Part 25 (2/2)

The hypnotised subject may pa.s.s through a lethargic stage before he wakes into a state in which he has gained _community of sensation_ with the operator; somewhat as the silkworm (to use the oldest and the most suggestive of all ill.u.s.trations) pa.s.ses through the apparent torpor of the coc.o.o.n-stage before evolving into the moth. Again, the automatist's hand (as we shall presently see) is apt to pa.s.s through a stage of inco-ordinated movements, which might almost be taken for ch.o.r.eic, before it acquires the power of ready and intelligent writing. Similarly the development, for instance, of a tooth may be preceded by a stage of indefinite aching, which might be ascribed to the formation of an abscess, did not the new tooth ultimately show itself. And still more striking cases of a _perturbation which masks evolution_ might be drawn from the history of the human organism as it develops into its own maturity, or prepares for the appearance of the fresh human organism which is to succeed it.

a.n.a.logy, therefore, both physiological and psychical, warns us not to conclude that any given psychosis is merely degenerative until we have examined its results closely enough to satisfy ourselves whether they tend to bring about any enlargement of human powers, to open any new inlet to the reception of objective truth. If such there prove to be, then, with whatever morbid activities the psychosis may have been intertwined, it contains indications of an evolutionary _nisus_ as well.

These remarks, I hope, may have sufficiently cleared the ground to admit of our starting afresh on the consideration of such motor automatisms as are at any rate not morbid in their effect on the organism, and which I now have to show to be _evolutive_ in character. I maintain that we have no valid ground for a.s.suming that the movements which are _not_ due to our conscious will must be less important, and less significant, than those that _are_. We observe, of course, that in the organic region the movements which are _not_ due to conscious will are really the most important of all, though the voluntary movements by which a man seeks food and protects himself against enemies are also of great practical importance--he must first live and multiply if he is to learn and know.

But we must guard against confusing importance for immediate practical life with importance for science--on which even practical life ultimately depends. As soon as the task of living and multiplying is no longer all-engrossing, we begin to change our relative estimate of values, and to find that it is not the broad and obvious phenomena, but the residual and elusive phenomena, which are oftenest likely to introduce us to new avenues of knowledge. I wish to persuade my readers that this is quite as truly the case in psychology as in physics.

As a first step in our a.n.a.lysis, we may point out certain main characters which unite in a true cla.s.s all the automatisms which we are here considering--greatly though these may differ among themselves in external form.

In the first place, then, our automatisms are _independent_ phenomena; they are what the physician calls _idiognomonic_. That is to say, they are not merely symptomatic of some other affection, or incidental to some profounder change. The mere fact, for instance, that a man writes messages which he does not consciously originate will not, when taken alone, prove anything beyond this fact itself as to the writer's condition. He may be perfectly sane, in normal health, and with nothing unusual observable about him. This characteristic--provable by actual observation and experiment--distinguishes our automatisms from various seemingly kindred phenomena. Thus we may have to include in our cla.s.s the occasional automatic utterance of words or sentences. But the continuous exhausting vociferation of acute mania does not fall within our province; for those shouts are merely _symptomatic_; nor, again, does the _cri hydrocephalique_ (or spontaneous meaningless noise which sometimes accompanies water on the brain); for that, too, is no independent phenomenon, but the direct consequence of a definite lesion.

Furthermore, we shall have to include in our cla.s.s certain simple movements of the hands, co-ordinated into the act of writing. But here, also, our definition will lead us to exclude _ch.o.r.eic_ movements, which are merely symptomatic of nervous malnutrition; or which we may, if we choose, call _idiopathic_, as const.i.tuting an independent malady. But our automatisms are not _idiopathic_ but _idiognomonic_; they may indeed be a.s.sociated with or facilitated by certain states of the organism, but they are neither a symptom of any other malady, nor are they a malady in themselves.

Agreeing, then, that our peculiar cla.s.s consists of automatisms which are idiognomonic,--whose existence does not necessarily imply the existence of some profounder affection already known as producing them,--we have still to look for some more positive bond of connection between them, some quality common to all of them, and which makes them worth our prolonged investigation.

This we shall find in the fact that they are all of them _message-bearing_ or _nunciative_ automatisms. I do not, of course, mean that they all of them bring messages from sources external to the automatist's own mind. In some cases they probably do this; but as a rule the so-called messages seem more probably to originate within the automatist's own personality. Why, then, it may be asked, do I call them _messages_? We do not usually speak of a man as sending a message to himself. The answer to this question involves, as we shall presently see, the profoundest conception of these automatisms to which we can as yet attain. They present themselves to us as messages communicated from one stratum to another stratum of the same personality. Originating in some deeper zone of a man's being, they float up into superficial consciousness, as deeds, visions, words, ready-made and full-blown, without any accompanying perception of the elaborative process which has made them what they are.

Can we then (we may next ask) in any way predict the possible _range_ of these motor automatisms? Have we any limit a.s.signable _a priori_, outside which it would be useless to look for any externalisation of an impulse emanating from sub-conscious strata of our being?

The answer to this must be that no such limit can be with any confidence suggested. We have not yet learnt with any distinctness even how far the wave from a _consciously_-perceived stimulus will spread, or what changes its motion will a.s.sume. Still less can we predict the limitations which the resistance of the organism will impose on the radiation of a stimulus originated within itself. We are learning to consider the human organism as a practically infinite complex of interacting vibrations; and each year adds many new facts to our knowledge of the various transformations which these vibrations may undergo, and of the unexpected artifices by which we may learn to cognise some stimulus which is not directly felt.

