Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVI., December, 1880.

There is a curious mental condition sometimes produced by large doses of hasheesh which might be termed double consciousness more correctly than the state to which the name is usually applied. I once took an enormous dose of this substance. After suffering from a series of symptoms which it is not necessary here to detail, I was seized with a horrible undefined fear, as of impending death, and began at the same time to have marked periods when all connection seemed to be severed between the external world and myself. During these periods I was unconscious in so far that I was oblivious of all external objects, but on coming out of one it was not a blank, dreamless void upon which I looked back, a mere empty space, but rather a period of active but aimless life, full, not of connected thought, but of disjointed images. The mind, freed from the ordinary laws of association, passed, as it were, with lightning-like rapidity from one idea to another. The duration of these attacks was but a few seconds, but to me they seemed endless. Although I was perfectly conscious during the intermissions between the paroxysms, all power of measuring time was lost: seconds appeared to be hours—minutes grew to days—hours stretched out to infinity. I would look at my watch, and then after an hour or two, as I thought, would look again and find that scarcely a minute had elapsed. The minute-hand appeared motionless, as though graven in the face itself: the laggard second-hand moved so slowly that it seemed a hopeless task to watch it during its whole infinite round of a minute, and I always gave up in despair before the sixty seconds had elapsed. When my mind was most lucid there was a distinct duplex action in regard to the duration of time. I would think to myself, "It has been so long since a certain event!"—an hour, for example, since the doctor was summoned—but Reason would say, "No, it has been only a few minutes: your thoughts and feelings are caused by the hasheesh." Nevertheless, I was not able to shake off, even for a moment, this sense of the almost indefinite prolongation of time. Gradually the periods of unconsciousness became longer and more frequent, and the oppressive feeling of impending death more intense. It was like a horrible nightmare: each successive paroxysm was felt to be the longest I had suffered. As I came out of it a voice seemed constantly saying, "You are getting worse; your paroxysms are growing longer and deeper; they will overmaster you; you will die." A sense of personal antagonism between my will-power and myself, as affected by the drug, grew very strong. I felt as though my only chance was to struggle against these paroxysms—that I must constantly arouse myself by an effort of will; and that effort was made with infinite toil and pain. It seemed to me as if some evil spirit had the control of the whole of me except the will, and was in determined conflict with that, the last citadel of my being. Once or twice during a paroxysm I felt myself mounting upward, expanding, dilating, dissolving into the wide confines of space, overwhelmed by a horrible, unutterable despair. Then by a tremendous effort I seemed to break loose and to start up with the shuddering thought, "Next time you will not be able to throw this off; and what then?" The sense of double consciousness which I had to some extent is often, under the action of hasheesh, much more distinct. I have known patients to whom it seemed that they themselves sitting upon the chair were in continual conversation with a second self standing in front of them. The explanation of this curious condition is a difficult one. It is possible that the two sides of the brain, which are accustomed in health to work as one organ, are disjoined by the poison, so that one half of the brain thinks and acts in opposition to the other half.

