Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/115

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No. I.]
SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.
99

for it. But this fact is otherwise explicable; and the retardation of perception, a known psychological experience, is something quite different from paramnesia. There are at least two other possibilities. You see a new landscape: its image possesses you, but not in detail. Suppose a tenth of a second's distraction, during which you have 'thought' for a long time. (We can represent in a brief space a series of processes, whose objective time-value would be indefinitely greater.) On your return to the landscape, you find that you have 'seen it before.' But the prevision of events? One might have recourse, secondly, to the hyperaesthesia of hypnotism, medicine, and psychology; to an abnormal and unconscious perception, which one may term 'telepathy.' So one would have two perceptions in paramnesia: prevision is explained: the only illusion is that of wrong localization in time, due to the vague nature of the telepathic perception. This theory accords with the fact that children and those subject to presentiments are prone to paramnesia: it also obeys the law of parsimony. Leibnitz' "perceptions insensibles" are real enough to modern psychology.

E. B. T.


Du rôle de la pathologie mentale dans les recherches psychologiques. L. Marillier. Rev. Phil., XVIII, 10, pp. 366-411.

This article is an account of the clinical work of the celebrated alienist Victor Magnan. After describing M. Magnan's classification of mental diseases, the writer proceeds to indicate what contributions to the solving of certain psychological problems have been made by these studies in pathology.

Investigation of epilepsy shows the peculiar characteristic of the delirium, which sometimes succeeds and sometimes replaces the convulsive attack, to be the fact that, on emerging, the patient completely forgets all he has said and done during delirium. For this reason the term 'unconscious' has been applied to epileptic delirium. But the delirious acts and words show far too complex an adjustment to ends to be really unconscious. Nor does M. Ribot's theory, that the mental states in epileptic delirium disappear from memory because they lack intensity and frequency of repetition, seem to accord with the facts; for, in the first place, we cannot call mental states faint which occasion such violent motor reactions; and, secondly, when an idea incessantly recurs to the patient's mind for three weeks, there is certainly no want of frequent repetition. The true view of 'epileptic amnesia,' according to the writer and