A few concrete instances will make my meaning plainer. And my first example shall be taken from those experiments in _muscle-reading_--less correctly termed mind-reading--with which the readers of the _Proceedings_ of the S.P.R. are already familiar. Let us suppose that I am to hide a pin, and that some accomplished muscle-reader is to take my hand and find the pin by noting my muscular indications.[162] I first hide the pin in the hearth-rug; then I change my mind and hide it in the bookshelf. I fix my mind on the bookshelf, but resolve to make no guiding movement. The muscle-reader takes my hand, leads me first to the rug, then to the bookshelf, and finds the pin. Now, what has happened in this case? What movements have I made?

Firstly, I have made no _voluntary_ movement; and secondly, I have made no _conscious involuntary_ movement. But, thirdly, I have made an _unconscious involuntary_ movement which directly depended on conscious ideation. I strongly thought of the bookshelf, and when the bookshelf was reached in our vague career about the room I made a movement--say rather a tremor occurred--in my hand, which, although beyond both my knowledge and my control, was enough to supply to the muscle-reader's delicate sensibility all the indication required. All this is now admitted, and, in a sense, understood; we formulate it by saying that my conscious ideation contained a motor element; and that this motor element, though inhibited from any conscious manifestation, did yet inevitably externalise itself in a peripheral tremor.

But, fourthly, something more than this has clearly taken place. Before the muscle-reader stopped at the bookshelf he stopped at the rug. I was no longer consciously thinking of the rug; but the idea of the pin in the rug must still have been reverberating, so to say, in my sub-conscious region; and this unconscious memory, this unnoted reverberation, revealed itself in a peripheral tremor nearly as distinct as that which (when the bookshelf was reached) corresponded to the strain of conscious thought.

This tremor, then, was in a certain sense a message-bearing automatism.

It was the externalisation of an idea which, once conscious, had become unconscious, though in the slightest conceivable degree--namely, by a mere slight escape from the field of direct attention.

Having, then, considered an instance where the automatic message pa.s.ses only between two closely-adjacent strata of consciousness, externalising an impulse derived from an idea which has only recently sunk out of consciousness and which could easily be summoned back again;--let us find our next ill.u.s.tration in a case where the line of demarcation between the strata of consciousness through which the automatic message pierces is distinct and impa.s.sable by any effort of will.

Let us take a case of _post-hypnotic suggestion_;--say, for instance, an experiment of Edmund Gurney's (see _Proceedings_ S.P.R., vol. iv. p.

319). The subject had been trained to write with planchette, after he had been awakened, the statements which had been made to him when in the hypnotic trance. He wrote the desired words, or something like them, but while he wrote them his waking self was entirely unaware of what his hand was writing. Thus, having been told in the trance, ”It has begun snowing again,” he wrote, after waking, ”It begun snowing,” while he read aloud, with waking intelligence, from a book of stories, and was quite unconscious of what his hand (placed on a planchette behind a screen) was at the same time writing.

Here we have an automatic message of traceable origin; a message implanted in the hypnotic stratum of the subject's self, and cropping up--like a fault--in the waking stratum,--externalised in automatic movements which the waking self could neither predict nor guide.

Yet once more. In the discussion which will follow we shall have various instances of the transformation (as I shall regard it) of psychical shock into definite muscular energy of apparently a quite alien kind.

Such transformations of so-called psychical into physical force--of will into motion--do of course perpetually occur within us.

For example, I take a child to a circus; he sits by me holding my hand; there is a discharge of musketry and his grip tightens. Now in this case we should call the child's tightened grip automatic. But suppose that, instead of merely holding my hand, he is trying with all his might to squeeze the dynamometer, and that the sudden excitation enables him to squeeze it harder--are we then to describe that extra squeeze as automatic? or as voluntary?

However phrased, it is the fact (as amply established by M. Fere and others[163]) that excitations of almost any kind--whether sudden and startling or agreeable and prolonged--do tend to increase the subject's dynamometrical power. In the first place, and this is in itself an important fact, the average of squeezing-power is found to be greater among educated students than among robust labouring men, thus showing that it is not so much developed muscle as active brain which renders possible a sudden concentration of muscular force. But more than this; M. Fere finds that with himself and his friends the mere listening to an interesting lecture, or the mere stress of thought in solitude, or still more the act of writing or of speech, produces a decided increase of strength in the grip, especially of the right hand. The same effect of dynamogeny is produced with hypnotic subjects, by musical sounds, by coloured light, especially red light, and even by a hallucinatory suggestion of red light. ”All our sensations,” says M. Fere in conclusion, ”are accompanied by a development of potential energy, which pa.s.ses into a kinetic state, and externalises itself in motor manifestations which even so rough a method as dynamometry is able to observe and record.”

I would beg the reader to keep these words in mind. We shall presently find that a method apparently even rougher than dynamographic tracings may be able to interpret, with far greater delicacy, the automatic tremors which are coursing to and fro within us. If once we can get a spy into the citadel of our own being, his rudest signalling will tell us more than our subtlest inferences from outside of what is being planned and done within.

And now having to deal with what I define as messages conveyed by one stratum in man to another stratum, I must first consider in what general ways human messages can be conveyed. Writing and speech have become predominant in the intercourse of civilised men, and it is to writing and speech that we look with most interest among the communications of the subliminal self. But it does not follow that the subliminal self will always have such complex methods at its command. We have seen already that it often finds it hard to manage the delicate co-ordinations of muscular movement required for writing,--that the attempt at automatic script ends in a thump and a scrawl.

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