Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/522

THE PHYSICAL CONDITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 509 impossible. Therefore the non-implicated nervous tracts or areas are pretty nigh or completely incapable of consciousness, although not necessarily equally incapable of all function. Now, to be absorbed exclusively in one sensation or thought is to be unconscious. But in this case the exclusiveness is probably not quite complete. The consciousness, so far as it exists, is perhaps somewhat like that which persons have who rush frantically to the doors in a panic when a theatre takes fire, and undergo or inflict injuries in their wild fright, with- out knowing or feeling what they do. 1 When they come into possession of themselves after the danger is past, they have a dim sort of consciousness of one or two things that happened around them, but they are quite unable to give anything like an exact or complete account ; they remember no more perhaps than that they found themselves at a certain place, without remembering in the least how they got there. These instances, and many like instances which might be adduced, go to show that particular tracts of the mental organisation may be put into an ultra-physiological, if not pathological, action daring which they are isolated functionally from the rest of that organisation, and that all kinds and degrees of strange, partial, confused and distracted states of consciousness answer to the different degrees and extent of such extraordinary activity. Always the localised activity involves a localised consciousness. While the com- plete isolation of a particular tract, its exclusive activity, would be the abolition of consciousness, its almost complete isolation would be the condition of that sort of ecstasy into which saints of different religions have been in the habit of falling, and in which it is impossible sometimes to say whether they are conscious or not. It is the abstraction of this negation of everything definite which they call the Infinite, and imagine themselves then in ecstatic intercourse with. When a particular mental tract is engaged in an extra- ordinary activity which is yet not so extreme as to make a complete break of conduction with other tracts, its tendency notably is to attract concordant vibrations in them and to 1 The production of a hallucination by the intense activity of a vividly conceived idea illustrates the same principle of action. When the idea reaches such intensity as to be perceived as external object, the person is unconscious of the idea, oftentimes cannot be persuaded that he has had it. He has not so cultivated psychological introspection as to be able to catch the idea in the instant before it is transformed into objective hallucination : a thing which may sometimes be done.