From what has already been said it is plain that memory is entirely distinct from consciousness, and that it is in a certain sense automatic, or at least an attribute of all nerve-centres. If this be so, it would seem probable, a priori, that other intellectual acts are also distinct from consciousness. For present purposes the activities of the cerebrum may be divided into the emotional and the more strictly-speaking intellectual acts. A little thought will, I think, convince any of my readers that emotions are as purely automatic as the movements of the frog's hind leg. The Irishman who said that he was really a brave man, although he had a cowardly pair of legs which always ran away with him, was far from speaking absurdly. It is plain that passion is something entirely beyond the conscious will, because it is continually excited from without, and because we are unable to produce it by a mere effort of the will without some external cause. The common phrase, "He is working himself up into a passion," indicates a perception of the fact that consciousness sometimes employs memories, thoughts, associations, etc. to arouse the lower nerve-centres that are connected with the emotion of anger. It is so also with various other emotions. The soldier who habitually faces death in the foremost rank of the battle, and yet shrinks in mortal fear or antipathy from a mouse, is not an unknown spectacle. It is clear that his fear of the little animal is based not upon reason, but upon an uncontrollable sensitiveness in his nervous system acquired by inheritance or otherwise. It does not follow from this that conscious will is not able to affect emotion. As already pointed out, it can arouse emotion by using the proper means, and it undoubtedly can, to a greater or less extent, directly subdue emotion. The law of inhibition, as it is called by the physiologist, dominates the whole nervous system. Almost every nerve-centre has above it a higher centre whose function it is directly to repress or subdue the activity of the lower centre. A familiar instance of this is seen in the action of the heart: there are certain nerve-centres which when excited lessen the rate of the heart's beat, and are even able to stop it altogether. The relation of the will-power to the emotions is directly inhibitory. The will is able to repress the activity of those centres which preside over anger. In the man with red hair these centres may be very active and the will-power weak; hence the inhibitory influence of the will is slight and the man gets angry easily. In the phlegmatic temperament the anger-centres are slow to action, the will-power strong, and the man is thrown off his balance with difficulty. It is well known that power grows with exercise, and when we habitually use the will in controlling the emotional centres its power continually increases. The man learning self-control is simply drilling the lower emotional centres into obedience to the repressive action of the higher will. Without further demonstration, it is clear that emotion is distinct from conscious will, and is automatic in the sense in which the term has been used in this article.

Imagination also is plainly distinct from consciousness. It acts during sleep. Often, indeed, it runs riot during the slumbers of the night, but at times it works with an automatic regularity exceeding its powers during the waking moments. It is also true that judgment is exercised in sleep, and that reason sometimes exerts its best efforts in that state. But not only do the intellectual nets go on without consciousness during sleep, but also while we are awake. Some years since I was engaged in working upon a book requiring a good deal of thought. Very frequently I would be unable to solve certain problems, but leaving them would find a day or two afterward, on taking pen in hand, that the solution traced itself without effort on the paper clearly and logically. During the sleeping hours, or during the waking hours of a busy professional life, the brain had, without my consciousness, been solving the difficulties. This experience is by no means a peculiar one. Many scientific workers have borne testimony to a similar habit of the cerebrum. The late Sir W. Rowan Hamilton, the discoverer of the mathematical method known as that of the quaternions, states that his mind suddenly solved that problem after long work when he was thinking of something else. He says in one place: "Tomorrow will be the fifteenth birthday of the quaternions. They started into life or light full grown on the 16th of October, 1843, as I was walking with Lady Hamilton to Dublin and came up to Brougham Bridge; that is to say, I then and there felt the galvanic circle of thought closed, and the sparks which fell from it were the fundamental equations between I, F and K exactly as I have used them ever since. I felt the problem to have been at that moment solved—an intellectual want relieved which had haunted me for at least fifteen years before." Mr. Appolo, a distinguished scientific inventor, stated in the Proceedings of the Royal Society that it was his habit to get the bearings and facts of a case during the day and go to bed, and wake the next morning with the problem solved. If the problem was a difficult one he always passed a restless night. Examples might be multiplied. Sir Benjamin Brodie, speaking of his own mental action, states that when he was unable to proceed further in some investigation he was accustomed to let the matter drop. Then "after an interval of time, without any addition to my stock of knowledge, I have found the obscurity and confusion in which the subject was originally enveloped to have cleared away. The facts have seemed all to settle themselves in their right places, and their mutual relations to have become apparent, although I have not been sensible of having made any distinct effort for that purpose."

