Doctor Liebeault's office, where he waited half an hour, and then returned home, thinking that the experiment had failed. But at ten minutes to ten the young man arrived. There was nothing about his appearance to indicate that he was in any abnormal condition.

He greeted Doctor Liebeault, explained that he had come to thank him for his kindness to him, and inquired for Doctor Liegeois, whom he said he had expected to find there. A few minutes afterward, Doctor Liegeois having meanwhile been hastily summoned, the young man cried out that a monkey had just come in, riding on the back of a dog. He watched the antics of these imaginary animals with great interest, laughing heartily, and describing the tricks he fancied he saw them performing.

After this, he announced the arrival of a man who was evidently the owner of the monkey and the dog, and he begged Doctor Liebeault to lend him a little money to reward the man for the amus.e.m.e.nt his animals had given him. But he saw no bear.

A moment later he was conversing with the two physicians, in evident ignorance of all that he had just been saying and doing. He angrily denied that there had been any animals in the room. When asked why he himself was there, he could give no definite reply. Doctor Liegeois immediately put him into the hypnotic state, and demanded:

"Do you know why you came here this morning?"

"Of course I do."

"Why was it?"

"Because you told me to."

"When?"

"A year ago."

"But you did not come at nine o'clock?"

"You did not tell me to come at nine o'clock. You said to come at exactly a year from the time you were talking to me. It was ten minutes to ten when you gave me your command."

"And why did you not see the bear?"

"Because you said nothing about a bear when you repeated your orders.

You spoke only once of a bear. Everything else you spoke of twice. I thought you had changed your mind about the bear."[51]

[51] Dr. Liegeois's account of his many hypnotic experiments, as given in his "De la Suggestion et du Somnambulisme dans leurs Rapports avec la Jurisprudence et la Medecine legale,"

forms one of the most striking contributions to the literature of hypnotism.

Obviously, the hypnotic self, distinct and different though it is from the primary, waking self, can reason, can a.n.a.lyze, can draw conclusions as readily as the conscious self, and is, to put it otherwise, as truly a self as the conscious self.

Facts like these, as was said, have caused numerous investigators to question the validity of the hitherto prevailing view of human personality. The self, they affirm, is no single, continuous, permanent ent.i.ty. On the contrary, it is merely a loosely coordinated aggregation of mental states, forever s.h.i.+fting and changing, so that the self of to-morrow may be vastly different from the self of to-day. To quote Professor Ribot, the famous scientist, and one of the most distinguished exponents of this new view of the self:

"The unity of the ego is not the unity of a single ent.i.ty diffusing itself among multiple phenomena; it is the coordination of a certain number of states perpetually renascent, and having for their sole, common basis the vague feeling of the body. This unity does not diffuse itself downward, but is aggregated by ascent from below; it is not an initial, but a terminal point."

And Ribot adds emphatically:

"It is the organism, with the brain, its supreme representative, which const.i.tutes the real personality; comprising in itself the remains of all that we have been and the possibilities of all that we shall be.

The whole individual character is there inscribed, with its active and pa.s.sive apt.i.tudes, its sympathies and antipathies, its genius, its talent or its stupidity, its virtues and its vices, its torpor or its activity."[52]

[52] Ribot's "Les Maladies de la Personalite." Quoted from F. W. H. Myers's translation in his "Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death," vol. i, p. 10.

Or, as the eminent psychologist, Alfred Binet, declares:

"We have long been accustomed by habits of speech, fictions of law, and also by the results of introspection, to consider each person as const.i.tuting an indivisible unity. Actual researches utterly modify this current notion. It seems to be well proven nowadays that if the unity of the ego be real, a quite different definition should be applied to it.

It is not a single ent.i.ty; for, if it were, one could not understand how in certain circ.u.mstances some patients, by exaggerating a phenomenon which obviously belongs to normal life, can unfold several different personalities. A thing that can be divided must consist of several parts. Should a personality be able to become double or triple, this would be proof that it is compound, a grouping of, and a resultant from, several elements."[53]

[53] "Les Alterations de la Personnalite," p. 316.

