COLUMBIA LIBRARIES OFFSITE HEALTH SCIENCES STANDARD HX641 30266 RC602.R351887 The diseases of pere^ RECAP ■^■■m^BHBl Ribot, Th, The Diseases of Personality. 1387 Columbia Untoergitp College of 33f)2>stctan£ anb burgeons Hibrarp Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from Open Knowledge Commons http://www.archive.org/details/diseasesofperson1887ribo . "j-"_ ■ I 11 E\ % wk \ ■ THL ..-■■. .■ ■ - D B~ ■ - ' ■'-'■■ - ABTIS • ■'" C ' • SQl IANOF0? ■ , ■ , THE 3 I 8 s S OF Is the only publication of its kind : THE ONLY ORE CONTAINING POPULAR SCIENTIFIC WOEKS AT LOW PRICES, for tt popular ' : i Fiction : rat the >of mtains only r : Of For ; . >st part, the Bi . .t L: works of acknowkd 3 first rank in the ,vorld work- stand forem . 2 and Piiilosoph Literature of on: tiro STRONfe MEAT ..FOR THEM THAT C4« ny q£ the (f rea • the Worfes^fehat have revolutionized it of : land" alined to &&and. fere-Yei* in the bisftory ©r M?nd. THE 99 ^DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. ^ By TH. RIBOT. Translated from the French by J. FITZGERALD, M.A. (Copyright, 1887, by J. Fitzgerald.) CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.— PERSONALITY. — INDI- VIDUALITY. — CONSCIOUSNESS. In the language of psychology the gen- eral meaning of the term " person " is, an individual being that has a clear conscious- ness of itself and that acts consequently : it is the highest form of individuality. Metaphysical psychology, to explain this character (which it reserves for man ex- clusively) merely assumes a Me [ego], ab- solutely one, simple, and identical. Un- fortunately, the explanation is illusive, the solution only apparent. Unless we assign a supernatural origin to this Me, we must needs explain how it comes to be, and from what lower form it springs. Ex- perimental psychology can neither state the problem in the same way nor treat it by the same method. It learns from nat- ural history how difficult it is in many cases to determine the characters of indi- viduality, far less complex though they be than those of personality ; simple, easy solutions it mistrusts, and far from sup- posing the problem to be resolvable at the first attack, it finds the solution at the final term of its researches, as the result of laborious investigations. It is there- fore quite natural that the representatives of the old school, being a little off their bearings, should accuse those of the new school of " stealing their Me," though nobody has attempted anything of the kind. But the language of either side is so different from that of the other, and their methods are so opposite that they no longer understand one another. At the risk of increasing the confusion, I would try to find out what is to be learned from teratological, or morbid, or merely rare cases, touching the formation and disorganization of personality, but without pretending to treat the subject in its entirety : that undertaking were, it seems to me, premature. Personality being the highest form of psychic individuality, a preliminary ques- tion arises : What is an individual ? Few problems have in our days been more dis- cussed by naturalists than this, and few remain more obscure as regards the lower grades of animal life. It is not yet time to treat it in detail : in the conclu- sion of this work, after we shall have studied the constituent elements of per- sonality, we will consider personality itself as a whole. Then we shall take oc- casion to compare personality with the ; lower forms through which nature hass essayed to produce it, and to show thai the psychic individual is only the expres-. sion of the organism : like it of low grade, undifferentiated, incoherent, or- complex and integrated. For the present it suffices to remind the reader who has already some acquaintance with these ; studies, that as we descend in the animaL series, we see the psychic individual formed by more or less perfect fusion of less complex individuals— -a, colony-con-, sciousness being produced by the co-op- eration of local consciousness. These discoveries in natural history are of the : - utmost importance for psychology. Own- ing to them the problem of personality takes a new form : it mus, t be approached from below; and one is^led.to ask; whether the human personality itself is-, not a "coalition whole " whose extreme- complexity makes ks origin difficult to . discover, or even inscrutable, did not the existence of elemental forms throw some light upon the process of this fusion. Human personality — and of this alone can we treat to any purpose, especially in a pathological essay — is a concrete whole, a complex. To. know what it is, we must THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. analvze it, and here analysis is of neces- sity 'artificial, for it separates groups of phenomena that are not merely juxta- posed but co-ordinated, and standing toward one another not in the relation of mere simultaneity but of mutual depend- ence. Still analysis is indispensable. Adopting therefore a division of the sub- ject which I hope will be its own justifi- cation, I will consider successively the Organic, the Affective, and the Intellect- ive conditions of personality, laying stress upon anomalies and irregularities. Upon a final survey of the subject we shall group together again these dissevered elements. But before we begin the exposition and interpretation of the facts, it will be well to have an understanding as to the nature ■of consciousness. I do not propose to write a monograph on consciousness, for ■that would cover pretty nearly the whole field of psychology : it will be enough to : state the problem with precision. Details apart, we find only two hypoth- eses : one very ancient, according to ■\vhich consciousness is the fundamental -property of the "soul," or the "mind," -constituting its essence ; the other very -recent, which regards consciousness as a simple phenomenon superadded to the cerebral activity, as an occurrence having its own conditions of existence, and which .comes or goes as circumstances decide. The former hypothesis has been in vogue so long that it is easy to judge of its merits and its defects. I am _ not called upon to pass sentence upon it ; I will simply show its utter powerlessness to explain the mind's unconscious life. In the first place, for a long time it took no cognizance of this unconscious life. Leibnitz's clear and profound observa- tions on that point lie forgotten or at least in abeyance ; and till well on in the present century the most distinguished psychologists (with a few exceptions) re- • stricted themselves to consciousness. At last, when the question must be heard, . and when it was clear to every one that to regard psychic life as embracing simply the data of consciousness is a conception so poor and jejune as to be of no use in practice, then the metaphysical psycholo- gists were in a quandary. They adopted the hypothesis of "unconscious states." . an ambiguous and semi-contradictory - term soon widely accepted : the term it- self betrays the confusion of ideas amid ^vvhich it arose. What is meant by " un- conscious states ? " The wise note their existence, without trying to account for them ; the less wise talk of latent thought, of unconscious consciousness — expres- sions so vague, so illogical, that many au- thors have admitted as much. In truth, if the soul be defined to be thinking sub- stance, whereof states of consciousness are modifications, it is plainly a contradic- tion in terms to ascribe to it unconscious states. No fetch of language, no trick of dialectic can help the matter : and foras- much as the high importance of these un- conscious states as factors of psychic life is undeniable* there is no escape from the situation. The second hypothesis clears the ground of all this logomachy. It does away with the factitious problems that swarm in the first (eg. whether con- sciousness be a general or a particular faculty, etc.), and we may fearlessly claim for it the benefit of the lex parcimonia. It is the simpler, the clearer, the more consistent of the two. Compared with the other, it may be characterized as ex- pressing the unconscious in physiolog- ical terms (states of the nervous system) and not in psychological terms (latent thought, sensations not sensed, etc.). But this is only a particular case of the hypothesis : we have now to consider it as a whole. I would remark first that conscious- ness, like all general terms, must be re- solved into concrete data. Just as there is not a will in general, but only volitions, so there is not a consciousness in general, but only states of consciousness : and these alone are real. As for defining the state of consciousness, the fact of being conscious, that were a vain and idle at- tempt . it is a datum of observation, an ultimate fact. Physiology shows that its production is always associated with the activity of the nervous system and in par- ticular of the brain. But the converse proposition is not true : though psychic activity always implies nerve activity, nerve activity does not always imply psychic activity. Nerve activity has far greater extension than psychic activity : hence consciousness is something super- added. In other words, we must regard a state of consciousness as a complex fact (evenement, event, occurrence) which presupposes a particular state of the ner- vous system ; nor is this nervous process an accessory but on the contrary an inte- gral part of the fact — nay, its ground- work, its fundamental condition ; once produced, the fact exists in itself ; when THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. consciousness is added, the fact exists for itself ; consciousness completes it, gives it the finishing touch, but does not constitute it. Upon this hypothesis we readily under- stand how every manifestation of psychic life — sensations, desires, feelings, voli- tions, recollections, reasonings, inven- tions, etc., may be alternately conscious and unconscious. There is nothing mys- terious in this alternation, because in every case the essential conditions, i.e., the physiological conditions, remain the same, and consciousness is only comple- mentary — the finish. The question would remain, why this finish sometimes is added, sometimes is lacking ; for were there not in the phys- iological phenomenon itself something more in the former case than in the lat- ter, the adverse hypothesis would be in- directly strengthened. If it could be shown that whenever certain physiologi- cal conditions are present there is con- sciousness, that when they disappear, consciousness too disappears, and that when they vary, consciousness varies : then we should have no longer an hy- pothesis but a scientific truth. That is a distant prospect indeed. Still we may confidently predict that consciousness at least will never give us these revelations touching itself. As Maudsley justly says, consciousness cannot be at once effect and cause — cannot be at once itself and its molecular antecedents : it lives for an instant only and cannot by a direct intu- ition turn back to its immediate physio- logical antecedents ; and besides, to de- scend again to these material antecedents were to lay hold not of itself but of its cause. It would be for the present chimerical to undertake to define even roughly the necessary and sufficient conditions of the apparition of consciousness. We know that the cerebral circulation, as regards the quantity and the quality of the blood, has a good deal to do with the case. Of this we have striking proof in experi- ments made on the heads of animals im- mediately after decapitation. So too we know that the duration of the nervous processes in the centers is an important point. Psychometric research daily shows that a state of consciousness takes longer time in proportion to its greater complex- ity, and that on the other hand automatic acts, whether primordial or acquired, the rapidity of which is extreme, do not en- ter the consciousness. It may also be affirmed that the apparition of conscious- ness is connected with the period of the disassimilation of nerve tissue, as Herzen has shown in detail.