We speak of persons in syncope and under the influence of anaesthetics as unconscious, when this is really not the case. They have, it is true, lost for the time ordinary consciousness of sensation in the tissues, and of outward things, but they are still conscious on other planes, of which perhaps only a glimpse remains in memory.
Consciousness is regarded as the changing, evanescent factor, and mind as the real substratum, when the fact is precisely the opposite. Now, in the ordinary affairs of life, we are more or less familiar with three planes of consciousness, viz., the ordinary waking state, the dream state, and the condition of dreamless sleep. Memory, however, is something as distinct from consciousness as is thought or perception. To say that we are entirely unconscious is one thing, to say that we have no memory of any event is quite another thing. Memory is the principle and the process of association of events and ideas occurring in consciousness. If there are no events, no ideas, no changes, then there are no elements for association, and hence to memory.
We may say, that for the time, the bodily avenues are closed to sensation and perception, and that the brain cases to function, and hence, that for the time there is no thought. We are, then, not sensitive, not perceptive, toward outer nature, and we are unthinking but never unconscious. The missing link is memory, which fails to connect the shifting experiences of outer life with those of dreamless sleep, syncope, hypnotic states, anaesthesia, and the like, while to say that we lose consciousness is to entirely mistake its nature.
In day-dream or revere, we are as unconscious sometimes of the outer world as in dreamless slumber, the difference consisting in the function of memory, and this is often largely absent or in abeyance in reverie. Experiments in hypnotism give many facts in full support of this line of reasoning. No one pretends to say that the subject in hypnotism is unconscious, and the hypnotizer can determine whether the hypnotic consciousness shall be connected with that of ordinary life by the link of memory or not.
If we regard all these varying conditions as a shifting of our planes of consciousness, and in no case as lose of consciousness itself, a great deal of obscurity will disappear from the realm of psychology. In delirium, monomania, hallucination, alcoholism and insanity, the planes of consciousness become disordered, disjointed, or wholly changed.
It is the orderly association of ideas that is disturbed. Undue prominence is given to one idea, and it becomes a hallucination. Its relation to consciousness is therefore abnormal and the whole mental realm “deranged,” while consciousness, per se, remains unaltered. Consciousness is like a double mirror presenting one face to the phenomenal world of change, reflecting the shifting panorama of the mind, and indirectly, through the mind, the sensation derived through the avenues of feeling and emotion from the outer world. The other face of the mirror is turned within towards its original source in the principle of cosmic ideation, or the ideas of eternal nature.
At last two distinct planes of consciousness were long ago recognized by medical science in the so-called double consciousness of somnambulism. Here the individual leads two distinct lives, with no connection between them except that they exist in the same individual.
The case of Barkworth, quoted by A. Moll, who can add up long rows of figures while carrying on a lively discussion without allowing his attention to be at al diverted form the discussion; or of a lecturer, F. Myers, who, for a whole minute, allows his mind to wander entirely from the subject in hand and imagines himself to be sitting beside a friend in the audience and to be engaged in conversation with him, and who wakes up to find himself still on the platform lecturing away with perfect case and coherency, serve to show separate and distinct planes of consciousness as existing in man.
The philosophy of acquired habit, or automatism, whether muscular or intellectual, only confirms this view of multiple planes of consciousness; for the body, no less than the mind, the senses and feelings, no less than the intellectual, pertain to our states of consciousness.
I have thus dwelt on this principle of consciousness because I regard it as a matter of the very greatest importance, and the point of departure from which al mental processes and intellectual operations should be studied. Consciousness, per se, is the one persistent and unchanging factor in the life of man. Its function is to note the changes that elsewhere occur.
It is hence the noumenon of all phenomena, the citadel of the soul, the spark of the infinite in the finite being, man. Consciousness is to man what the pure white ray is to the solar spectrum. The pure white light is the vehicle of the rainbow, the chariot of the sun; and whenever this vehicle divides and differentiates it does so with mathematical exactness and with perfect proportion or rhythm into planes of seven. Helmholzt says the musical scale, with its recognized intervals and laws of harmony, are “not merely arbitrary,” but “are the result of the nature of the intervals themselves.”
If these planes and principles exist in nature under the universal laws of harmony and order, and are apprehensible to man as much through his bodily organs and functions in the realm of consciousness, then all that the musical scale is in the realm of sound, and all that the musical scale is in the realm of sound, and all that the solar spectrum is in the realm of light, such also I think are the planes and principles of consciousness in the life of man. Consciousness is one, persistent and itself unchanging, while noting all other changes and reflecting every state, and its key is the octave or the universal septenary in nature.
“Thus we see that from the prime original (nature) infinity are evolved by means of definite proportions of it either in rest or in motion, the various measures of space and time, the lines and metres, and in a manner so analogous that they must be considered counterparts of one another. And these lines and metres, by being mingled in an infinite variety of ways become the forms of space and the rhythms of time.
These forms and rhythms are then made manifest by vibrations to the eye and ear, and so are clothed by them, as it were, with colors and tones. In its innermost nature, therefore, the forms in space and time (though seemingly so totally unlike) are in reality only different manifestations of one idea-visible nature and music are aesthetically considered counterparts of one another.