Not only is there such a thing, then, as unconscious thought, but it is probable that the best thinking is rarely, if ever, done under the influence of consciousness. The poet creates his work when the inspiration is on him and he is forgetful of himself and the world. Consciousness may aid in pruning and polishing, but in creating it often interferes with, rather than helps, the cerebral action. I think any one of my readers who has done any literary or scientific writing will agree that his or her best work is performed when self and surrounding objects have disappeared from thought and consciousness scarcely exists more than it does in a dream. Sometimes the individual is conscious of the flow of an undercurrent of mental action, although this does not rise to the level of distinct recognition. Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks of a business-man of Boston who, whilst considering a very important question, was conscious of an action going on in his brain so unusual and painful as to excite his apprehension that he was threatened with palsy; but after some hours his perplexity was all at once cleared up by the natural solution of the problem which was troubling him, worked out, as he believed, in the obscure and restless interval. "Jumping to a conclusion," a process to which the female sex is said to be especially prone, is often due to unconscious cerebration, the reasoning being so rapid that the consciousness cannot follow the successive steps. It is related that Lord Mansfield once gave the advice to a younger friend newly appointed to a colonial judgeship, "Never give reasons for your decisions. Your judgments will very probably be right, but your reasons will almost certainly be wrong." The brain of the young judge evidently worked unconsciously with accuracy, but was unable to trace the steps along which it really travelled.

We are not left to the unaided study of our mental processes for proof that the human brain is a mechanism. In the laboratory of Professor Goltz in Strasburg I saw a terrier from which he had removed, by repeated experiments, all the surface of the brain, thereby reducing the animal to a simple automaton. Looked at while lying in his stall, he seemed at first in no wise different from other dogs: he took food when offered to him, was fat, sleek and very quiet. When I approached him he took no notice of me, but when the assistant caught him by the tail he instantly became the embodiment of fury. He had not sufficient perceptive power to recognize the point of assault, so that his keeper, standing behind him, was not in danger. With flashing eyes and hair all erect the dog howled and barked furiously, incessantly snapping and biting, first on this side and then on that, tearing with his fore legs and in every way manifesting rage. When his tail was dropped by the attendant and his head touched, the storm at once subsided, the fury was turned into calm, and the animal, a few seconds before so rageful, was purring like a cat and stretching out its head for caresses. This curious process could be repeated indefinitely. Take hold of his tail, and instantly the storm broke out afresh: pat his head, and all was tenderness. It was possible to play at will with the passions of the animal by the slightest touches.

During the Franco-German contest a French soldier was struck in the head with a bullet and left on the field for dead, but subsequently showed sufficient life to cause him to be carried to the hospital, where he finally recovered his general health, but remained in a mental state very similar to that of Professor Goltz's dog. As he walked about the rooms and corridors of the soldiers' home in Paris he appeared to the stranger like an ordinary man, unless it were in his apathetic manner. When his comrades were called to the dinner-table he followed, sat down with them, and, the food being placed upon his plate and a knife and fork in his hands, would commence to eat. That this was not done in obedience to thought or knowledge was shown by the fact that his dinner could be at once interrupted by awakening a new train of feeling by a new external impulse. Put a crooked stick resembling a gun into his hand, and at once the man was seized with a rage comparable to that produced in the Strasburg dog by taking hold of his tail. The fury of conflict was on him: with a loud yell he would recommence the skirmish in which he had been wounded, and, crying to his comrades, would make a rush at the supposed assailant. Take the stick out of his hand, and at once his apathy would settle upon him; give him a knife and fork, and, whether at the table or elsewhere, he would make the motions of eating; hand him a spade, and he would begin to dig. It is plain that the impulse produced by seeing his comrades move to the dining-room started the chain of automatic movements which resulted in his seating himself at the table. The weapon called into new life the well-known acts of the battle-field. The spade brought back the day when, innocent of blood, he cultivated the vineyards of sunny France.