* But all these re- sults are but partial gains, while a scien- tific account of the genesis of a phenom- enon requires a determination of all its essential conditions. This the future will yield perhaps. In the mean time we shall best strengthen our hypothesis by showing that it alone explains one highly important character — and not merely a condition — of con- sciousness, namely its infer?nittence. To avoid all misunderstanding at the outset, be it noted that the question is not as to the discontinuity of states of conscious- ness with one another. Each has its limits which, while they allow it to be as- sociated with others, preserve its own in- dividuality. Not of this do we speak, but of the well known fact that con- sciousness has interruptions : in ordinary language, a man is not always thinking. True it is, that this assertion has been contradicted by the majority of metaphy- sicians. But they have never furnished proof in support of their thesis ; and,-as all the facts apparently are against it, the burden of proof seems to lie upon its ad- vocates. Their whole argument is in effect that since the soul is essentially a thing that thinks, consciousness must needs always exist in some degree, even though no trace of it subsists in the mem- ory. But this is simply begging the ques- tion, for the hypothesis we maintain chal- lenges their major premise. Their alleged proof is, after all, only an inference drawn from a contested hypothesis. Let us put aside all a priori solutions and look at the question as it is in itself. Let us consider, not cases of syncope, artificial anaesthesia, epileptic vertigo, co- ma, etc., but the familiar and frequently occurring psychic state of sleep. It has been asserted that sleep is never dream- less ; but that is a purely theoretic asser- tion, based on the thesis that the soul is ever thinking. The only fact that can be cited in support of this proposition is that sometimes a sleeper, when called or questioned, responds in suitable fashion, but on waking has no recollection of the occurrence. But this fact does not justi- fy a general conclusion, and the theory of the metaphysicians is met by the physiologists with another. Physiology teaches us that the life of every organ comprises two periods, one of compara- *La Condizione fisica della Conscienza. Roma, 1879. 4 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. tive repose, or of assimilation, the other of activity, or of disassimilation ; that the brain presents no exception to this law, and that experience shows the duration of sleep, in the several epochs and circum- stances of life, to be in direct ratio to the need of assimilation. The cause of sleep is the necessity of repairing losses, of making the nutritive circulation succeed to the functional circulation. In wake- fulness, the brain burns up more material than is given to it by the blood, so that oxidation soon grows less, and with it the excitability of the nerve tissue. Preyer's experiments show that sleep comes when, in consequence of prolonged activity, the substance of the brain, like that of a fatigued muscle, finds itself overloaded with a certain quantity of acid detritus. The very presence of these products ar- rests, at a given moment, the cerebral activity, which does not reappear till re- pose has allowed complete elimination of these waste matters. * It must be ad- mitted that complete, absolute sleep, without any dream, is the exception ; but that such sleep occurs, and that not rarely, is sufficient to establish the intermittent character of consciousness. The physiological thesis possesses a probative value very different from, and much stronger than, that of the meta- physical thesis. And it must be remem- bered — an important point — that all those who have investigated the question whether there exists perfect cerebral sleep, are men of cultivated and active minds- psychologists, physicians, literary men — in whom the brain is ever wakeful, vi- brating like a sensitive musical instru- ment in response to the slightest excita- tion : in them consciousness is a habit, 'so to speak. Those who put to them- selves the question whether sleep is al- ways accompanied by dreams, are, in fact, the ones least fitted to give a reply in the negative. Among hand workers, this is not the case. A farm-laborer living re- mote from all intellectual agitation, ever restricted to the same occupations, to the same routine, usually does not dream. I know several peasants who look on a dream as a rare occurrence in their hours of sleep. " The most convincing proof that the mind can be completely inactive during sleep — that it can have its existence momentarily m- * By absorbing a certain quantity of lactate of soda, taken as a type of disassimilation products in the brain, Preyer produced yawning, somnolence, and even sleep. terrupted or suspended — would indisputably be afforded if the instant of falling asleep should connect immediately with the instant of awaking, and if the intervening time should be as though it had not been. The philosophers who do not believe in perfect sleep have themselves pointed out this test, at the same time declaring that it has never been verified. But I have been witness of the fact under the following circumstances : One morning, at 2 o'clock, I was called to attend a person in the neigborhood attacked by cholera. As I was about to go out, my wife gave me some direction about the can- dle I held in my hand, and then fell asleep. I came back after about half an hour The noise of the key turning in the lock as I opened the door, awakened my wife suddenly. So deep had been her sleep, so close was the conjunction of the moment when she fell asleep, with the moment when she was awak- ened, that she supposed she had not slept at all, and that she took the sound of the key upon my return, for the same sound at my going. Seeing me re-enter, she believed I was simply turning back on my steps, and asked me the reason ; great was her aston- ishment on learning that I had been absent half an hour." t I know not how facts of this kind can be met, except by falling back upon the inevitable hypothesis of states of con- sciousness that have left no trace in the memory : but that hypothesis, I repeat, is gratuitous and improbable. Those who are subject to fits of swooning with loss of consciousness, know by experience that, while the fit is on, they may suffer a fall or contusion of a member, or over- turn a chair, and, yet, on coming to them- selves, have no idea of what has hap- pened. Is it likely that these rather se- rious accidents, had they been accompa- nied by consciousness, would have left no memory lasting at least a few seconds. I do not in any wise deny that in certain circumstances, whether normal or morbid, — for instance, in hypnotism — states of consciousness that leave no trace appar- ent at the awakening, may later be re- called ; I will restrict as much as any one may wish, the cases of complete interrup- tion of consciousness ; but one single case suffices to raise up insuperable diffi- culties against the hypothesis of the soul being substance which thinks. On the opposite hypothesis, all is easily explained. If consciousness is an occurrence depend- + Despine, Psychologie Naturelle, I., p. 522. Writers on insanity mention cases where, a patho- logical state suppressing consciousness abruptly, the patient, after a longer or shorter interval, re- sumes his conversation at the word where he had been stricken. See other facts of like nature in Winslow, On Obscure Diseases, etc., p. 322 et seq. THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 5 ent on determinate conditions, it need not surprise us if sometimes it is wanting. Were this the place to discuss the question of consciousness thoroughly, we might show that on our hypothesis the relation of the conscious to the uncon- scious is no longer unsettled or contra- dictory. The term unconscious may al- ways be expressed by this periphrasis : A, physiological state which, though sometimes, and even most frequently it is accompanied by consciousness, or may have been so accompanied originally, is at present not accompanied by conscious- ness. This characterization, though neg- ative as regards psychology, is positive as regards physiology. It declares that in every psychic happening the funda- mental, active element, is the nervous process, and that the other is but con- comitant. Consequently it is easy to see that all of the manifestations of psy- chic life may be unconscious and con- scious by turns: for the former case there is required (and this suffices) a determinate nervous process, that is to say, the calling into action of a determi- nate number of nerve elements forming a determinate association, to the exclu- sion of all other nerve elements and of all other possible associations. For the second case it is required (and this suffices) that supplementary conditions of whatever kind be added, without changing aught in the nature of the phenomenon, save to render it conscious. And here we see how unconscious cere- bration does so much work quietly, and how, oftentimes after protracted incuba- tion, it manifests itself by unexpected results. Each state of consciousness represents only a very small part of our psychic life, for unconscious states ever underlie it and as it were thrust it for- ward. Every volition, for instance, has roots deep down in our being ; the mo- tives that accompany and apparently ex- plain it are never more than a part of the true cause. So it is with many of our sympathies ; and so evident is this fact, that minds most deficient in observation often wonder that they cannot account for their likes and dislikes. It were tedious as well as needless to pursue this demonstration farther. Should the reader wish to do so he may consult, in Hartmann's Philosophy of the Uncon- scious, the section entitled " Phenomenol- ogy." There he will find classified all the manifestations of the mind's uncon- scious life, and he will see that there is not one fact that is not explained by the hypothesis here maintained. Let him then apply to the same facts the other hypothesis. One point more remains to be con- sidered. The theory which regards con- sciousness as a phenomenon, and which springs (as could be shown were the di- gression allowable here) from that funda- mental principle in physiology that " re- flex action is the type of nerve action and the basis of all psychic activity," to many sound intellects appears paradoxical and irreverent. They think it robs psychol- ogy of all stability and dignity. They are loath to admit that all the highest manifestations of nature are instable, fleeting, superadded, and, as regards their conditions of existence, subordinate. But that is only a prejudice. Conscious- ness, whatever be its origin, and its na- ture, loses naught of its value ; it is to be esteemed for what it is in itself ; and for the one who takes the evolution point of view, it is not the origin that is of im- portance but the height attained. Ex- perience too teaches us that as we ascend in the series, natural compounds are more and more complex and instable. Were stability to measure dignity the highest place would belong to minerals. This objection then, a purely sentimental one, is inadmissible. As for the diffi- culty of explaining on this hypothesis the unity and continuity of the conscious subject, it is not yet time to speak of it. It will be considered in due course. But the hypothesis of consciousness as phenomenon has a weak side : its sincer- est partisans have maintained it under a form that has won for them the title of advocates of absolute automatism. They are wont to compare consciousness to a ray of light from the furnace of a steam- engine that lights up the machine but has no effect whatever on its work ; ac- cording to them consciousness has no more action than the shadow that ac- companies the wayfarer's steps. If these similes have no purpose save to express the doctrine in a telling way, there is nothing to say ; but taken in their strict sense they are exaggerated and inexact. Consciousness in itself and by itself is a new factor ; and in this there is nothing mystical nor supernatural, as we shall see. In the first place, from the hypothesis itself, a state of consciousness supposing a greater number of physiological con- ditions (or at least different ones) than THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. does the same state when it remains un- conscious, it follows that two individuals, one of them in the former state, the other in the latter, are not, other things being equal, strictly comparable. Stronger proofs still remain — not logi- cal deductions but facts. When a phys- iological state is become a state of con- sciousness, it thereby acquires a special character. Before, it had relation to space, and could be conceived of as the calling into action of a certain number of nerve elements occupying a determinate superficies : but now it takes a position in time — comes after this, follows that, whereas for unconscious states there is neither before nor after. It now is capable of being recalled, i. . cii., p. 333. THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 21 the original and fundamental one, are grafted, one after the other, two new per- sonalities not only quite distinct, but to- tally exclusive of each other. Upon this point it is necessary to give the gist of a few observations.