[237] See on this subject the remarkable treatise of Alfred Binet, ‘On the Psychic Life of Micro-organisms,’ contained in the volume of extracts: ‘Le Fétichisme dans l’Amour (Etudes de Psychologie expérimentale). La Vie psychique des Micro-organismes, l’Intensité des Images mentales, le Problème hypnotique, Note sur l’Écriture hystérique.’ Paris, 1890.—A short time before Binet, this same subject was treated by Verworn in a very deserving manner, at once original and suggestive, in his Psycho-physiologische Protisten-Studien. Jena, 1889.
[238] ‘Certain [sick] persons enjoy keenly a sense of the lightness of their body, feel themselves hovering in the air, believe they could fly; or else they have a feeling of weight either in the whole body, in many limbs, or in one single limb, which seems to them huge and heavy. A young epileptic sometimes felt his body so extraordinarily heavy that he could scarcely raise it. At other times he felt himself so light that he believed he did not touch the ground. Sometimes it seemed to him that his body had assumed such proportions that it was impossible for him to pass through a door. In this last illusion ... the patient feels himself very much smaller or very much larger than he really is.’—Th. Ribot, Les Maladies de la Personnalité, 3e édition. Paris, 1889, p. 35.
[239] Sollier, Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile, p. 52 et seq.
[240] Lombroso, L’Uomo delinquente. 3a edizione. Torino, 1884, p. 329 et seq.
[241] Lombroso, Les Applications de l’Anthropologie criminelle. Paris, 1892, p. 179.
[242] Th. Ribot, Les Maladies de la Personnalité, pp. 61, 78, 105.
[243] Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind. London, 1879, p. 287.
[244] See also Alfred Binet, Les Altérations de la Personnalité, Paris, 1892, p. 39: ‘His senses close to outside stimulation; for him, the external world ceases to exist; he lives no more than his exclusively personal life; he acts only through his own stimuli, with the automatic movement of his brain. Although he receives nothing more from outside, and his personality is completely isolated from the surroundings in which he is placed, he may be seen to go, come, do, act, as if he had his senses and intelligence in full exercise.’ This, it is true, is the description of a patient, but what he says of the latter applies equally, with a difference of degree only, to the ego-maniac. Féré has communicated to the Biological Society of Paris, in the séance of November 12, 1892, the results of a great number of experiments made by him, whence it appears ‘that among the greater part of epileptics, hysterical and degenerate subjects, cutaneous sensibility is diminished.’ See La Semaine médicale, 1892, p. 456.
[245] Alfred Binet, Les Altérations de la Personnalité. Paris, 1892, pp. 83, 85, et seq.
[246] ‘The organic, cardiac, vaso-motor, secretory, etc., phenomena accompanying almost all, if not all, affective states ... far from following the conscious phenomenon, precede it; none the less they remain in many cases unconscious.’—Gley, quoted by A. Binet, Les Altérations de la Personnalité, p. 208.