The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

childish reminiscences have been wrought into us during the retrospective hours of our entire intervening life. Other things equal, at all times of life recency promotes memory. The only exception I can think of is the unaccountable memory of certain moments of our childhood, apparently net fitted by their intrinsic interest to survive, but which are perhaps the only incidents we can remember out of the year in which they occurred. Everybody probably has isolated glimpses of certain hours of his nursery life, the position in which he stood or sat, the light of the room, what his father or mother said, etc. These moments so oddly selected for immunity from the tooth of time proba bly owe their good fortune to historical peculiarities which it is now impossible to trace. Yery likely we were re minded of them again soon after they occurred ; that be came a reason why we should again recollect them, etc., so that at last they became ingrained.

The attention which we lend to an experience is propor tional to its vivid or interesting character ; and it is a notorious fact that what interests us most vividly at the time is, other things equal, what we remember best. An impres sion may be so exciting emotionally as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues ; and thus originates a path ological delusion. " A woman attacked by robbers takes all the men whom she sees, even her own son, for brigands bent on killing her. Another woman sees her child run over by a horse ; no amount of reasoning, not even the sight of the living child, will persuade her that he is not killed. A woman called ' thief ' in a dispute remains convinced that every one accuses her of stealing (Esquirol). Another, at tacked with mania at the sight of the fires in her street during the Commune, still after six months sees in her de lirium flames on every side about her (Luys), etc., etc." '

On the general effectiveness of both attention and repe tition I cannot do better than copy what M. Taine has written : " If we compare different sensations, images, or ideas, we find that their antitudes for revival are not equal. A large number of them are obliterated, and never reappear through life ; for instance, I drove through Paris a day or two ago, and though I saw plainly some sixty or eighty new faces, I cannot now recall any one of them ; some extra ordinary circumstance, a fit of delirium, or the excitement of haschish would be necessary to give them a chance of revival. On the other hand, there are sensations with a force of revival which nothing de stroys or decreases. Though, as a rule, time weakens and impairs our strongest sensations, these reappear entire and intense, without having lost a particle of their detail, or any degree of their force. M. Brierre de Boismont, having suffered when a child from a disease of the scalp, asserts that ' after fifty-five years have elapsed he can still feel his hair pulled out under the treatment of the skull-cap.'1 — For my own part, after thirty years, i remember feature for feature the appearance of the theatre to which I was taken for the first time. From the third row of boxes, the body of the theatre appeared to me an immense well, red and flaming, swarming with heads ; below, on the right, on a narrow floor, two men and a woman entered, went out, and re-entered, made gestures, and seemed to me like lively dwarfs : to my great surprise, one of these dwarfs fell on his knees, kissed the lady's hand, then hid behind a screen ; the other, who was coming in, seemed angry, and raised his arm. I was then seven, I could understand nothing of what was going on ; but the well of crimson velvet was so crowded, gilded, and bright, that after a quarter of an hour I was, as it were, intoxicated, and fell asleep.

" Every one of us may find similar recollections in his memory, and may distinguish in them a common character. The primitive impres sion has been accompanied by an extraordinarg degree of attention, either as being horrible or delightful, or as being new, surprising, and out of proportion to the ordinary run of our life ; this it is we express by saying that we have been strongly impressed ; that we were ab sorbed, that we could not think of anything else ; that our other sen sations were effaced ; that we were pursued all the next day by the re sulting image ; that it beset us, that we could not drive it away ; that all distractions were feeble beside it. It is by force of this dispro portion that impressions of childhood are so persistent ; the mind being quite fresh, ordinary objects and events are surprising. At present, after seeing so many large halls and full theatres, it is impossible for me, when I enter one, to feel swallowed up, engulfed, and, as it were, lost in a huge dazzling well. The medical man of sixty, who has expe rienced much suffering, both personally and in imagination, would be less upset now by a surgical operation than when he was a child.

