In some of these unfortunates the upper consciousness is not only of very narrow range and liable to frequent disordination, but is of such unstable composition that, after being disordinated, it is reconstructed out of a quite different set of elements. Mr. F. W. H. Myers has proposed to call this phenomenon an "allotropic crystallization" of the elements of mind, which seems to me a highly appropriate simile. The patient can then scarcely be said to have any permanent self at all. He is, as it were, broken to pieces and rebuilt out of different memories, desires, and aptitudes at every hysterical crisis. It seems as if his body were successively possessed by totally different persons. But we have no reason for believing that the different persons all coexist. Probably the emergence of one is only made possible by the destruction of another. In some of the extreme forms of hysteria it is possible to take advantage of this principle to reconstruct the lost normal individual. Pierre Janet has taken a hysterical woman who had lost many of her memories and sensations, and to some degree her power of movement; disordinating the upper consciousness by hypnotizing her, he has grasped, as it were, by suggestion the lost mental elements, restored them to the upper consciousness, and made her for the time being quite normal. But, unfortunately, the enlarged upper consciousness seems of very unstable composition, and the patient soon sinks into trance and awakens in her former state.
I have briefly outlined this conception of consciousness as a system of elements capable of disintegration and of various novel recombinations. And let me repeat what I have already said, that although I have preferred, for the sake of brevity, to develop it deductively from certain fundamental hypotheses, it has been attained by the opposite process from a study of facts. Confessedly it is as yet only a theory, and will doubtless be essentially modified before being accepted as the foundation of the science of psychology. In its present form I can not myself regard it as more than a good working hypothesis. But it is something to have even a good working hypothesis in a field in which the constructive conceptions of current psychology prove absolutely useless.