In both the dog and the man just spoken of the control of the will over the emotions and mental acts was evidently lost, and the mental functions were performed only in obedience to impulses from without—i.e. were automatic. The human brain is a complex and very delicate mechanism, so uniform in its actions, so marvellous in its creation, that it is able to measure the rapidity of its own processes. There are scarcely two brains which work exactly with the same rapidity and ease. One man thinks faster than another man for reasons as purely physical as those which give to one man a faster gait than that of another. Those who move quickly are apt to think quickly, the whole nervous system performing its processes with rapidity. This is not, however, always the case, as it is possible for the brain to be differently constructed, so far as concerns its rapidity of action, from the spinal cord of the same individual. Our power of measuring time without instruments is probably based upon the cerebral system of each individual being accustomed to move at a uniform rate. Experience has taught the brain that it thinks so many thoughts or does so much work in such a length of time, and it judges that so much time has elapsed when it has done so much work. The extraordinary sense of prolongation of time which occurs in the intoxication produced by hasheesh is probably due to the fact that under the influence of the drug the brain works very much faster than it habitually does. Having produced a multitude of images or thoughts in a moment, the organ judges that a corresponding amount of time has elapsed. Persons are occasionally seen who have the power of waking at any desired time: going to bed at ten o'clock, they will rouse themselves at four, five or six in the morning, as they have made up their minds to do the previous night. The explanation of this curious faculty seems to be that in these persons the brain-functions go on with so much regularity during sleep that the brain is enabled to judge, though unconsciously, when the time fixed upon has arrived, and by an unconscious effort to recall consciousness.

Of course the subject of automatism might have been discussed at far greater length than is allowable in the limits of two magazine articles, but sufficient has probably been said to show the strong current of modern physiological psychology toward proving that all ordinary mental actions, except the exercise of the conscious will, are purely physical, produced by an instrument which works in a method not different from that in which the glands of the mouth secrete saliva and the tubules of the stomach gastric juice. Some of my readers may say this is pure materialism, or at least leads to materialism. No inquirer who pauses to think how his investigation is going to affect his religious belief is worthy to be called scientific. The scientist, rightly so called, is a searcher after truth, whatever may be the results of the discovery of the truth. Modern science, however, has not proved the truth of materialism. It has shown that the human organism is a wonderful machine, but when we come to the further question as to whether this machine is inhabited by an immortal principle which rules it and directs it, or whether it simply runs itself, science has not, and probably cannot, give a definite answer. It has reached its limit of inquiry, and is unable to cross the chasm that lies beyond. There are men who believe that there is nothing in the body save the body itself, and that when that dies all perishes: there are others, like the writer, who believe that they feel in their mental processes a something which they call "will," which governs and directs the actions of the machine, and which, although very largely influenced by external surroundings, is capable of rising above the impulses from without, leading them to believe in the existence of more than flesh—of soul and God. The materialist, so far as natural science is concerned, stands upon logical ground, but no less logical is the foundation of him who believes in human free-will and immortality. The decision as to the correctness of the beliefs of the materialist or of the theist must be reached by other data than those of natural science.

H.C. WOOD, M.D.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP

CIVIL-SERVICE REFORM AND DEMOCRATIC IDEAS

A movement which appeals not to the emotions, but to the intellect—whose advocates aim at enlightening-the public mind and convincing it of the truth of some new or disregarded principle, and the necessity of enforcing it—needs above all things open and active opposition, both as a stimulant to its supporters and as a means of arousing general attention. It has been very unfortunate for our Civil-Service Reformers that they have never been able to provoke discussion. They have had the field of argument all to themselves. Their repeated challenges have been received only with silent respect, scornful indifference, or expressions of encouragement still more depressing. Those whose hostility they were prepared to encounter have been the readiest to acknowledge the truth of their propositions—considered as pure abstractions—and have even invited them to apply their system—in conjunction with that which it seeks to supplant. Meanwhile, the popular interest has been kept busily absorbed by issues of a different nature; and the Reformers, snubbed in quarters where they had confidently counted on aid, and hustled from the arena in which they had fondly imagined they were to play a prominent part and exert a decisive influence, are now, it is announced, about to devote their energies to the quiet propagation of their views by means of tracts and other publications, abstaining from any appearance in the domain of actual politics either as a distinct party or as an organized body of independent voters appealing to the hopes and fears of existing parties, and ready to co-operate with one or the other according to the inducements offered for their support.

