Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/109

P. JANET AND F. RAYMOND, Ndvroses et Iittes Fixes. '.*.") hysteria, and insanity, we had been supplied with abundant facts for interpretation, and occasionally the facts were critically handled by competent psychologists. What, however, was wanting was a sure and practical method of catching the subtle evanescences that constitute the content of dreams, hallucinations, etc. Such a method, Dr. Janet, following on the scientific lines of Charcot, suggested and justified. It is many years ago since Dr. Hughliugs-Jackson applied to the ends of clinical research the same method of observing minutely the sequences of movement in epilepsy ; the results were of the highest order, and prepared the way for the experimental verifications of Ferrier, Fritsch and Hitzig, Munck, and how many more? The stimulation- and ablation methods of cerebral research have been followed and supplemented by a more searching histology, and, recently, both histology and experimental localisation have been reinterpreted in the light of the " neuron " this loosely attached weed vibrat- ing in an ocean of cerebral jelly. And, no doubt, we shall yet come upon physical methods of more involved subtlety. But, far as our methods have gone, the results come short of the demands of psychological analysis, and where the method of Dr. Janet seems to me most important is in that it turns round and uses psychological processes as a means of physiological analysis. Already the study of aphasia and the mental concomitants of its many varieties has gone a considerable way ; but Dr. Janet, by taking advantage of the immense variety of mental abnormalities in hysteria, has raised the method of psychological observation to the level of a method not only of cure which is, after all, a veri- fication but of discovery. The mental phenomena are the things primarily observed, and one feels, in working through a wealth of detail enough to shame the most industrious clinical observers, that the evanescent subtlety of the observed facts is really a pro- found functional analysis of psycho-physical structure and will compel us to more involved conceptions of cerebral physiology. A hint of this was given in L' Automat isme Psychologique (p. 419) : " Doubtless, a certain physiological modification must, I am con- vinced, accompany this psychological disaggregation ; but the modification is absolutely unknown to us ; it must be abnormal and much more delicate than this regular division of the brain into two hemispheres". Even more to the same purpose is Dr. Stout (Analyt. Psych., i., p. 32) : " Indeed, one may say that the whole physiological plan of investigation of the higher cerebral processes is controlled and conditioned by psychological data, and even by psychological hypotheses ". In delicacy, in the record of fine shades, in the restoration of mental sequences, the psycholo- gical method here applied matches approximately the " soft play of life " ; the stimulus is not an electrode, but a word, a sugges- tion, an idea ; the movements observed are not simply co-ordina- tions of hand, arm, limb or eye, but the attitudes, the contractures, the convulsions, the verbal jingles, the writings that form the