208 PSYCHOLOGY. Sometimes the mutual ignorance of the selves leads to incidents which are strange enough. The acts and move- ments performed by the sub-conscious self are withdrawal from the conscious one, and the subject will do all sorts of incongruous things of which he remains quite unaware. " I order Lucie [by the method of distraction] to make a pied de nez, and her hands go forthwith to the end of her nose. Asked what she is doing, she replies that she is doing nothing, and continues for a long time talking, with no apparent suspicion that her fingers are moving in front of her nose. I make her walk about the room ; she con- tinues to speak and believes herself sitting down." M. Janet observed similar acts in a man in alcoholic delirium. Whilst the doctor was questioning him, M. J. made him by whispered suggestion walk, sit, kneel, and even lie down on his face on the floor, he all the while believing himself to be standing beside his bed. Such bizarreries sound incredible, until one has seen their like. Long ago, without understanding it, I myself saw a small example of the way in which a person's knowledge may be shared by the two selves. A young woman who had been writing automatically was sitting with a pencil in her hand, trying to recall at my request the name of a gentleman whom she had once seen. She could only recollect the first syllable. Her hand meanwhile, without her knowledge, wrote down the last two syllables. In a perfectly healthy young man who can write with the planchette, I lately found the hand to be entirel}^ anaesthetic during the writing act ; I could prick it severely without the Subject knowing the fact. The writ- ing on the planchette, however, accused me in strong terms of hurting the hand. Pricks on the other (non-writing) hand, meanwhile, which awakened strong protest from the young man's vocal organs, were denied to exist by the self which made the planchette go.* We get exactly similar results in the so-called post-hyp- notic suggestion. It is a familiar fact that certain sub- jects, when told during a trance to perform an act or to
- See Proceedings of American Soc. for Psycli. Research, vol. i. p.
648.