We heartily wish them success in this new enterprise, and it is as a contribution to their efforts that we publish in this number of the Magazine an article which, so far as our observation extends, is the first direct argumentative attack upon their doctrines and open defence of the system they have assailed. We shall not undertake to anticipate their reply, but I shall content ourselves with pointing out, on the principle of fas est ab hoste doceri, what they may learn from this attack, and especially what hints may be derived from it in regard to the proper objective point of their proposed operations. Hitherto, if we mistake not, they have been led to suppose that the only obstacles in their way are the interested antagonism of the "politicians" and the ignorant apathy of the great mass of the people, and it is because they have found themselves powerless to make head against the tactics of the former class that they intend to confine themselves henceforth to the work of awaking and enlightening the latter. There is always danger, however, when we are expounding our pet theories to a group of silent listeners, of ignoring their state of mind in regard to the subject-matter and mistaking the impression produced by our eloquence. George Borrow tells us that when preaching in Rommany to a congregation of Gypsies he felt highly flattered by the patient attention of his hearers, till he happened to notice that they all had their eyes fixed in a diabolical squint. Something of the same kind would, we fear, be the effect on a large number of persons of well-meant expositions of the English civil-service reform and its admirable results. Nor will any appeals to the moral sense excite an indignation at the workings of our present system sufficiently deep and general to demand its overthrow. Civil-service reform had a far easier task in England than it has here, and forces at its back which are here actively or inertly opposed to it. There the system of patronage was intimately connected with oligarchical rule; official positions were not so much monopolized by a victorious party as by a privileged class; the government of the day had little interest in maintaining the system, the bulk of the nation had a direct interest in upsetting it, and its downfall was a natural result of the growth of popular power and the decline of aristocracy. Our system, however similar in its character and effects, had no such origin; it does not belong to some peculiar institution which we are seeking to get rid of: on the contrary, it has its roots in certain conceptions of the nature of government and popular freedom—of the relations between a people and those who administer its affairs—which are all but universally current among us.

It is this last point which is clearly and forcibly presented in the article of our contributor, and which it will behoove the Reformers not to overlook. Nothing is more characteristic of the American mind, in reference to political ideas, than its strong conservatism. This fact, which has often puzzled foreign observers accustomed to connect democracy with innovating tendencies and violent fluctuations, is yet easily explained. Though ours is a new country, its system of government is really older than that of almost any other civilized country. In the century during which it has existed intact and without any material modification the institutions of most other nations have undergone a complete change, in some cases of form and structure, in others of theory and essence. Even England, which boasts of the stability of its government and its immunity from the storms that have overturned so many thrones and disorganized so many states, has experienced a fundamental, though gradual and peaceable, revolution. There, as elsewhere, the centre of power has changed, the chain of tradition has been broken, and new conceptions of the functions of government and its relations to the governed have taken the place of the old ones. But in America nothing of this kind has occurred: the "old order" has not passed away, nor have its foundations undergone the least change; the municipal and colonial institutions under which we first exercised the right of self-government, and the Constitution which gave us our national baptism, are still the fountain of all our political ideas; and our party struggles are not waged about new principles or animated by new watch words, but are fenced and guided by the maxims transmitted by the founders of the republic. This is our strength and our safeguard against wild experiments, but it is also an impediment to every suggestion of improvement. It binds us to the letter of tradition, leads us to confound the accidental with the essential, and gives to certain notions and certain words a potency which must be described as an anachronism. We still use the language of the Revolutionary epoch, recognize no perils but those against which our ancestors had to guard, and put faith in the efficacy of methods that have no longer an object, and of phrases that have lost their original significance. Because George III. distributed offices at his pleasure as rewards, and bound the holders to party services in conformity with his will, the sovereign people is to do the same. "Rotation in office" having been the means in the eighteenth century of dispelling political stagnation and checking jobbery and corruption, it is still the only process for correcting abuses and getting the public service properly performed. The prime duty of all good citizens is to emulate the incessant political activity of their patriotic forefathers, and it is owing solely to a too general neglect of this duty that ballot-stuffing and machine-running, and all the other evils unknown in early days and in primitive communities, have come into existence and gained sway throughout the land. These and similar views, according to our observation, characterize what we may without disrespect, and without confining the remark to the rural districts, term the provincial mind, and wherever they exist the ideas of the Civil-Service Reformers are not only not understood or treated as visionary, but are regarded with aversion and distrust as foreign, monstrous and inconsistent with popular freedom and republican government.