* A woman whose case was observed by Morel, had been abandoned to a vicious life by her mother from the age of fourteen years. " Later, in her shame and wretchedness, her only resource was to enter a brothel. She was taken thence one year afterward and placed in the convent of the Good Shepherd at Metz. Here she stayed two years, and the too strong reaction that took place in her feelings gave rise to religious mania, which was followed by a period of profound stupid- ity." Being now placed under the care of a physician, she would pass through, two alternate periods, believing herself to be in turn prostitute and nun. On emerg- ing from the period of stupidity, " she would go to work regularly, and her language was always proper, hut she would arrange her toilet with a certain coqitetterie. Then this tendency would increase, her eyes growing brighter, her glance lascivious ; she would dance and sing. At last her obscene language and her erotic solicitations would compel her sequestration in solitary confine- ment. She would say her name was Mad- ame Poulmaire, and would give the fullest details of her former life in prostitution. Then, after a period of depression, she would become again gentle and timid, carry- ing even to scrupulousness the sense of pro- priety. She would now arrange her toilet with the utmost austerity. The tone of her voice too would assume a peculiar character, as she spoke of the Good Shepherd convent at Metz and of her longing to return thither. Now her name would be Sister Martha of the Five Wounds, Theresa of Jesus, Mary of the Resurrection, etc. She would not speak in the first person singular, but would say to the attendant sister, ' Take our dress ' ; 4 there is our handkerchief.' Nothing was her own any more, according to the rule in convents. She would have visions of angels smiling upon her, and moments of ecstasy." In a case reported by Krafft-Ebing, a neuropathic patient, son of an insane fa- ther, " during the period of depression was disgusted with the world, and all his thoughts were about the nearness of death, and about eternity, and his pur- pose then was to become a priest. Dur- ing his maniacal periods he was noisy, * They can be found in extenso in Ritti. Traits Clinique de la Folie a Double Forme. Paris, 183? Obss. XVII., XIX., XXX., XXXI. pursued his studies with mad ardar, would not hear of theology, and thought only of practicing medicine." An insane woman at Charenton, pos- sessing very remarkable power and origi- nality of mind, " from day to day would change in personality, in condition, in life, and even in sex: Now she would be a young lady of blood royal betrothed to an emperor; anon a plebeian woman and a democrat : to-day a wife and in the family way ; to-morrow still a maid. It would happen also that she would think her- self a man, and one day she imagined herself to be a political prisoner of importance, and composed some verses upon the subject." Finally in the observation which fol- lows we find the complete formation of a second personality. " A lunatic in the Maison de Vanves," says Billod,t " about every eight months would let his beard grow and would show himself to all the inmates in unusual garb and. with unwonted behavior, giving himself out to be one Nabon, an artillery lieutenant lately re- turned from Africa to take the place of his brother. The patient would then remain several months in a state of great exultation, adapting all his conduct to his new charac- ter. After some time he would announce the return of his brother who, he would say, was in the village and was now to take his place. Then some day he would have his beard shaved off, would make a complete change in his habits and demeanor, and would resume his true name. But now he would present all the signs of melancholia, walking about slowly, loving silence and solitude, continually reading the Folio-wing of Christ and the Fathers of the Church. In this mental state, a lucid one if 3"OU please, but one that I am far from considering as normal, he would remain till the coming back of ' Lieutenant Nabon.' " The two cases first cited are, in reality, but an exaggeration, a largely magnified copy, so to speak, of the normal state. The Me is always made 'up of contradic- tory tendencies — virtues and vices, mod- esty and arrogance, avarice and prodi- gality, desire for rest and need of action, and so on. Usually these opposite tend- encies equilibrate one another, or at least the one which dominates is not without its counterpoise. In the cases before us, in virtue of pretty well ascertained or- ganic conditions, not only is equilibrium impossible, but a group of tendencies be- comes hypertrophied at the expense of the antagonist group, which becomes t Annates Me'dico-fisychologiques, 1858. 22 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. atrophied ; then an inverse reaction takes place, so that the personality, instead of consisting of those mean oscillations whereof each one represents one side of human nature, passes ever from one ex- cess to another. We may remark that these diseases of personality consist of a reduction to a simpler state : but we must not yet dwell upon that point. Nutrition being less a function than the fundamental property of whatever has life, the tendencies and the feelings connected with it possess a very general character. The same cannot be said of what concerns the conservation of the species. That function, attached as it is to a definite part of the organism, finds expression in very definite feelings. Hence this is well fitted to verify our thesis ■ for if personality is a composite varying according to its constituent ele- ments, a change in the sex instincts will change the personality, a perversion will pervert it, an interversion will intervert it : and this is just what happens. First let us recall some known facts, -though commonly the conclusions they enforce are not drawn. At puberty a new group of sensations and consequently of feelings, sentiments -and ideas comes into existence. This influx of unwonted psychic states — stable because their cause is stable, coordinated to one another be- cause their source is one — tends pro- foundly to modify the constitution of the Me. It feels undecided, troubled with a vague and latent unrest whose cause is hid. Little by little these new elements of the moral life are assimilated by the existing Me, enter into it, are converted into it, withal making it other than it was. It is changed ; a partial alteration of the personality has taken place, the result of which has been to produce a new type of character — the sexual character. This development of an organ and of its func- tions, with their train of instincts, imagin- ings, feelings, sentiments and ideas, has produced in the neuter personality of the child a differentiation — has made of it a Me male or female, in the complete sense of the term. Till now there existed only a sort of rough draft \ebauche\ of the complete personality, but that has served to obviate all sudden shock in the change, to prevent a rupture between the past and the present, to make the personality continuous. If now we pass from the normal devel- epment to exceptional and pathological cases, we shall find variations or trans- formations of personality dependent on the state of the genital organs. The effect of castration upon animals is w T ell-known. Not less known is its effect upon man. A few exceptions apart (and such are found even in history) eunuchs present a deviation from the psychic type. " Whatever we know about them," says Maudsley, " confirms the belief that they are for the most part false, lying, coward- ly, envious, revengeful, void of social and moral feeling, mutilated in soul as well as in body." Whether this moral degra- dation be the direct result of castration, as some authors assert, or whether it re- sult from an equivocal social situation, is a question that does not affect our thesis : whether the result comes directly or in- directly from the mutilation, the cause remains the same. As regards hermaphrodites experience verifies what we might have predicted a ftrio?-i. With the characteristics of one sex they present some of those peculiar to the other, but instead of combining the functions of both, they possess oniy im- perfect organs, and commonly these are sexually impotent. The moral character of hermaphrodites is sometimes neutral, again masculine, in other cases feminine. Abundant instances are cited by writers who have treated the question. * " Some- times the hermaphrodite, after having shown a very strong liking for women, is animated with the very opposite instincts by the descent of the testicles." In a case recently observed by Dr. Magitot an her- maphrodite woman successively mani- fested feminine tastes and very pro- nounced masculine appetites. " In gen- eral the affective faculties and the moral dispositions show the effects of the mal- formation of the organs. Nevertheless, it is but fair " says Tardieu, " to make large allowance for the influence of the habits and occupations imposed upon these individuals by the error as to their real sex. Some of them being from the first educated as girls, dressed as girls, employed in women's work, married per- haps as women, retain the thoughts, the habits, the demeanor of the female sex. Such was the case with Maria Arsano, deceased at the age of eighty years, who was in fact a man whose character had been made feminine by habit." I do not propose here to detail the * For the facts see Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hil- aire Histoire des Anomalies vol. II., p. 65, ei seq. .Also Taraieu and Laugier, Dictionnaire de Mcdc- cine, art. Hermaphkodisme. THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 23 perversions or aberrations of the sexual instinct, * each one of which imprints its mark upon the personality, altering it more or less, transiently or permanently. These partial alterations reach their term in total transformation, in change of sex. There are many instances of this : the following may serve as a type. Lalle- mant records the case of " a patient who believed himself to be a woman, and who wrote letters to an imaginary lover. At the autopsy there was found an hyper- trophy with induration of the prostate, and an alteration of the ejaculatory canals." It is probable that in many cases of this kind there has been perver- sion or abolition of the sexual feelings. Some exceptions, however, are to be noted. From sundry detailed observations (which see in Leuret, Fragments Psy- chol., p. 114 et seq.) we learn of individ- uals who assume the gait, the habit, the voice, and, as far as they may, the garb of the sex they imagine themselves to be- long to, though they present no anatomi- cal or physiological anomaly of the sex- ual organs. In such cases the starting point of the metamorphosis is to be sought elsewhere : it must be found in the cerebro-spinal organ. Indeed when we speak of the sexual organs as consti- tuting or as modifying personality, we are to be understood as speaking, not of those organs themselves alone as defined by their anatomic conformation, but also of their relations to the encephalon, in which they are represented. Physiolo- gists locate in the lumbar region of the spinal column the reflex genito-spina! center. From that center to the brain all is undiscovered territory ; for the hypoth- esis of Gall, who made the cerebellum the seat of physical love, is not much in favor, despite the confirmatory observa- tions of Budge and of Lussana. But however great our ignorance upon this point, sexual impressions must reach the encephalon, for they are felt, and there are centers from which psychic incitations are sent out to the sexual organs to put them in action. These nerve-elements, whatever their nature, their number, or their seat ; whether they are localized or diffused, are the cerebral, and conse- quently the psychic, representatives of the sexual organs ; and since in produc- ing a special state of consciousness they usually produce others also, there must * For a full discussion of this question see the article by Dr. Gley, " Sur les Aberrations de 1' In- stinct Sexuel " in the Revue Philosophique, Jan. be some association between this group of psycho-physiological states and a cer- tain number of others. The conclusion to be drawn from the cases already cited, is that there has arisen a cerebral disorder of unknown character (a woman suppos- ing herself to be a man, or vice versa) whence results a fixed erroneous state of consciousness. This fixed state of con- sciousness, predominating over the nor- mal states, calls forth natural, almost anatomical associations, which are as it were its radiations (the feelings, the ways, the speech, the dress of the imaginary sex) : it tends to complete itself. Here is a metamorphosis from above not from below ; and here we have an instance of what is called the influence of the moral upon the physical. We will endeavor to show further on that the Me upon which most psychologists have based their rea- sonings is formed by a like process. Further these cases belong among the intellective deviations of personality, of which we shall treat in the next chapter. Before we quit this subject, I would notice a few facts hard to account for, but which nevertheless cannot be seri- ously alleged against our thesis. I refer to the phenomenon of " opposite sex- uality " \sexualite co7itro,ire~\ often men- tioned of late, and about which- a few words will suffice. Certain