But the brain, which Ribot identifies with the personality, is a mere organ of the body, peris.h.i.+ng with the body. Does it follow that the self perishes with bodily death? Is it really without an abiding, indwelling principle superior to, and independent of, the physical organism--in short, a soul--that would enable it to survive the final catastrophe of earthly existence? Is man soulless? Does death end personality?

Aye, those who hold with Ribot would reply. To speak of a soul is, in their view of the case, sheer mysticism, since "the ego in us is nothing more than the functional result of the arrangement for the time being of the molecules or ions of our brain matter."

That is why, at the beginning of this chapter, I stated that, of all the labors of the modern investigators of the nature of man, none would seem to be so irreparably destructive as the blows they have dealt at the traditional conception of human personality.

Yet, when we probe a little deeper, it will be found that the damage is not so irreparable as would at first appear; nay, it will even be found that by their searching inquiries, the advocates of the brain-stuff theory have unwittingly provided stronger reasons than were at any previous time available for insisting both on the actuality of the soul and the fundamental unity and continuity of the ego.

Undeniably, it is necessary to modify the old conception in some important respects. After the discoveries that have been made as to the disintegrating effects of natural and artificially induced sleep, of disease, of sudden frights, of profound emotional shocks, of alcohol and drugs, etc., it is idle to pretend that unity and continuity are distinctive characteristics of the ordinary self of waking life. So far as that self is concerned, its instability and divisibility are now plainly evident.

What, however, if it can be shown that, equally with the secondary selves that may and so often do replace it, the primary self is only part of a larger self--a self which persists unchanged beneath all the mutations of spontaneous and experimental occurrence? In that case it will at once become clear that the situation has again changed completely, and that we are back to the traditional, the intuitive, the "common-sense" conception of personality, with the single difference that the term "self" means something broader and n.o.bler than when we limit it to the now demonstrated unstable, and ever-changeable self of ordinary consciousness.

And it is precisely to such a view of the self that the discoveries of the modern investigators, when closely scrutinized, irresistibly impel us. If, I repeat, they have shown that what we usually look upon as the self is liable to sudden extinction, they have likewise brought to light abundant evidence to prove that there is none the less an abiding self, a self not dominated by but dominating the organism, and unaffected by any vicissitudes that may befall the organism.

To be sure, it must be said that, as yet, comparatively few of those to whom we owe this evidence are prepared to admit that such is the ultimate outcome of their efforts. All the same, the evidence is there, not simply justifying, but rendering logically necessary, the hypothesis of a continuous, unitary ego, inclusive of, and superior to, all changing selves of outward manifestation, and possessing powers thus far little utilized; but, under certain conditions, utilizable for our material, intellectual, and moral betterment.

I have, in fact, in the previous chapters presented much of the evidence supporting this view.[54] All the phenomena of subconscious mental action--as variously exhibited in telepathy, crystal vision, automatic writing and speaking, the cure of disease by wholly mental means--point unmistakably, I am persuaded, to the existence of a superior self to which the ordinary self of everyday life stands in much the same relation as does the secondary self of a hysterical patient to the ordinary, normal self of a healthy person.

[54] See also my book, "The Riddle of Personality,"

especially pp. 69-70, 159-162.

Not all the faculties of the larger self--for instance, the faculty involved in telepathic action--seem to be adapted for ready employment here on earth. Which would argue, of course, for a future state in which, freed from all hampering limitations of the body, such faculties will have full manifestation.

But most a.s.suredly, as the findings of the psychopathologists indicate plainly, some among these hidden powers are amply available for use here and now, and may be so employed as to enable the self of ordinary consciousness to become less liable to disintegration, to ward off and conquer disease, to develop mental attainments of a high order, to solve life's varying problems with a sureness and success sadly lacking to most of us at present.