"Whatever may be the kind of attention, voluntary or involuntary, it always acts alike ; the image of an object or event is capable of re vival, and of complete revival, in proportion to the degree of atten* tion with which we have considered the object or event. We put this rule in practice at every moment in ordinary life. If we are apply ing ourselves to a book or are in lively conversation, while an air Is being sung in the adjoining room, we do not retain it \ we vaguely that there is singing going on, and that is all We then stop our reading or conversation, we lay aside all internal preoccupa tions and external sensations which our mind or the outer world can throw in our way ; we close our eyes, we cause a silence within and about us, and, if the air is repeated, we listen. We say then that we have listened with all our ears, that we have applied our whole minds. If the air is a fine one, and has touched us deeply, we add that we have been transported, uplifted, ravished, that we have forgotten the world and ourselves; that for some minutes our soul was dead to all but sounds. . . .

" This exclusive momentary ascendency of one of our states of mind explains the greater durability of its aptitude for revival and for more complete revival. As the sensation revives in the image, the image reappears with a force proportioned to that of the sensation. What we meet with in the first state is also to be met with in the second, since the second is but a revival of the first. So, in the struggle for life, in which all our images are constantly engaged, the one furnished at the outset with most force retains in each conflict, by the very law of repe tition which gives it being, the capacity of treading down its adversa ries ; this is why it revives, incessantly at first, then frequently, until at last the laws of progressive decay, and the continual accession of new impressions take away its preponderance, and its competitors, finding a clear field, are able to develop in their turn.

" A second cause of prolonged revivals is repetition itself. Every one knows that to learn a thing we must not only consider it attentively, but consider it repeatedly. We say as to this in ordinary language, that an impression many times renewed is imprinted more deeply and exactly on the memory. This is how we contrive to retain a language, airs of music, passages of verse or prose, the technical terms and propo sitions of a science, and still more so the ordinary facts by which our conduct is regulated. When, from the form and color of a currantjelly, we think of its taste, or, when tasting it with our eyes shut, we magine its red tint and the brilliancy of a quivering slice, the images in our mind are brightened by repetition. Whenever we eat, or drink, or walk, or avail ourselves of any of our senses, or commence or con tinue any action whatever, the same thing happens. Every man and every animal thus possesses at every moment of life a certain stock of clear and easily reviving images, which had their source in the past in a confluence of numerous experiences, and are now fed by a flow of re newed experiences. When I want to go from the Tuileries to the Pan theon, or from my study to the dining-room, I foresee at every turn the colored forms which will present themselves to my sight ; it is oth erwise in the case of a house where I have spent two hours, or of a town where I have stayed three days ; after ten years have elapsed the images will be vague, full of blanks, sometimes they will not exist, and i shall have to seek my way or shall lose myself. — This new property of

images is also derived from the first. As every sensation tends to rerive in its image, the sensation twice repeated will leave after it a double tendency, that is, provided the attention be as great the second time as the first ; usually this is not the case, for, the novelty diminishing, the interest diminishes ; but if other circumstances renew the interest, or if the will renovates the attention, the incessantly increasing tendency will incessantly increase the chances of the resurrection and integrity af the image.'1*

If a phenomenon is met with, however, too often, and with too great a variety of contexts, although its image is retained and reproduced with correspondingly great facil ity, it fails to come up with any one particular setting, and the projection of it backwards to a particular past date consequently does not come about. We recognize but do not remember it — its associates form too confused a cloud. No one is said to remember, says Mr. Spencer, " that the object at which he looks has an opposite side ; or that a cer tain modification of the visual impression implies a certain distance ; or that the thing he sees moving about is a live animal. To ask a man whether he remembers that the sun shines, that fire burns, that iron is hard, would be a misuse of language. Even the almost fortuitous coiv nections among our experiences cease to be classed as memories when they have become thoroughly familiar. Though, on hearing the voice cf some unseen person slightly known to us, we say we recollect to whom the voice belongs, we do not use the same expression respecting the voices of those with whom we live. The meanings of words which in childhood have to be consciously recalled seem in adult life to be immediately present." f

