Note 161 — Chapter VIII · MOTOR AUTOMATISM

I do not wish to assert that all unfamiliar psychical states are necessarily evolutive or dissolutive in any assignable manner. I should prefer to suppose that there are states which may better be styled allotropic;—modifications of the arrangements of nervous elements on which our conscious identity depends, but with no more conspicuous superiority of the one state over the other than (for instance) charcoal possesses over graphite or graphite over charcoal. But there may also be states in which the (metaphorical) carbon becomes diamond;—with so much at least of advance on previous states as is involved in the substitution of the crystalline for the amorphous structure.