exactly as if one author composed more than half of the trance-messages, no matter by whom they are uttered. Whether all sub-conscious selves are peculiarly susceptible to a certain stratum of the Zeitgeist, and get their inspiration from it, I know not; but this is obviously the case with the secondary selves which become 'developed' in spiritualist circles. There the beginnings of the medium trance are indistinguishable from effects of hypnotic suggestion. The subject assumes the rôle of a medium simply because opinion expects it of him under the conditions which are present; and carries it out with a feebleness or a vivacity proportionate to his histrionic gifts. But the odd thing is that persons unexposed to spiritualist traditions will so often act in the same way when they become entranced, speak in the name of the departed, go through the motions of their several death-agonies, send messages about their happy home in the summer-land, and describe the ailments of those present.

I

I have no theory to publish of these cases, the actual beginning of several of which I have personally seen. am, however, persuaded by abundant acquaintance with the trances of one medium that the control' may be altogether different from any possible waking self of the person. In the case I have in mind, it professes to be a certain departed French doctor; and is, I am convinced, acquainted with facts about the circumstances, and the living and dead relatives and acquaintances, of numberless sitters whom the medium never met before, and of whom she has never heard the names. I record my bare opinion here unsupported by the evidence, not, of course, in order to convert anyone to my view, but because I am persuaded that a serious study of these trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs of psychology, and think that my personal confession may possibly draw a reader or two into a field which the soidisant scientist' usually refuses to explore.*

* Some of the evidence for this medium's supernormal powers is

Review, and Psychological Conclusion.-To sum up this long chapter:-The consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought, each part of which as 'I' can remember those which went before, know the things they knew, and care paramountly for certain ones among them as Me,' and appropriate to these the rest. This Me is an empirical aggregate of things objectively known. The I which knows them cannot itself be an aggregate; neither for psychological purposes need it be an unchanging metaphysical entity like the Soul, or a principle like the transcendental Ego, viewed as 'out of time.' It is a thought, at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own. All the experiential facts find their place in this description, unencumbered with any hypothesis save that of the existence of passing thoughts or states of mind.

If passing thoughts be the directly verifiable existents which no school has hitherto doubted them to be, then they are the only Knower' of which Psychology, treated as a natural science, need take any account. The only pathway that I can discover for bringing in a more transcendental Thinker would be to deny that we have any such direct knowledge of the existence of our states of consciousness as common-sense supposes us to possess. The existence of the 'states' in question would then be a mere hypothesis, or one way of asserting that there must be a knower correlative to all this known; but the problem who that knower is would have become a metaphysical problem. With the question once stated in these terms, the notion either of a Spirit of the world which thinks through us, or that of a set of individual substantial souls, must be considered as prima facie on a par with our own psychological' solution, and discussed impartially. I myself believe that

given in The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. VI. p. 436, and in the last Part of vol. VII (1892).

room for much future inquiry lies in this direction. The 'states of mind' which every psychologist believes in are by no means clearly apprehensible, if distinguished from their objects. But to doubt them lies beyond the scope of our natural-science (see p. 1) point of view. And in this book the provisional solution which we have reached must be the final word: the thoughts themselves are the thinkers.

CHAPTER XIII.

ATTENTION.

The Narrowness of Consciousness-One of the most extraordinary facts of our life is that, although we are besieged at every moment by impressions from our whole. sensory surface, we notice so very small a part of them. The sum total of our impressions never enters into our experience, consciously so called, which runs through this sum total like a tiny rill through a broad flowery mead. Yet the physical impressions which do not count are there as much as those which do, and affect our sense-organs just as energetically. Why they fail to pierce the mind is a mystery, which is only named and not explained when we invoke die Enge des Bewusstseins, 'the narrowness of consciousness,' as its ground.

Its Physiological Ground. Our consciousness certainly is narrow, when contrasted with the breadth of our sensory surface and the mass of incoming currents which are at all times pouring in. Evidently no current can be recorded in conscious experience unless it succeed in penetrating to the hemispheres and filling their pathways by the processes set up. When an incoming current thus occupies the hemispheres with its consequences, other currents are for the time kept out. They may show their faces at the door, but are turned back until the actual possessors of the place are tired. Physiologically, then, the narrowness of consciousness seems to depend on the fact that the activity of the hemispheres tends at all times to be a consolidated and unified affair, determinable now by this current and now by that, but determinable only as a whole. The ideas correlative to the reigning system of processes

are those which are said to 'interest' us at the time; and thus that selective character of our attention on which so much stress was laid on pp. 173 ff. appears to find a physiological ground. At all times, however, there is a liability to disintegration of the reigning system. The consolidation is seldom quite complete, the excluded currents are not wholly abortive, their presence affects the 'fringe' and margin of our thought.

Dispersed Attention. Sometimes, indeed, the normal consolidation seems hardly to exist. At such moments it is possible that cerebral activity sinks to a minimum. Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention. is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start; the pensée de derrière la tête fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until

also without reason that we can discover-an energy is given, something we know not what enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, the background-ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.

This is the extreme of what is called dispersed attention. Between this extreme and the extreme of concentrated attention, in which absorption in the interest of the moment is so complete that grave bodily injuries may be unfelt, there are intermediate degrees, and these have been studied experimentally. The problem is known as that of