These are cases where too many paths, leading to too diverse associates, block each other's way, and all that the mind gets along with its object is a fringe of felt familiarity or sense that there are associates. A similar result comes about when a definite setting is only nascently aroused. We then feel that we have seen the object already, but when or where we cannot say, though we may seem to ourselves to be on the brink of saying it. That nascent cerebral excita tions can effect consciousness with a sort of sense of the imminence of that which stronger excitations would make us definitely feel, is obvious from what happens when we

seek to remember a name. It tingles, it trembles on the verge, but does not come. Just such a tingling and trem bling of unrecovered associates is the penumbra of recog nition that may surround any experience and make it seem familiar, though we know not why.* * Professor HSffding considers that the absence of contiguous associates distinctly though t-of is a proof that associative processes are not concerned in these cases of instantaneous recognition where we get a strong sense of familiarity with the object, but no recall of previous time or place. His theory of what happens is that the object before us, A, comes with a sense of familiarity whenever it awakens a slumbering image, a, of its own past self, whilst without this image it seems unfamiliar. The quality of familiarity is due to the coalescence of the two similar processes A -f a in the brain (Psychologic, p. 188 ; Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil., xm. 432 [1889]). This explanation is a very tempting one where the phenomenon of recognition is reduced to its simplest terms. Experiments have been performed in Wundt's laboratory (by Messrs. Wolfe, see below, p. 679, and Lehmann (Philosophische Studien, v. 96), in which a person had to tell out of several closely resembling sensible impressions (sounds, tints of color) presented, which of them was the same with one presented a moment before. And it does seem here as if the fading process in the just-excited tract must combine with the process of the new impression to give to the latter a peculiar sub jective tinge which should separate it from the impressions which the other objects give. But recognition of this immediate sort is beyond our power after a very short time has intervened. A couple of minutes' in terval is generally fatal to it ; so that it is impossible to conceive that our frequent instantaneous recognition of a face, e.g., as having been met before, takes place by any such simple process. Where we as sociate a head of classification with the object, the time-interval has much less effect. Dr.

Lehmann could identify shades of gray much more successfully and permanently after mentally attaching names or numbers to them. Here it is the recall of the contiguous associate, the number or name, which brings about the recognition. Where an experience is complex, each element of the total object has had the other elements for its past contiguous associates. Each element thus tends to revive the other elements from within, at the same time that the outward object is making them revive from without. We have tl-us, whenever we meet a familiar objec.t, that sense of expectation gratified which is so large a, factor in our aesthetic emotions ; and even were there no ' fringe of ten dency ' toward the arousal of extrinsic associates (which there certainly al ways is), still this intrinsic play of mutual association among the parts would give a charaUer of ease to familiar percepts which would make of them a distinct subjective class. A process fills its old bed in a different way from that in which it makes a new bed. One can appeal to introspec tion for proof. When, for example, I go into a slaughter-house into which I once went years ago, and the horrid din of the screaming hogs strikes me with the overpowering sense of identification, when the blood-stained face of the ' sticker,' whom I had long ceased to think of, is immediate^

There is a curious experience which everyone seems to have had — the feeling that the present moment in its com pleteness has been experienced before — we were saying jusf this thing, in just this place, to just these people, etc. This ' sense of pre-existence ' has been treated as a great mys tery and occasioned much speculation. Dr. Wigan con sidered it due to a dissociation of the action of the two hemi spheres, one of them becoming conscious a little later than the other, but both of the same fact.* I must confess that

recognized as the face that struck me so before; when the dingy and red dened woodwork, the purple-flowing floor, the smell, the emotion of dis gust, and all the details, in a word, forthwith re-establish themselves as familiar occupants of my mind ; the extraneous associates of the past time are anything but prominent. Again, in trying to think of an engraving, say the portrait of Rajah Brooke prefixed to his biography, I can do so only partially; but when I take down the book and, looking at the actual face, am smitten with the intimate sense of its sameness with the one I was striving to resuscitate, — where in the experience is the element of extrinsic association? In both these cases it surely feels as if the moment when the sense of recall is most vivid were also the moment when all extraneous associates were most suppressed. The butcher's face recalls the former walls of the shambles; their thought recalls the groaning beasts, and they the face again, just as I now experience them, with no different past ingreiient. In like manner the peculiar deepening of my consciousness of the Rajah's physiognomy at the moment when I open the book and say " Ah! that's the very face! " is so intense as to banish from my mind all collateral circumstances, whether of the present or of former experiences. But here it is the nose preparing tracts for the eye, the eye preparing them for the mouth, the mouth preparing them for the nose again, all these processes involving paths of contiguous association, as defended in the text. I can not agree, therefore, with Prof. Hoffding, in spite of my respect for him as a psychologist, that the phenomenon of instantaneous recognition is only explicable through the recall and comparison of the thing with its own past image.