patients ob- served by Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, Char- cot and Magnan, Servaes, Cock, et at, present a congenital introversion of the sexuai instinct, whence results, despite their normal physical constitution, an in- stinctive and violent attraction to a per- son of the same sex, with strong repul- sion toward the opposite sex : in short, " a woman will be a woman physically but psychically a man : a man will be physi- cally a man, psychically a woman." These facts are entirely at variance with what logic and experience teach us : here the physical and the moral are in mutual contradiction. Strictly speaking-, those who regard the Me as an entity might quote these facts as proving its indepen- dence, its autonomous existence. Never- theless that were a gross illusion, for their whole argument would rest upon two very weak bases, viz., on some facts of very rare occurrence, and on the present diffi- culty of finding an explanation of them. No one will deny that cases of " opposite sexuality" are but an infinitesimal fac- tion of the sum of the cases known to us by experience. By their rarity they form an exception, and. by their nature a psychological monstrosity : but monstros- 24 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. ities are not miracles, and it behooves us to find out whence they come. We might attempt to account for them in many ways, but that usually means that no explanation is sufficient. I will not inflict these explanations upon the reader. Like every other science, psy- chology must be resigned to be ignorant for a time, and must not fear to confess ignorance. Herein it differs from meta- physics, which undertakes to explain all things. Physicians who from their own medical point of view have studied these strange creatures, regard them as degen- erate individuals. The point of special interest for us would be to know why degenerescence takes this form and not another. Probably the explication of this mystery is to be sought in the mul- tiple elements of heredity, in the complex play of the conflicting male and female elements : I leave the question to minds more clear-sighted and more fortunate in discovering the causes of things. But aside from the question of the cause, one can hardly refuse to recognize a devia- tion of the cerebral mechanism, as in the cases quoted by Leuret, and in like in- stances. But the influence of the sexual organs upon the nature and formation of character is so little open to question that to dwell upon it were to waste time, and an hypothetical explanation of " op- posite sexuality " would in no wise further our research. The instincts, desires, tendencies, senti- ments, etc., that relate to the conserva- tion of the individual and to that of _ the species, have their material conditions clearly determined, the former in_ the totality of organic life, the latter in a special set of organs. But when from the primordial and fundamental forms of the affective life we pass to those which are of secondary formation and which have sprung up later in the course of evolution (tendencies social, moral, intel- lectual, aesthetic, etc.), then, to say noth- ing of the impossibility of assigning to these their direct organic bases, we find that they are by no means so general ; none of them, except perhaps the moral and the social tendencies, express the individual in his totality; they are partial, and represent only one group in the sum total of his tendencies. Hence no one of them has of itself the power of producing a metamorphosis of the personality. As long as the habitude we call bodily sense (or ccenassthesis) and that other habitude which is memory, do not come into play, there can be no complete transforma- tion : the individual may be changed, he does not become another. But these variations, though partial, are interesting. They show the tran- sition from the normal to the morbid state. In studying the diseases of the will * we found in ordinary life many fore- shadowings of the graver forms. Here, too, common observation shows us how little cohesion and unity the normal Me possesses. Apart from perfectly bal- anced characters (though in the strict sense of the term such characters do not exist) there are in every one of us ten- dencies of every kind, in every degree of contrariety, with all possible intermediate shades of difference, and with all sorts of combinations between them. For the Me is not merely a memory, an accu- mulation of recollections linked to the present moment, but a sum of instincts, tendencies, desires, which are simply its innate and acquired constitution entering into action. Memory is the Me statical, the group of tendencies is the Me dynam- ical. If, instead of being influenced un- consciously by the idea of the Me being an entity — a prejudgment instilled into , us both by education and by the so- called testimony of consciousness — we were to take it for what it is, namely a coordination of tendencies and of psychic states whose proximate cause is to be sought in the coordination and consen- sus of the organism, we should no longer be surprised at its oscillations — incessant in fickle, but rare in stable characters — which for a longer or a shorter time, or even for«an almost infinitesimal instant, exhibit the person in a new light. Some organic state, some external influence, reinforces some tendency ; it becomes a center of attraction toward which con- verge the directly associated states and tendencies ; then associations grow closer and closer ; the center of gravity of the Me becomes displaced, and the person- ality is altered. " Two souls " said Goethe "dwell in my breast." Nor two only! If the moralists, poets, dramatists have shown us to satiety these two Mes con- tending in one Me, common experience shows yet more : it shows us many Mes, each as it comes to the forefront, exclud- ing the others. This is less dramatic, but more true. " Our Me differs widely from itself at different times : according * See the work so entitled (Humboldt Library No. 52). THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 2=; to a person's ago, his various duties, the occurrences of his life, the excitements of the moment, such or such an aggrega- tion of ideas which at a given moment represents the Me, becomes more highly developed than others, and takes the foremost place. We are another and yet the same. My Me as physician, my Me as man of science, my sensuous, my moral Me, etc, in other words, the com- plex of ideas, inclinations, will-tenden- cies, so denominated, may at any time come into a state of mutual opposition and repulsion. This would result not only in discord and scission between thought and will, but also in total loss of power, for each of these two isolated phases of the Me, if in all these spheres there was not a more or less open way for the return of the consciousness of some of these fundamental directions." * The orator, master of speech, who while speaking judges himself ; the actor who notes his own performance ; the psychol- ogist who studies himself, all are in- stances of this normal scission of the Me. Between these momentary and partial transformations (which because they are common do not strike one as psychologi- cally important; and the more serious states we have yet to consider, there ex- ist intermediate variations either more stable or more far-reaching, or both. The dipsomaniac, for example, leads two alternate lives : in one he is sober, dis- creet, industrious ; in the other quite overmastered by passion, reckless, heed- less. It is as though two incomplete and contrary individuals were grafted on a common trunk. The same is true of those who are subject to irresistible im- pulses and who declare that an external force constrains them to act in spite of themselves. We may cite also those transformations of character which are accompanied by cutaneous anaesthesia. One of the most curious instances of this was observed by Renaudin : A young man whose conduct had always been exem- plary, suddenly gave way to evil tenden- cies. His mental state gave no clear evi- dence of alienation, but it was noticed that the whole surface of his body had become absolutely insensible. The cutaneous anaesthesia was intermittent. " When it ceased, the young man's dispo- * Griesinger, Maladies Metitales, p. 55. See a good essay by Pauihan on Les Variations de la Personnalite a V Etat Normal {Rev. Philos., June 1882). sition was quite different ; he was now docile, affectionate, fully conscious of his painful situation : when it returned, im- mediately his evil inclinations controlled him, and these, as we found out, might go even so far as to incite him to homicide.'' Inevitably we come back in every case to the organism. But this excursus through diverse fields of observation, however monotonous it may be, exhibits to us the variations of personality in all its aspects. Since no two cases are iden- tical, each one offers a special decompo- sition of the Me. The cases last cited show us a transformation of character without lesion to the memory. As we proceed with our review of the facts, one conclusion will more and more impress itself upon our minds, viz. , that personal- ity results from two fundamental factors — the bodily constitution with its tenden- cies and feelings, and the memory. If (as in the cases so far considered) only the first of these factors is modified, the result is a momentary dissociation followed by a partial change of the Me. If the modification is so profound that the organic bases of memory suffer a kind oi paralysis, and become incapable of be- ing revived, then the disintegration of the Me is complete : there is no longer a past, and there is a different present. Then a new Me is formed, and usually it knows nothing of the former Me. The cases of this kind are so well known that I will simply mention them, viz., the case of the American lady described by Macnish, that of Felida, described by Dr. Azam, and those recorded by Dufay.t Just be- cause they involve the entire personality, these cases come under no specific head- ing, and we have no reason for mention- ing them here rather than anywhere else, except that we wish to remark that the tran- sition from one personality to another is always accompanied by a change of the character, associated no doubt with the unknown organic change which dominates the whole situation. This change is very clearly pointed out by Dr. Azam : his patient (Felida) is at one period gloomy, cold, reserved ; in the other pe- riod, gay, sprightly, cheerful, full of life, even boisterous. The change is greater still in the following case, which I give in + For a full account of the observations, see Taine, De V Intelligence, vol. I. p. 165 ; Azam, Revue Scient,, 20 May, 1876, 18 Sept., 1877, IO Nov. 1879 ; Dufay, ibidem, 15 July, 1876. As regards the part played by memory in pathological cases, see Diseases of Memory (Humboldt Library No 46 J, page 16 et seq. 26 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. some detail because it is recent and little known.* The subject, a youth of seventeen years, V. L. — had an attack of hystero-epilepsy and quite lost all recollection of one year of his life. His character underwent a total change. Born of " an unmarried vagabond girl and an unknown father, as soon as he was able to walk he began straying about the streets and begging. Later he be- came a thief, and was arrested and sent to the St. Urbain penal colony, where he worked as a farm-hand." One day while employed in the vineyard he grasped in his hand a snake concealed in a bundle of vine-cuttings. His fright was extreme, and on his return to the colony in the evening he lost consciousness. This fit returned again and again ; his legs grew weak ; at last came paralysis of his lower limbs, his intelligence remaining intact. He was now transferred to the Bonneval Asylum. There the physician reported of him that he had " a kindly, sympathetic expression" ; that he was " of a mild dis- position, and grateful for the care be- stowed upon him. He would tell the story of his life with fullest details, even his thefts, of which he was ashamed. He laid the blame to his homelessness and to the influence of his companions, who led him into evil. He regretted the past, and declared that in the future he would lead a better life." It was decided to fit him for some occupation compatible with his infirmity. He learned to read, also to write a little. He was taken every morning to the tailor's shop, and being placed upon a table, assumed quite nat- urally the tailor's posture, his legs being paralyzed and greatly atrophied and con- tracted. At the end of two months he could sew very well, and was a diligent worker." He had now an attack of hystero-epi- lepsy which continued for fifty hours, be- ing succeeded by a quiet sleep. Then his former personality came back. " On awaking, V — wanted to get up. He asked for his clothes, and succeeded in put- ting them on. though awkwardly; then he took a few steps about the