original perception of them returns,
though of course more faintly. But in Dr. Dessoir's opinion these revived
mental images would reach the height of actual hallucinations (so that the
man, dog, or tree would seem visibly present) if other memories and new
sensations did not compete with them and check their development.

Suppose, to use Mlle. Ferrand's metaphor, a human body, living, but with
all its channels of sensation hitherto unopened. Open the sense of sight
to receive a flash of green colour, and close it again. Apparently,
whenever the mind informing this body had the conception of green (and it
could have no other) it would also have an hallucination of green, thus

'Annihilating all that's made,
To a green thought in a green shade.'

Now, in sleep or hypnotic trance the competition of new sensations and
other memories is removed or diminished, and therefore the idea of a man,
dog, or tree once suggested to the hypnotised patient, does become an
actual hallucination. The hypnotised patient sees the absent object which
he is told to see, the sleeper sees things not really present.

Our primitive state, before the enormous competition of other memories and
new sensations set in, would thus be a state of hallucination. Our normal
present condition, in which hallucination is checked by competing memories
and new sensations, is a suppression of our original, primitive, natural
tendencies. Hallucination represents 'the main trunk of our psychical
existence.'[15] In Dr. Dessoir's theory this condition of hallucination
is man's original and most primitive condition, but it is not a _higher_,
rather a lower state of spiritual activity than the everyday practical
unhallucinated consciousness.

This is also the opinion of Hegel, who supposes our primitive mental
condition to be capable of descrying objects remote in space and time. Mr.
Myers, as we saw, is of the opposite opinion, as to the relative dignity
and relative reality of the present everyday self, and the old original
fundamental Self. Dr. Dessoir refrains from pronouncing a decided opinion
as to whether the original, primitive, hallucinated self within us does
'preside over powers and actions at a distance,' such as clairvoyance; but
he believes in hypnotisation at a distance. His theory, like Hegel's, is
that of 'atavism,' or 'throwing back' to some very remote ancestral
condition. This will prove of interest later.

Hegel, at all events, believed