Nor can I see in the facts in question any additional ground foi reinstating the general notion which we have already rejected (supra, p. 592) that a ' sensation ' is ever received into the mind by an 'image' oi its own past self. It is received by contiguous associates; or if they form too faint a fringe, its neural currents run into a bed which is still ' warm ' from just-previous currents, and which consequently feel different from currents whose bed is cold. I agree, however, with Hoffding that Dr. Lehman n's experiments (many of them) do not seem to prove the point which he seeks to establish. Lehmann, indeed, seems himself to believe that we recognize a sensation A by comparing it with its own past image <x (loc. cit. p. 114), in which opinion I altogether fail to concur.

* Duality of the Mind, p. 84. The same thesis is defended by the late Mr. R. H. Proctor, who gives some cases rather hard to reconcile with my »wn proposed explanation, in 'Knowledge' for Nov. 8, 1884. See also Ribot, Maladies de la Memoire, p- 149 ff. the quality of mystery seems to me a little strained. I have over and over again in my own case succeeded in resolving the phenomenon into a case of memory, so indistinct that whilst some past circumstances are presented again, the others are not. The dissimilar portions of the past do not arise completely enough at first for the date to be iden tified, All we get is the present scene with a general sug gestion of pastness about it. That faithful observer, Prof. Lazarus, interprets the phenomenon in the same way ; * and it is noteworthy that just as soon as the past context grows complete and distinct the emotion of weirdness fades from the experience.

have recently been made in Germany. Professor Eb- binghaus, in a really heroic series of daily observations of more than two years' duration, examined the powers of retention and reproduction. He learned lists of meaning less syllables by heart, and tested his recollection of them from day to day. He could not remember more than 7 after a single reading. It took, however, 16 readings to re member 12, 44 readings to remember 24, and 55 readings to remember 26 syllables, the moment of ' remembering ' being here reckoned as the first moment when the list could be recited without a fault, t When a 16-syllable list was read over a certain number of times on one day, and then studied on the day following until remembered, it was found that the number of seconds saved in the study on the second day was proportional to the number of read ings on the first — proportional, that is, within certain rather narrow limits, for which see the text.J No amount of repe tition spent on nonsense-verses over a certain length en abled Dr. Ebbinghaus to retain them without error for 24 hours. In forgetting such things as these lists of syllables, the loss gees on very much more rapidly at first than later on. He measured the loss by the number of seconds re-

f Ueber das Gedachtniss, experimentelle Untersuchungen (1885), p. 64 quired to relearn the list after it had been once learned Eoughly speaking, if it took a thousand seconds to learn the list, and five hundred to relearn it, the loss between the two learnings would have been one half. Measured in this way, full half of the forgetting seems to occur within the first half-hour, whilst only four fifths is forgotten at the end of a month. The nature of this result might have been anticipated, but hardly its numerical proportions. Dr. Ebbinghaus says :

" The initial rapidity, as well as the final slowness, as these were as certained under certain experimental conditions and for a particular individual, . . . may well surprise us. An hour after the work of learn ing had ceased, forgetting was so far advanced that more than half of the original work had to be applied again before the series of syllables could once more be reproduced. Eight hours later two thirds of the original labor had to be applied. Gradually, however, the process of oblivion grew slower, so that even for considerable stretches of time the losses were but barely ascertainable. After 24 hours a third, after B days a fourth, and after a whole month a good fifth of the original labor remain in the shape of its after-effects, and made the relearning by so much the more speedy." *

But the most interesting result of all those reached by this author relates to the question whether ideas are re called only by those that previously came immediately be fore them, or whether an idea can possibly recall another idea with which it was never in immediate contact, without passing through the intermediate mental links. The ques tion is of theoretic importance with regard to the way in which the process of « association of ideas ' must be con ceived ; and Dr. Ebbinghaus' s attempt is as successful as it is original, in bringing two views, which seem at first eight inaccessible to proof, to a direct practical test, and giving the victory to one of them. His experiments con clusively show that an idea is not only e associated ' directly with the one that follows it, and with the rest through that, but that it is directly associated with all that are near it, though in unequal degrees. He first measured the time needed to impress on the memory certain lists of syllables, and then the time needed to impress lists of the same syllables with gaps between them. Thus, representing the

