Thus, for instance, on his walking-stick into his hand, the touch of it reminded him of his gun, and he would then place himself in a position as though he were present at a battle. If a pen were put into his hand, the precise movements necessary for tracing written characters were-unconsciously produced in him.
These motor excitations were automatically developed in tile store of latent reminiscences grouped according to a primordial arrangement, and producing, as it were, phosphorescent gleams of the past ; as we see in decapi tated animals similar movements excited through the preservation of the automatic activity of the spinal cord.* Legrand du Saulle has reported a case which is some what analogous to the preceding. It is that of a young somnambulist, a ropemaker by trade, who, if seized with a fit of somnambulism when twisting his rope, would continue the operation he had begun, even while asleep.t In my own wards I had a patient, still young, who had been for a long time attached to the Salpetriere, as an assistant in the linen-room, being employed to fold the clothes and roll bandages. In the last years of her life this woman, completely blind and paraplegic, presented the following phenomena. While lying on her back, if any one put into her hands an unrolled bandage, or even the end of a cord, the touch imme diately awoke in her reminiscences of her former work, and she began automatically to make a rolling motion with her hands, without knowing what she was doing, as though she had been a piece of machinery.
We may then assert that the nervous plexuses of the spinal cord preserve in their minute structure (like the peripheral nervous plexuses, the retina among others) records of the impressions which have previously excited them, and that these persistent records thus become like a series of fixed autogenic excitations, designed to act at a long range, to radiate to a distance, and thus to produce a series of reactions quite similar to those to which they at first gave rise. These phenomena of motor reaction, which take place merely through the calling into play of the organs of automatic life, are capable of spontaneous evolution, and of producing a repetition of certain habitual movements without any participation on the part of the conscious personality, which is absent for the moment.*
In entering upon the study of the cerebral activity proper, we shall see what an important part this pro perty which the nervous elements possess of retaining a record of former impressions, plays in the operations of the life of the brain, and in what varied forms this organic phosphorescence, always identical with itself, always present and distributed throughout the nervous elements which compose the tissue of the brain, per forms its functions.
It is diffused throughout all the agglomerations of cells, which are like so many active foci of phospho rescence, but unites into a single resultant which concen trates all the sparse activities of the cerebral cells. It thus becomes, under the denomination of the general faculty of memory, a true synthesis of one of the primordial properties of the nervous elements.
The elements of the cerebral substance, the uncon scious agents of the manifestations of our psycho-intel lectual life, work in silence at the operations which they accomplish in common. They associate together, with their manifold properties, in one harmonious effort, corresponding with one another by the mysterious channels of their anastomoses, and without our know ledge preserve in their minute organism posthumous prolongations of past impressions. They act simulta neously to produce the phenomena of memory, and separately give off reminiscences, as illuminated bodies give off the luminous waves they have stored up in their substance ; this marvellous power of the cerebral cells, which depends on the favourable conditions in the midst of which they being maintained in a con dition of perpetual vigour so long as the physical con ditions of its material constitution are observed, and so long as it is associated with the vital phenomena of the organism.
The phenomena of memory, thus looked at as a neces sary consequence of a fundamental property of the nervous elements, enter directly into the mechanism of the different regular processes of cerebral activity. They may consequently be looked upon from the succes sive points of view of their genesis, their evolution, their mechanism, the diverse phases they pass through during the life of the individual, and the functional disturbances from which they are' liable to suffer,