DOUBLE OR SUB-CONSCIOUSNESS. “There are two sets,” says Dr. Brown-Sequard, “a double state of mental powers in the human organism, essentially differing from each other. The one may be designated as ordinary conscious intelligence; the other, a superior power, which controls our better nature.” J. Balfour Brown, in his “Medical Jurisprudence,” says:--“In no case of pure somnambulism, waking consciousness of the individual knows anything of the sleeping consciousness. It is as if there were two distinct memories.” This double-consciousness, memory, or sub-state of mental powers, is another but lower phase of psychic-consciousness, and is sometimes exhibited by accidents, and also by disease. Dr. Abercromby relates the case of a boy, four years old who was trepanned for a fracture of the skull. He was in a _complete stupor_ during the operation, and was not conscious of what took place. At fifteen he became seriously ill of fever. In the delirium occasioned by the fever, he gave a correct description of the operation, _and of all the persons present, their dress_, manners, and actions, to the minutest particulars. The “superior power” must have obtained this knowledge in some other way than through the ordinary channels of the outward senses. In cases of apparent drowning, where the person has been saved from death by active, external help, we have been informed that the human mind has worked with a rapidity of action not thought possible in the waking state, the intensity of menial action being increased in adverse ratio to the inaction of the external senses and consciousness. In this state the career of a lifetime has been reviewed, conversations, actions, persons seen and places visited, all vividly brought to mind--in possibly less time than it takes to pen this paragraph. These phenomena suggest the reflection that the daily waking life--sensuous and worldly-minded--is possibly, to many, the least real and effective. How much our external life is influenced by our unconscious (to us in the waking state) sub-life, is an interesting problem. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes says:--“The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we shall see that the automatic and unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes. We _all_ have a _double_ who is wiser and better than we, who puts thoughts into our heads and words into our mouths.”