Now, if 1 and 3 in the first list were learned in that order merely by 1 calling up 2, and by 2 calling up 3, leaving out the 2 ought to leave 1 and 3 with no tie in the mind ; and the second list ought to take as much time in the learning as if the first list had never been heard of. If, on the other hand, 1 has a direct influence on 3 as well as on 2, that in fluence should be exerted even when 2 is dropped out ; and a person familiar with the first list ought to learn the second one more rapidly than otherwise he could. This latter case is what actually occurs ; and Dr. Ebbinghaua has found that syllables originally separated by as many as seven intermediaries still reveal, by the increased rapidity with which they are learned in order, the strength of the tie that the original learning established between them, over the heads, so to speak, of all the rest. These last re sults ought to make us careful, when we speak of nervous ' paths,' to use the word in no restricted sense. They add one more fact to the set of facts which prove that associa tion is subtler than consciousness, and that a nerve-process may, without producing consciousness, be effective in the same way in which consciousness would have seemed to be effective if it had been there.* Evidently the path from 1

* All the inferences for which we can give no articulate reasons exem plify this law. In the chapter on Perception we shall have innumerable examples of it. A good pathological illustration of it is given in the curi ous observations of M. Biuet on certain hysterical subjects, with anaesthetic hands, who saw what was done with their hands as an independent vision but did not feel it. The hand being hidden by a screen, the patient was ordered to look at another screen and to tell of any visual image which might project itself thereon. Numbers would then come, corresponding to the number of times the insensible member was raised, touched, etc. Colored lines and figures would come, corresponding to similar ones traced on the palm; the hand itself, or its fingers, would come when manipulated; and, finally, objects placed in it would come; but on the hand itself noth ing could ever be felt. The whole phenomenon shows how an idea which remains itself below the threshold of a certain conscious self may occasion associative effects therein. The skin-sensations, unfelt by the patient'^ primary consciousness, iwaken, nevertheless, their usual visual associate* therein.

to 3 (omitting 2 from consciousness) is facilitated, broad ened perhaps, by the old path from 1 to 3 through 2 — only the component which shoots round through this latter way is too feeble to let 2 be thought as a distinct object. Mr. Wolfe, in his experiments on recognition, used vi brating metal tongues. " These tongues gave tones differing by 2 vibrations only in the two lower octaves, and by 4 vibrations in the three higher octaves. In the first series of experiments a tone was selected, and, after sounding it for one second, a second tone was sounded, which was either the same as the first, or different from it by 4, 8, or 12 vibrations in different series. The person experimented upon was to answer whether the second tone was the same as the first, thus showing that he recognized it, or whether it was different, and, if so, whether it was higher or lower. Of course, the interval of time between the two tones was an important factor. The proportionate number of correct judgments, and the smallness of the difference of the vibration-rates of the two tones, would measure the accuracy of the tone-memory. It appeared that one could tell more readily when the two tones were alike than when they were different, although in both cases the accuracy of the memory was remarkably good. . . . The main point is the effect of the time-interval between the tone and its reproduction. This was varied from 1 second to 30 seconds, or even to 60 seconds or 120 seconds in some experiments. The general result is, that the longer the interval, the smaller are the chances that the tone will be recognized; and this process of forgetting takes place at first very rapidly, and then more slowly. . . . This law is subject to considerable variations, one of which seems to be constant and is peculiar ; namely, there seems to be a rhythm in the memory itself, which, after falling, recovers slightly, and then fades out again." *

This periodical renewal of acoustic memory would seem to be an important element in the production of the agreeableness of certain rates of recurrence in sound. In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as im portant a function as recollecting. "The memory of some men, it is true, is very tenacious, even to a miracle ; but yet there seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas, * I copy from the abstract of Wolfe's paper in ' Science ' for Nov. 19, 1886. The original is in Psychologisclie Studien, m. 534 ff.