room. The par- aplegia had disappeared. His gait was un- steady and his legs could not sustain the weight of his body, but that was due to the atrophied state of the muscles. When his clothes were on, he wanted to go out to work on the farm with his comrades. We saw at once that the lad thought he was still at St. Urbain's, and that he wanted to re- sume his habitual occupations. He had in fact no recollection of his attack : did not re- cognize any one here — neither the doctor and nurses, nor his fellow-patients. He refused to believe that he had been paralyzed, say- ing that we were making sport of him. We attributed this to a momentary vesania, not an unusual sequel of strong hysteric seizures. But time went on, and still memory did not return. V — remembered distinctly his hav- ing been sent to St. Urbain's, that 'the other day ' he was frightened by a snake, but from that point forward all was blank. He re- membered nothing : he had no consciousness even of the lapse of time. " Naturally we suspected that he was feigning, as hysterical subjects are wont to do, and we tried in every way to make him contradict himself, but in vain. Thus, we had him taken to the tailor's shop without letting him know where he was going. We walked alongside of him, careful not to give him a hint as to what direction he should take. V — did not know where he was going. Ar- rived at the shop, he gave no sign of know- ing where he was, and declared he came there now the first time. A needle was put in his hand and he was asked to use it in sewing, but he set about it as clumsily as any one does who attempts for the first time to perform the task. Garments were shown him on which he had done the coarser stitching while in the paralytic state. In vain : he recalled nothing of all this. After a month of experiments, observations, and tests of every kind, we were convinced that V — remembered nothing." One of the most interesting points of this case is the modification of the pa- tient's character — a reversion to his prior life and hereditary antecedents. " He is no more the same person : he is now quarrelsome, and an inordinate eater. He makes rude answers. He cared not for wine and usually gave his share of wine to his comrades: now he steals theirs. When some one tells him that once he used to steal, but that he ought not to begin thieving again, he boldly says that 'if he was a thief, he has paid for it, for they have put him in prison.' He is employed in the garden. One day he ran away, taking with him some property and sixty francs be- longing to one of the infirmarians. He was captured five leagues away from Bonneval, just after he had sold his clothes to purchase others and was making ready to take the train for Paris. The arrest was not easily made, for he struck and bit the keepers who had come in pursuit of him. Brought back to the asylum, he became furious, shouting, and rolling upon the ground, so that he had to be confined in a cell." * The case is reported by Dr. Camuset in the Annates Medico-fisychologiques, Jan., 1882. Although we have not yet studied the THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 27 anomalies of personality in all its forms, it will not be out of place here to attempt a few partial and provisional conclusions which will serve to lessen the obscurity of the subject. I will confine myself however to one point — to cases of false personality consisting essentially of a fixed idea, an overweening idea toward which converges the whole group of con- cordant ideas, all others being eliminated and as it were annihilated : as when persons believe themselves to be God, pope, emperor, and speak and act accord- ingly. The study of the intellectual con- ditions of personality will furnish us with many an instance of this — hypno- tized subjects, for example, who assume a personality or enact a role at the oper- ator's will ; but the instances we are al- ready familiar with warrant a question as to what we are to learn from them. At first view, these cases are quite simple as regards the mechanism of their formation. The prime origin is ob- scure ; why is this particular idea pro- duced and not some other ? Commonly we know nothing whatever about it, but once the morbid conception produced, it grows and grows, till at last it reaches its highest point, through the mere au- tomatism of association of ideas. Hence it is not my intention to dwell upon this point, but to show that these pathologi- cal cases explain for us an illusion into which psychology has almost always fallen when it has based itself simply up- on internal observation — the illusion of substituting for the real Me a factitious Me that is far simpler. In order to comprehend the real, con- crete personality and not an abstraction substituted in its room, what we must do is, not to shut ourselves up in our con- sciousness and, closing our eyes, proceed to question it : rather must we open our eyes and observe. The child, the peas- ant, the laborer, the millions of people who walk the streets or who work in the fields ; who have never heard of Fichte or Maine de Biran ; who have never read a dissertation on the Me and the non-Me, nor a single line on psychology — have each one his own definite personality, and this personality they instinctively af- firm. Every moment ever since that for- gotten epoch when their Me was first constituted, i. e., when it was formed as a coherent group amid the occurrences that assail it, that group has maintained itself steadily, steadily undergoing modi- fication. In great part it is made up of states and acts nearly automatic which in each individual constitute the bodily sense (or ccensesthesis) and the routine of life ; which serve as support to all the rest, but whose every alteration, how brief or partial soever, is immediately felt. In great part too it is made up of a complex of sensations, images, ideas, representing the habitual environment within which the individual lives and moves, with the recollections thereto at- tached. All this represents organized states, firmly linked together, mutually calling each other forth, systemized. The fact we actually are cognizant of, though we may not inquire into the cause. "Whatever is new, unwonted ; all changes in the state of the body or of its environment, are unhesitatingly adopt- ed, classed by an instinctive act as form- ing part of the personality or as being external to it. Not by a definite and ex- plicit judgment is this operation perform- ed each moment, but by an uncon- scious logic far more profound than the logic of the schools. Had we to charac- terize with one word this natural, spon- taneous, real, form of personality I should call it an habitude . nor can it be anything else, since, as we maintain, it is but the expression of an organism. Let the reader, instead of observing him- self, proceed objectively : that is, let him observe and interpret with the aid of the data of consciousness the state of those who have never reflected upon their per- sonality, and he will see that the forego- ing thesis is true, and that real personal- ity affirms itself not by reflection but by acts. Let us now consider factitious or arti- ficial personality. When the psycholo- gist essays to comprehend himself, as he says, by inward observation, he attempts the impossible. When he sets about the task, either he restricts himself to the present, and that helps him little : or, let- ting his reflection extend over the past, he affirms himself to be the same that he was a year or ten years ago ; he does but express learnedly and laboredly what any peasant knows as well as himself. By inner observation he can grasp only tran- sitory phenomena, and so far as I know answer has never been made to these just observations of Hume : "As for me, whenever I contemplate what is inmost in what I call my own self, I always come in contact with such or such special perception as of cold, heat, light or shadow, love or hate, pleasure or pain. I never come unawares upon my mind existing in a state void of perceptions : I never observe aught 28 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. save perception. ... If any one, after seri- ous reflection and without prejudices, thinks he has any other idea of himself, i confess that 1 can reason no longer with him. The best I can say for him is mat perhaps he is right no less than 1, and that on this point our na- tures are essentially different. It is possible tnat he may perceive something simple and permanent wnicli he calls himself, but as for me f am quite sure i possess no such prin- ciple." iiume, Works, vol. I, p. 321. Since Hume's day some one has said : " Through tlie sense ot erlort and of resist- ance we leel that we cause " [par I effort et la resistance, nous nous sentons cause]. True ; and pretty nearly all schools agree that in this way the ivie distinguishes it- self from the non-Me : but the sense of effort nevertheless is still simply a state of consciousness — the sense of the mus- cular energy spent to produce a given act. To seek to grasp by analysis a syn- thetic whole as personality is, or by an in- tuition of consciousness lasting at most a few seconds to seize a complex like the Me, were to attempt the solution of a problem whose data are mutually con- tradictory. The psychologists have gone to work differently. They have con- sidered states of consciousness as ac- cessories, and the tie that connects them as the essential thing : and it is this mys- terious underlying something that, under the name of unity, identity, or continuity, becomes the true Me. Nevertheless plainly we have here only an abstraction, or more precisely a schema. For the real personality has been substituted the idea of personality — a very different thing. This idea of personality is like all general terms formed in the same way, as sensi- bility, will, etc.; but it is no more like the real personality than the plan of a city is like the city itself. And as in the cases of aberration of personality that have led to the present remarks, one idea has taken the place of a complex, forming an imaginary and a diminished personality, so bv the psychologist the schema of person- ality is substituted for the concrete per- sonality, and it is upon this beggarly framework that he rests all his reasoning, inductions, deductions and dogmatizings. Of course this comparison is made on the condition of mutatis mutandis and with many restrictions, which the reader will find out for himself. In short, for one to reflect on his Me is to take an artificial position which changes its nature — to substitute an ab- stract representation for a reality. The true Me is that which feels, thinks, acts, without exhibiting itself, so to speak, to itself upon a stage. For the Me is in its nature and by its definition a subject ; and to become an object it must undergo a reduction, an adaptation to the mind's optical conditions, and that transforms it, mutilates it. Till now we have considered the ques- tion only on its negative side. To what' positive hypothesis as to the nature of personality are we led by the observation of morbid cases ? First let us lay aside the hypothesis of a transcendental entity — an hypothesis that cannot be recon- ciled with pathology, and which explains nothing. Let us put aside also the hypothesis which makes of the Me " a bundle of sen- sations " or of states of consciousness, as many have held it to be, following Hume. So to think is to take appearances for reality, a group of signs for a thing, or more exactly, to take effects for their cause. Besides, if, as we hold, conscious- ness is only an indicative phenomenon, it cannot be a constitutive state. We have to penetrate deeper, to that consensus of the organism of which the conscious Me is but the psychological ex- pression. Has this hypothesis any firmer ground than the other two? Both ob- jectively and subjectively considered, the characteristic trait of personality is that continuity in time, that permanence which is called identity. This has been denied of the organism, on grounds so well known that there is no need to state them : but it is strange that those who refuse to concede continuity, identity, to the organism should fail to see that all the arguments for a transcendental prin- ciple hold good also for the organism, and that all the arguments that can be brought against the latter have the same force against the former. That every higher organism is one in its complexity is an observation at least as old as the Hippocratic writings , and since Bichat's time no one attributes this unity to a mysterious vital principle ; certain writers however make a great noise about the constant molecular renovation which con- stitutes life, and ask, Where is the iden- tity ? But as a fact every one believes in this identity of the organism. Identity is not immobility. If, as some savants hold, life has its seat not so much in the chemical substance of the protoplasm, as in the motions of the particles, then it is a "combination, of motions," or a " form of motion," and this constant THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 2 9 molecular renovation must itself be sub- I ordinate to more recondite cone: However that may be, every unbiased j mind will admit that the organism pos- i sesses identity. What h] - then ! could be more simple or more natural j than to consider the conscious identity as j the inward manifestation of the external 1 identity subsisting in the organism - On this physical basis of the organism ! rests also, according to our thesis, what ; we call the unity of the Me, i.e., the in- j terdepender.ee which links together the states of consciousness. The unity of the Me is the unity of a complexus, an d by a metaphysical illusion do we accord j to it the ideal unity of the mathematical ! point. It consists not in the act of a sup- j posedly simple " essence," but in a co- ! ordination of the nerve centers, w themselves represent a coordination of j the functions of the organism. It is true I that here we have to do with hypotheses, j but at least they have no superna; . ir ..'