6l6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
come to be regarded as subconscious. The automatic planchette writing of normal persons when attending to something else and quite unaware that any writing is going on, illustrates this condition. The writing is that of a secondary personality.
The cases of distinctly successive personalities, like Fe*lida's, which displace one another at irregular periods, do not afford any insuper- able difficulties of interpretation. On the side of the nervous system there must occur altered functioning of a cataclysmic but temporary character, an alteration of a very deep-seated but thoroughly intelligi- ble nature. One can appreciate how such changed nervous conditions might lead to sequent syntheses of conscious experiences, each group of which would show its constituent members standing in relations of close organic coordination with each other, thus rendering possible a memory although a memory quite cut off from a participation in the recalling of experiences belonging to the other and opposed neural conditions. On the side of the mental processes involved we have conditions which seem to justify entirely the designation of the sequent states as personalities. In temperament as well as in memory the conditions seem perfectly distinct and they evince just the same sort of isolation and insulation from other conscious states (with a few insignificant exceptions) as do the personalities of normal individuals.
But in the case of coexistent personalities the simplicity of formu- lation is much more questionable. 1 It does not appear to the reviewer at all events that physiological processes are inadequate to account for the facts of asserted subconscious personality. In the case of plan- chette writing, for example, the coordinations are all latent in the cerebral centers and there is certainly no obvious reason why they should not discharge in essentially coherent ways. 2 Space is lacking to do full justice either to Professor Binet's position or to that of his opponents, but it has seemed to me desirable to point out that this portion of his doctrine must for the present anyhow be subjected to further investiga- tion before it can be safely adopted. The natural antithesis to his theory is the old and battle-scarred doctrine of unconscious cerebration against which he vigorously inveighs. But surely the fallacies of that
1 An excellent discussion of this and other kindred topics will be found in a paper by ARTHUR H. PIERCE in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research for 1895. A reply by Meyers occurs in the same publication.
2 This position seems to be supported by some recent experiments reported by SOLOMONS and STEIN in the Psychological Review for September 1896.