even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive; so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen. Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, of ten die before us; and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are fast approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colors; and, if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear. How much the constitution of our bodies, and the make of our animal spirits, are concerned in this; and whether the temper of the brain makes this difference, that in some it retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like free stone, and in others little better than sand, I shall not here inquire, though it may seem probable that the constitution of the body does sometimes influence the memory; since we oftentimes find a disease quite strip the mind of all its ideas, and the flames of a fever in a few days calcine all those images to dust and confusion, which seemed to be as lasting as if graven in marble.1' *

This peculiar mixture of forgetting with our remember ing is but one instance of our mind's selective activity. Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Eibot calls foreshortening ; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts which filled them.

1 'As fast as the present enters into the past, our states of consciousness disappear and are obliterated. Passed in review at a few days' distance, nothing or little of them remains : most of them have made shipwreck in that great nonentity from which they never more will emerge, and they have carried with them the quantity of duration which was inher ent in their being. This deficit of surviving conscious states is thus a deficit in the amount of represented time. The process of abridgment, of foreshortening, of which we have spoken, presupposes this deficit. If, in order to reach a distant reminiscence, we had to go through th« entire series of terms which separate it from our present selves, memor) would become impossible on account of the length of the operation. W«

thus reach the paradoxical result that one condition of remembering is that we should forget. Without totally forgetting a prodigious number of states of consciousness, and momentarily forgetting a large number, we could not remember at all. Oblivion, except in certain cases, is thus no malady of memory, but a condition of its health and its life."* There are many irregularities in the process of forget ting which are as yet unaccounted for. A thing forgotten Dn one day will be remembered on the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all in vain, will, soon after we have given up the attempt, saunter into the mind, as Emerson somewhere says, as in nocently as if it had never been sent for. Experiences of bygone date will revive after years of absolute oblivion, often as the result of some cerebral disease or accident which seems to develop latent paths of association, as the photographer's fluid develops the picture sleeping in the collodion film. The oftenest quoted of these cases is Cole ridge's:

" In a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a young woman, who could neither read nor write, was seized with a fever, and was said by the priests to be possessed of a devil, because she was heard talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were written out, and found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, but having slight connection with each other. Of her Hebrew sayings, only a few could be traced to the Bible, and most seemed to be in the Babbinical dialect. All trick was out of the question ; the woman was a simple creature ; there was no doubt as to the fever. It was long be fore any explanation, save that of demoniacal possession, could be ob tained. At last the mystery was unveiled by a physician, who deter mined to trace back the girl's history, and who, after much trouble, discovered that at the age of nine she had been charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived till his death. On further inquiry it appeared to have been the old man's custom for years to walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice out of his books. The books were ransacked, and among them were found sev eral of the Greek and Latin Fathers, together with a collection of Rab binical writings. In these works so many of the passages taken down at the young woman's bedside were identified that there could be no reasonable doubt as to their source." f

f Biographia Literaria, ed. 1847, I. 117 (quoted in Carpenter's Mental Physiology, chapter x. which see for a number of other cases, all unt'or- Hypnotic subjects as a rule forget all that has happened in their trance. But in a succeeding trance they will often remember the events of a past one. This is like what happens in those cases of * double personality' in which no recollection of one of the lives is to be found in the other. We have already seen in an earlier chapter that the sensibility often differs from one of the alternate personalities to another, and we have heard M. Pierre Janet's theory that anaesthesias carry amnesias with them (see above, pp. 385 if.). In certain cases this is evidently so ; the throwing of certain functional brain-tracts out of gear with others, so as to dissociate their consciousness from that of the remaining brain, throws them out for both sensorial and ideational service. M. Janet proved in various ways that what his patients forgot when antesthetic they remembered when the sensibility returned. For instance., he restored their tactile sense temporarily by means of electric currents, passes, etc., and then made them handle various objects, such as keys and pencils, or make particu lar movements, like the sign of the cross. The moment the anaesthesia returned they found it impossible to recollect the objects or the acts. ' They had had nothing in their hands, they had done nothing,' etc. The next day, however, sensibility being again restored by similar processes, they remembered perfectly the circumstance, and told what they had handled or had done.