. charac t ■ Take man in the fcetal state, before the be ling of psychic life: leave out ail the tereditary dispositions aire;:. any way impressed upon him, which will later com; into play. At some undefined lest in the last weeks of tne foe - :, some sort of body sense (coenaest must come into existence — a vague feeling of well-being or of dis- comfort. Ho vever confused this may be sup josed to be, it implies certain mod- ifications in the nerve centers, as far as their rudimentary state may allow. When sensations objective or not) of external causation are added to these simple vital, organic, sensations, they too necessarily produce a modification in the nerve centers. But they are not in- scribed on a tabula rasa ; the warp of the psychic life is already laid, and this warp is general sensibility, the feeling of life, which, even though it be very vague, absolutely constitues, at this period of life, almost the total sum of conscious- ness. Thus we have a glimpse of the origin of the connection between states of consciousness. The first sensation — supposing one to exist in the isolated state— does not come like an aerolite in a desert : at its entrance even it is con- nected with others — with the states which constitute the bodily sense, and which are simply the psychic expression of the organism. In terms of physiology, this means that the modifications of the nervous system representing materially sensations and the desires that arise out of them (these being the first elements : the higher psychic life) are added to prior modifications which are the material representatives of the vital and organic Sensations; and that thereby relations are established between these nervous elements ; so that from the first the com- plex unity of the Me editions of existence, and these it finds in that gen- eral consciousness of the organism so much overlouked, though it .-rthe- iess the main supper; : lithe rest. In short, all depends upon the unity of the jrganism : and when the psychic life, having itself passed the embry mi - stage, has taken shape, the I ] ly be com- pared to a rich piece of tapestry where the warp has completely ; ;ared, being in some instances li > it erlaid with figures, in others being embroidered in high relief ; the psychologist who em- ploys inner observation only, sees but the figures and the embroidered designs, and loses himself in a maze of conjecture as bat may underlie them ; if he were but to change his position >r tc look at the reverse side, he would save himself many a useless induction, and would learn The same thesis might be discussed under the form of a criticism of Hume. The Me is not, as Hume held, a mere bundle of perceptions. Without appeal- ing to psychology, but confining one's self to simple ideological analysis, one ob- serves here the omission of one important point, viz., the relations between the pri- mordial states. Relation is an element vague in its nature, and hard to deter- mine, since it does not exist by itself. Still, it is something more and something else than the two states which limit it. In Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psy- chology is found a searching study : little noticed) of the elements of psychic life, with hypotheses as to their material conditions. Quite recently Mr. W. James has taken the question up again.* He compares the course of cur con- sciousness with its uneven flow to the progress of a bird that alternately flies and perches. The resting-places are oc- cupied by relatively stable sensations and images : the spaces passed over in flight are represented by thoughts of re- lations between the points of rest : the latter — the " transitive portions " are nearly always forgotten. It seems to me * See Mind, Jan., 334, p. 1 et sec. 30 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. that this is our thesis in another form — the continuity of the psychic phenomena by reason of a deep, hidden substratum, to be sought in the organism. In truth, that were- a precarious sort of personality which should have no other ground, but consciousness, and this hypothesis is found wanting when tested by the sim- plest facts : as for instance when an ex- planation is asked of the fact that after a sound sleep of six or eight hours I unhes- itatingly declare my identity. To refer the essence of our personality to a mode of existence (consciousness) that disap- pears at least during one-third of our life, is to offer a curious solution. We therefore maintain, as we have elsewhere done with regard to memory, that individuality, in itseif and such as it exists actually in the nature of things, is not to be confounded with individuality as it exists for itself in virtue of con- sciousness (personality). The organic memory is the basis of all the highest forms of memory, these being only its more perfect phases. The organic indi- viduality is the basis of all the highest forms of personality, which are only its development. Of personality, as of mem- ory, I hold that it is completed, perfected, by consciousness, not constituted by con- sciousness. Although, in order to keep these re- marks within due limits, I have carefully abstained from all digression, from criti- cism of opposite doctrines, and from ex- position of points of detail, I must, in passing, point out one question which suggests itself naturally : Does the con- sciousness of our personal identity rest upon memory, or vice versa ? One per- son will say, without memory I should be but a present existence incessantly re- newed, and that does away with ail pos- sibility, however faint, of identity. An- other will say, without a feeling of iden- tity binding them together and impressing a character upon them, my recollections would not be mine : they would be for- eign to me. Is it then memory which produces the sense of identity, or is it the sense of identity which produces memory ? Neither ! These are both effects, whose cause is to be sought in the organism : for on the one hand its (the organism's) objective identity is expressed in that sub- jective state which we call the sense of personal identity ; and on the other hand, it is here (i.e. in the organism) that are enregistered the organic conditions of our recollections, and here too is found the basis of our conscious memory. The feeling of personal identity, as well as memory in the psychological sense, are effects whereof the one cannot be the cause of the other. Their common ori- gin is in the organism, where identity and organic enregistration {i.e. memory) are one. Here we touch one of those nial- posited-questions which abound in the hypothesis of an entity-consciousness. CHAPTER IV. INTELLECTIVE DISTURBANCE. In certain morbid states the traditional five senses are subject to serious pertur- bations, their functions becoming per- verted or distorted. Do these "pares- thesias " and " dysaethesias " play any part in changes of personality ? Before we examine this point, we have first to ask, what happens when one or more of the senses are suppressed ? Is the per- sonality then altered, maimed, or trans- formed ? Experience seems to give an- swer in the negative. Total loss of any sense may be either acquired or congenital. We will first con- sider the former case. We will set aside the two secondary senses, taste and smell, as well as touch in its several forms, allied as it is to the general sensibility ; and we will consider only hearing and sight. In- stances of acquired blindness and deaf- ness are not rare : quite frequently they produce modifications of character, but such changes are not radical, and the in- dividual remains the same. Congenital blindness and congenital deaf-muteness affect the personality more profoundly. Those who are deaf-mutes from birth, if they have to depend on their own re- sources and are not instructed in the deaf- mute language, remain in a state of men- tal inferiority. This has sometimes been exaggerated,* but it is nevertheless incon- testable, and it is due to causes so often explained that there is no need to recall them here. The conscious personality falls below the normal stage : but in this case we have an arrest of development rather than an alteration of personality in the strict sense of the term. As for those born blind, many of them, as we know, are clever and ingenious, and there is no ground for supposing in their case any diminution or alteration of * See on this point the facts reported by Kuss- maul, Die Stbrzingeii der Sprache, VII. p. 16 et seq* THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. personality. However odd, to our minds, their conception of the visible world, which they image to themselves accord- ing to hearsay only, that does not seri- ously affect either the nature of their per- sonality or the idea they have of it. Take the case of Laura Bridgman — the most noted case of sense privation on rec- ord, a case- minutely studied, and fully detailed.* Here we see a woman bereft at the age of two years of sight and hear- ing, almost entirely deprived of the senses of smell and taste, and possessing only the sense of touch. Doubtless very great credit is due to the painstaking and intel- ligent training which has fashioned her mind: nevertheless her instructors could not endow her with new senses, and her one sense of touch had to suffice for all purposes. Now Laura Bridgman is seen to possess an individuality of her own, and a clearly marked character, being of a kindly disposition, almost invariably good-humored, untiring in her efforts toward self-instruction : in short, she is a person. Disregarding the innumerable details involved in the foregoing cases, we may safely conclude that congenital or ac- quired privation of one or more of the senses involves no morbid state of the personality. In the less favorable cases there is a relative arrest of development, which is remedied by education. For those who hold the Me to be an exceedingly complex composite — and such do we hold it to be — every change, addi- tion, or subtraction, in its constituent ele- ments affects it more or less. But the aim of our analysis is precisely to distinguish, in these elements, what is essential from what is accessory. What the external senses (touch excepted) bring in is not an essential factor. The senses determine and circumscribe the personality ; they do not constitute it. Were it not rash to trust to pure logic in questions of observation and experience, this conclusion might be deduced a priori. Sight and hearing are pre-eminently objective : they reveal to us what is without, not what is within. As for touch, a complex sense which many physiologists resolve into three or four senses, this, in so far as it makes us acquainted with the properties of the outer world — in so far as it is an eye for the blind — belongs in one group with sight and hearing ; otherwise, it is only * See Mary Swift Lamson, Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman, the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl. one form of the sense we have of our own body. It may seem strange to say that pares- thesia and dysesthesia, of which we are now to treat, i. Uej>sie, p. 391. t Revue des Deux Mondcs, 15 Oct., 1845, p. 307. THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 37 southward, or remaining at home ? Many a time in our lives does it happen that we have to make our choice between three alternatives each one of which nec- essarily excludes the other two. Where shall we locate the third ? for under that strange form the question has been raised. In some cases of congenital atrophy of the brain which appear to be confirmed by authentic observations, we find indi- viduals possessing from infancy only one cerebral hemisphere, yet their intellectual development has been up to the ordinary standard, and they have been like other human beings. * In such individuals, ac- cording to the hypothesis we are com- bating, there couid have been no interior conflict. But it is needless