uble consciousness at all, but, if
the term may be allowed, double memory. It is evidently allied in its
nature to the loss of the sense of personal identity. Certain phenomena
of remembrance seen frequently in exhausting diseases, and especially in
old age, show the permanence of impressions made upon the higher
nerve-centres, and are also very similar in their nature to this
so-called double consciousness. Not long since a very aged lady of
Philadelphia, who was at the point of death, began to talk in an unknown
tongue, soon losing entirely her power of expressing herself in English.
No one could for a time make out the language she was speaking, but it
was finally found to be Portuguese; and in tracing the history of the
octogenarian it was discovered that until four or five years of age she
had been brought up in Rio Janeiro, where Portuguese is spoken. There is
little difference between the nature of such a case and that of the
so-called double consciousness, both involving the forgetting of that
which has been known for years.

There is a curious mental condition sometimes produced by large doses of
hasheesh which might be termed double consciousness more correctly than
the state to which the name is usually applied. I once took an enormous
dose of this substance. After suffering from a series of symptoms which
it is not necessary here to detail, I was seized with a horrible
undefined fear, as of impending death, and began at the same time to
have marked periods when all connection seemed to be severed between the
external world and myself. During these periods I was unconscious in so
far that I was oblivious of all external objects, but on coming out of
one it was not a blank, dreamless void upon which I looked back, a mere
empty space, but rather a period of active but aimless life, full, not
of connected thought, but of disjointed images. The mind, freed from the
ordinary laws of association, passed, as it were, with lightning-like
rapidity from one idea to another. The duration of these attacks was but
a few seconds, but to me they seemed endless. Although I was perfectly
conscious during the intermissions between the paroxysms, all power of
measuring time was lost: seconds appeared to be hours--minutes grew to
days--hours stretched out to infinity. I would look at my watch, and
then after an hour or two, as I thought, would look again and find that
scarcely a minute had elapsed. The minute-hand appeared motion