“It is very much as if the optic ganglia developed fully in themselves, without any closer connection with the rest of the brain than existed at their first appearance.  They would form a little complex nervous system almost but not quite apart from the brain system; and it would be difficult to deny them a consciousness of their own; which would indeed form part of the whole consciousness of the individual, but which would be in a manner self-dependent.”  It must, if this is so, be said that before birth, on the psychic side, the embryo’s activities “form part of a complex consciousness which is that of the mother and embryo together.”  “Without subscribing to the strange stories of telepathy, of the solemn apparition of a person somewhere at the moment of his death a thousand miles away, of the unquiet ghost haunting the scenes of its bygone hopes and endeavors, one may ask” (with the author of the address in medicine at the Leicester gathering of the British Medical Association, British Medical Journal, July 29, 1905) “whether two brains cannot be so tuned in sympathy as to transmit and receive a subtile transfusion of mind without mediation of sense.  Considering what is implied by the human brain with its countless millions of cells, its complexities of minute structure, its innumerable chemical compositions, and the condensed forces in its microscopic and ultramicroscopic elements—­the whole a sort of microcosm of cosmic forces to which no conceivable compound of electric batteries is comparable; considering, again, that from an electric station waves of energy radiate through the viewless air to be caught up by a fit receiver a thousand miles distant, it is not inconceivable that the human brain may send off still more subtile waves to be accepted and interpreted by the fitly tuned receiving brain.  Is it, after all, mere fancy that a mental atmosphere or effluence emanates from one person to affect another, either soothing sympathetically or irritating antipathically?” These remarks (like Dr. Marshall’s) were made without reference to maternal impressions, but it may be pointed out that under no conceivable circumstance could we find a brain in so virginal and receptive a state as is the child’s in the womb.

On the whole we see that pregnancy induces a psychic state which is at once, in healthy persons, one of full development and vigor, and at the same time one which, especially in individuals who are slightly abnormal, is apt to involve a state of strained or overstrained nervous tension and to evoke various manifestations which are in many respects still imperfectly understood.  Even the specifically sexual emotions tend to be heightened, more especially during the earlier period of pregnancy.  In 24 cases of pregnancy in which the point was investigated by Harry Campbell, sexual feeling was decidedly increased