to pursue this criticism further, and I content myself with recalling Griesinger's remark upon a verse in Faust . Not two souls only, but many souls dwell within us. Idle indeed were this discussion if it did not afford us a view of our subject under a different aspect. These contra- dictions within the personality, this par- tial scission in the Me, such as we see them in the lucid moments of insanity and delirium, or in the self-condemnation of the dipsomaniac while he raises the cup to his lips, are not oppositions in space (of one hemisphere against the other) but oppositions in time. To bor- row a favorite expression of Lewes's, they are successive " attitudes " of the Me. This hypothesis accounts for everything that is explained by the other and be- sides it explains what that does not. If one is fully imbued with the idea that personality is a consensus, one will easily see how the mass of conscious, sub-con- scious, and unconscious states which make it up may at a given moment be summed up in a tendency or a predominant state which, for the person himself and for others, is its expression at that moment. Straightway this same mass of constitu- ent elements is summed up in an opposite state which has become predominant. Such is our dipsomaniac, who drinks and who condemns himself. The state of consciousness predominant at a given mo- ment is for the individual himself and for others his personality. Clearly three states or more may suc- ceed one another (co-exist apparently) by the same mechanism. We are no longer * Cotard, Etude sur V Atrofhie Cerebrate. Paris, 186S. Diet. Encyc.des Scijnces Medicates, art. Cek- VEAU.pp. 298, 453. restricted to the number two. True, it must be admitted that this inner scission occurs more frequently between two con- trary states than between three or more. This is owing to certain conditions of consciousness which we must recall. Is there actual co-existence of two states of consciousness, or only so rapid a suc- cession of one to the other as to resemble simultaneousness ? The question is a very difficult one and has not yet been settled, though it will perhaps one day be settled by the psycho-physicists. Hamil- ton and others have maintained that we may have as many as six impressions at once, but their conclusion is grounded on very inexact observations. The determi- nation of the duration of states of con- sciousness by the rigorous processes of physics is a great step in advance. Wundt has endeavored to go further, and to deter- mine by experiment what he justly calls the extension of consciousness ( Umfang des Bewusstseins), that is, the maximum num- ber of states that it can simultaneously contain. His experiments have had to do only with exceedingly simple impres sions (the strokes of a pendulum at fixed intervals punctuated by strokes on a small bell) and therefore they are not in all respects applicable to the complex states we are considering. He finds that " twelve representations form the max- imum ' extension ' of consciousness in the case of successive relatively simple states." t Experience then, seems to pronounce in favor of a very rapid suc- cession, equivalent to a co-existence. The two, three, or four contrary states would be at bottom a succession. Further, we know that, to use a com - parison that is often employed, con- sciousness, like the retina, has its " blind spot." Distinct vision is but a small por- tion of the total vision. Distinct con- sciousness is only a small portion of the total consciousness. Here we hit the natural, the incurable cause of that illu- sion whereby the individual identifies himself with his existing state of con- sciousness, particularly when the same is intense ; and of necessity this illusion is far stronger for himself than for others. We see also why (apparent) co-existence is easier for two contrary states than for three ; and far easier than for a larger number. This fact is due to the limita- tions of the consciousness. As we said + Grundziige der Physiol. ol. II., p. 215. Psychologie, 2d ed., 33 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY, before, there is an opposition in time, not in space. In short, the relative independence of the two hemispheres is not open to doubt : neither may we doubt that the personal- ity is perturbed by disaccord between them. But to reduce the whole matter to a simple division between the left side and the right is an hypothesis not sup- ported by any weighty argument. A few words with regard to memory. We have no occasion to study memory separately, for it pervades our subject everywhere. Personality, in fact, is not a phenomenon but an evolution ; not a momentary thing but a history ; not a present nor a past but both. We will not consider what I may call the objective, intellectual memory — the sense percep- tions, images, experiences, cognitions stored up within us. All these may dis- appear, in part or wholly, through diseases of memory, of which we have given many illustrations elsewhere.* We will consider now only the subjec- tive memory — memory of ourselves, of our physiological life and of the sensa- tions or feelings that accompany it. This distinction is- purely artificial, but it will enable us to simplify matters. First, does such a memory exist ? One might say that in the perfectly healthy individual the vital tone is so con- stant that the consciousness he has of his body is but a present ever repeated ; but this monotony, if it exists, by excluding consciousness would on the other hand favor the formation of an or- ganic memory. As a fact there are al- ways going on changes — inconsiderable they may be — and as we are conscious only of differences, these are felt. So long as they are faint and partial the im- pression of uniformity persists, because actions that are continually repeated are represented in the nervous system far more enduringly than ephemeral changes. Consequently the memory of them is or- ganized beneath consciousness, and it is hence all the more firmly based. Here we see the groundwork of our identity. These slight changes act in the long run, producing what is called an insensible change. After ten years of absence, an object, say a monument, is the same to the eye, but it is not the same as regards feeling and sentiment . here it is not the * Diseases of Memory (Humboldt Library No faculty of sense perception but its accom- paniment that has changed. But we have here the state of sanity and health — the simple transformation that is nat- ural to everything that lives and that evolves. Such is organic memory, such its habit. But now let certain disturbing causes in- tervene of which we can demonstrate the effects, subjective and objective. There is produced a profound and sudden, or at least a rapid and persistent transforma- tion of the ccenassthesis. What is the re- sult ? Experience alone can tell, for in our ignorance of the causes we are re- duced to simple empiricism. In extreme cases — and we will not notice others — the individual is changed. His metamorphosis occurs in three principal forms, as regards the memory, ist. The new personality, after a longer or shorter period of transition, alone re- mains, the original personality being for- gotten (Leuret's patient). This case is rare. It supposes the former ccenassthe- sis completely done away, or at least for- ever inactive and incapable of resuscita- tion. When it is considered that absolute transformation of personality, i.e., substi- tution of one personality for another — - substitution complete, unreserved, with- out a link to connect the present with the past — presupposes a radical and thorough transformation in the organism, one is not surprised to find that it occurs but rarely. I am not aware of any case where the second personality has not in- herited at least some small share of the effects of its predecessor — at the very least certain acquired faculties that have become automatic, as the power of walk- ing, talking, and the like. 2d. Usually beneath the new bodily sense (ccenassthesis) that has become or- ganized and has become the groundwork of the exsiting Me, the old organic memory persists. From time to time it returns to consciousness, weak and faint like some memory of childhood that repe- tition has not reawakened. Probably this reviviscence is caused by some re- mainder of the old organic memory that is common to the two : the individual then seems another. The existing state of consciousness evokes a like one, but this has another accompaniment. The two seem mine though contradictory of each other. Such is the case with patients who find that everything is as it ever was, and yet that all is changed. 3d. Finally, there are cases of alterna- tion. Here the two subjective memories THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 39 — the organized expression of the two ccenaestheses — persist, both in turn be- coming predominant. Each is attended by, and sets in action a group of feelings and of physical and intellectual aptitudes that do not exist in the other. Each forms part of a separate complexus. The case reported by Azam is a good illustration of two memories alternating. We can add nothing more without re- peating what we have already said, or without heaping up hypotheses. Our ig- norance of the causes stops us short. The psychologist is here like the physi- cian who has to deal with a disease of which he can make out only the symp- toms. What physiological influences are they which thus alter the general tone of the organism, consequently of the ccenses- thesis, consequently too of the memory ? Is it some condition of the vascular sys-« tern ? Or some inhibitory action, some arrest of function ? We cannot say. So long as this question remains undecided we are still only at the surface of the matter. Our purpose has simply been to shoA r that memory though in some re- spects it may be confounded with person- ality, is not its ultimate basis. Even in the normal state the same physical situation has a tendency to re- call the same mental situation. I have often observed how, on falling asleep, a dream of the preceding night till then forgotten comes back to memory in great detail and very distinct. In traveling, when I leave one town to sleep in an- other, this recurrence of the previous night's dream sometimes takes place, but then the dream comes back piecemeal, disjointed, and hard to reconstruct. Is thus the effect of the physical conditions, in one case alike, in the other slightly dif- ferent? Though I have not seen this fact mentioned in any work upon dreams, I do not suppose it to be peculiar to me. But there are certain familiar facts that are more conclusive. In somnam- bulism, whether natural or induced, the occurrences of preceding states of the same kind that are forgotten during wakefulness come back in the hypnotic state. Of this we have an illustration in the well known case of the porter who while intoxicated mislaid a parcel : on becoming sober he was unable to discover it, but he found it on getting drunk again. Do we not here see a tendency to the formation of two memories, one normal, the other pathological, the two pertaining to two distinct states of the organism, and constituting as it were the embry- onic forms of the extreme cases already mentioned ? We have already shown in a general way the role of ideas in the transforma- tion of personality. It remains to ob- serve this new factor in operation and to ascertain what results it produces per se and distinctively. Of the many elements whose consensus constitutes the Me, none perhaps can be so easily isolated and studied apart. But we must guard against an ambiguity in terms. For the conscious individual the idea of his per- sonality may be an effect or a cause ; a result or a prime factor, a point of arrival or a point of departure. In the normal state it is always an effect, a result, a point of arrival. In the morbid state it is both an effect and a cause. In many of the instances already cited we have seen organic perturbations, whether affective or sensorial, produce such a feel- ing of exaltation or of depression, that the individual believes himself to be a god, a giant, a great man, or on the other hand a mere automaton, a phantom, a dead man. Clearly these erroneous ideas are a fairly logical conclusion from the inner transformation of the individual — the ultimate formula expressing it. There are other cases of a contrary nature, where the transformation of personality comes not from below but from above; where it is not completed in the brain but where it begins in the brain ; and where accordingly the idea is, not a con- clusion, but a premise. No doubt it were rash to assert that in many in- stances where an erroneous idea becomes the starting-point for a change in the Me, this has not underlying it and be- fore it in time an organic or an affective perturbation. Indeed it .must be affirmed that such is the case always ; even in the hypnotized subject, in whom the person- ality is changed by suggestion. Between the two forms of