Note 107 — Chapter XIX

In the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, pp. 253-4, I have tried to account for some of the variations in this consciousness. Out of 140 persons whom I found to feel their lost foot, some did so dubiously. "Either they only feel it occasionally, or only when it pains them, or only when they try to move it; or they only feel it when they 'think a good deal about it' and make an effort to conjure it up. When they 'grow inattentive,' the feeling 'flies back' or 'jumps back,' to the stump. Every degree of consciousness, from complete and permanent hallucination down to something hardly distinguishable from ordinary fancy, seems represented in the sense of the missing extremity which these patients say they have. Indeed I have seldom seen a more plausible lot of evidence for the view that imagination and sensation are but differences of vividness in an identical process than these confessions, taking them altogether, contain. Many patients say they can hardly tell whether they feel or fancy the limb."