metamorphosis indi- cated above there exists no clear line of demarkation : the term " ideal metamor- phosis of personality " is only an a priori denomination. Having made this reser- vation, we will now examine this new as- pect of our subject, starting as usual from the normal state. A very common occurrence is the en- grossment of the personality by an in- tense fixed idea. So long as this idea occupies the consciousness it is hardly an exaggeration to say that it is the in- dividual. When a man is wrestlincr con- 40 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. tinually with a problem, or intent on working out an invention, or bending his energies toward the production of some original work in any held, his entire men- tal^resources, his whole personality, are drawn upon for the benefit of one idea. In such cases, a man is overmastered by his dominant idea, that is, he is an automaton : he is in an abnormal state ; there is a disturbance of equilibrium. Of this we have proof in the innumerable anecdotes that are current the world over about inventors, whether well balanced or half-crazed. And it may be remarked in passing that a fixed idea is a fixed senti- ment, or a fixed passion. The fixed idea gets its intensity, its stability, its tenacity from some longing, some emotion of love or hatred, some consideration of gain. Ideas are ever servitors of the passions, but they are like those masters who al- ways obey the while they think they command. So far we have no change of personal- ity, but only simple deviation from the normal type, or better, the schematic type, where ex hypothesi the organic, the af- fective, and, the intellective elements pro- duce a perfect consensus. There is hy- pertrophy at one point, atrophy at other points, conformably to the law of com- pensation. Let us consider morbid cases. Outside of the artificial alterations pro- duced during hypnotism it is difficult to find any great number of cases in which the starting-point is indisputably an idea. But I think I am justified in classing among changes of personality having their source in the intellect the phenom- ena of lycanthropy and of zoanthropy ; once so' common, now rare. At all events, in every instance of which we have authentic record * the mental debil- ity in the lycantkrope is so great, and so near akin to stupidity, that one is dis- posed to see here a case of reversion, of return to the purely animal individuality. We may add that as these cases are com- plicated with disorders of the viscera, and with hallucinations of touch (cutane'es) and of sight, it is not easy to decide whether they are the effects of a precon- ceived idea, or whether they themselves produce it. Still it must be remembered that lycanthropy has sometimes been epidemic, that is, it must have begun, at least among the ■ imitators, with a fixed idea. Finally, this particular malady dis- appeared when men had ceased to be- lieve in it — when the thought that he was a wolf could no longer find a lodgment in a man's brain. The only perfect instances of trans- formation of the personality by ideas (transformation ideale) are those already mentioned, where men believe them- selves to be women, and vice versa, without presenting any sexual anomaly that could account for this metamor- phosis. The influence of an idea ap- pears also to be initiative or preponder- ant with the possessed, demoniacs. It often acts upon the exorcist by contagion. To cite one instance of this, Father Sunn, so long mixed up with the well- known doings at the Loudun Ursuline nunnery, was convinced that he had two souls, and sometimes, as it would appear, even three.! In short, transformation of personality through the dominance of an idea are not very frequent, and this affords new proof of what we have again and again repeated : that personality comes from the more fundamental psychic elements. In the higher nerve centers it attains its unity and there does it come to full con- sciousness of itself, there it reaches per- fection. If by a mechanism acting in the reverse direction it proceeds from above downward, the result is superficial, pre- carious, momentary. Of this we have a demonstration when artificial personalities are produced in hypnotized subjects. The observations of Ch. Richet on this subject are full and conclusive.}: I will sum them up briefly. * See Calmeil, De la Folie Considered sous le Point de Vue Pathologiquc, Philosophique, His- torique. et Judiciaire, vol. i, book 3, chap. 2, and book 4, chap. 2. t He has left us a detailed account of his mental state in his Ilistorie des Diablcs de Loudun, p. 297 et seq.: " I cannot describe to you what passes within me during this time [/. e., when the demon passes from the body of the possessed nun into his body] and how this spirit unites with mine, with- out depriving me either of the cognition or of the liberty of my soul, nevertheless making himself like another me, and as though I had two souls whereof one is dispossessed of its body and of the use of its organs and stands aside, looking on while the intruder makes herself at home. The two spirits fight on one field, which is the body, and the soul is as it were divided in twain : in one part of her, she is the subject of the diabolic impres- sions: in the other, she is the subject of the mo- tions that are proper to her or that God gives her. When I would, by the motion of one of these two souls, make the sign of the cross upon my lips, the other turns my hand away very rapidly, and seizes my finger with the teeth to bite it in its rage. * * When I would speak my speech is checked ; at the mass I am stopped quite short ; at the table I cannot raise a morsei to my mouth ; at confession, I suddenly forget my sins, and I feel the devil go- ing and coming within me, as in his own house. ' X Revue Philosophique, March, 1883. He gives some later observations in his work, IS Homme et I Intelligence. See also Carpenter, Mental Phys- iology. THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 41 The hypnotized subject (usually a woman) is made to believe herself to be, now a peasant, again an actress, or a general, an archbishop, a nun, a sailor, a little girl, and so forth ; and she acts her part without any misgiving. Here the psychological data are perfectly clear. In this state of artificially produced som- nambulism the real personality is intact ; the organic, affective, and intellectual elements have undergone no considerable alteration, but they all remain in posse. A certain not well understood state of the nerve centers, an arrest of function, prevents them from passing into act. By suggestion an idea is evoked : in- stantly by the mechanism of association, this awakens analogous states of con- sciousness, and no others , and in con- nection with them — always by associa- tion — the appropriate gestures, acts, speech and sentiments. In this way is constituted a personality external to the real personality, made up of borrowed elements and depending on automatism. This experiment shows what an idea may do when freed from control by other ideas, but at the same time reduced to its own sole forces, and no longer sup- ported and aided by the totality of the individual. In some cases of imperfect hypnotism dualism is produced. Dr. North, pro- fessor of physiology in the Westminster Hospital, says, in speaking of the period of hypnotization when he was being in- fluenced by the fixing of the gaze . — " I was not unconscious, but it seemed as if I lived as two beings. I fancied that an inner Me was alive to all that was pass- ing, but that it took no part in the acts of the outer Me, nor had any care to control them. The repugnance or the inability of the inner Me to direct the outer Me seemed to increase as the situation was continued."* * Hack Tufce, On the Mental Condition in Hyp- notism, published in the Journal of Mental Sci- ence, April. i33t. We have also in this article the case of a physician who, during a troubled slumber after some twenty hours of climbing' among the Alps, dreamt that he was twain • one Me had died, the other was making the autopsy. In some cases of intoxication and of delirium, the psychic coordination disappears, and there is a kind of scission of the personality in two. See the articles by Dr. Azam on changes of personality {Rez'ue Scientifigue, Nov. 17, 1883) and of Dr. Galicier [Revue Pliilosi'phique. July, 1887"). Taine gives a curious case of semi-pathological incoordination : — '• I have seen a person who, while singing or talking writes, without looking at the paper, consecutive phrases, even whole pages, quite unconscious of what she is writing. In my opinion she is per- fectly sincere, yet she declares that when she comes to the end of the page she has no idea what Can this inner personality — the true personality — ever be entirely suppressed ? Can the individual's proper character be reduced to nought, so as to be trans- formed into its opposite ? No doubt it can : the operator, by persistent enforce- ment of his authority, succeeds in doing this, after more or less resistance. Richet impressed upon a woman who was a very strong Bonapartist strict re- publican convictions. Braid having hyp- notized a " teetotaler," whose sobriety was without reproach, assured the man again and again that he was drunk. •'This assertion was strengthened by a feeling of staggering (produced by mus- cular suggestion) and it was amusing to see the man wavering between this im- posed idea and the conviction resulting from his habits." This momentary met- amorphosis however is perfectly innocu- ous. As Richet justly remarks: — ''In these curious modifications what changes is simply the outer form, the habits and general demeanor, and not the individu- ality proper." As for the question whether by repeated suggestions to sus- ceptible subjects, we might be able at length to produce a modification of the character . that is a problem to be solved - : oeriment alone, and that is beyond our present purpose. Here perhaps is the place to note the fact of the disappearance of personality, a. phenomenon that has been described by the mystics of ever)' age, according to their own experience, and often in ele- gant language.! The pantheistic meta- she has set down on the paper. On reading' it she is amazed, sometimes alarmed. The handwriting differs from her ordinary style. The movement of the fingers and of the pencil is stiff and seems automatic. The wntir.g always ends with a signa- ture, the name of one who is dead and it bears the impress of a mental background [arrtere- : mental] that the author would be unwf.'. _ divulge. " (De V Intelligence, 3d edition, prefaces. t I will quote only one of these descriptions, and that one because by its style of language and its date it comes nearest to our own time. " I seem to have become a statue on the banks of the stream of time, and to be assisting at some mystery, whence I shall go forth aged or ageless. I feel my- self to be without name, impersonal, with the star- ing eyes of a corpse, with aiind vague and universal like nothingness or the absolute : I am in suspense, I am as if non-existent. In such moments it seems to me that my consciousness withdraws into its eternity * * * it sees itself in its very essence, su- perior to every form containing its past, its present, and its future [sees itself as the] void which en- compasses all, an atmosphere {mzlie-u invisible and fecund, the virtuality of a world which detaches itself from its own existence to regain itself {se ressaisir) in its pure inwardness yiniimite pure). In those sublime moments the soul re-enters her- self, goes back again to indeterrnination ; she be- comes retro-i'oluted (Sit venza verba. The original has s est reitnpliquee. Transla'or '•■ beyond her own life, she becomes again a divine embryo. All is ef- 42 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. physicians, too, without attaining to ec- stasy, speak of a state in which the mind thinks of itself " under the form of eter- nity," appears to itself as outside of time and space, as free from all contingent modality and forming one with the infi- nite. This psychological situation, though infrequent, must not be forgotten. To me it seems as an absolute engrossment of the mental activity by a single idea (in the mystics a positive one, negative in the empirics) which idea, from its high degree of abstractness, and from its be- ing exempt from all determination and limitation, contradicts and excludes all feeling of individuality. Let but one sen- sation, however commonplace, intervene, and the illusion disappears. This state is neither above the personality nor below it, but without and beyond. To sum up, the states of consciousness called ideas are only a secondary factor in constituting personality and in chang- ing it. Ideas play their part, but it is not a predominant one. These results do not agree with the time-honored teachings of psychology. Ideas have an objective character : hence they cannot express the individual as do his desires, his feelings, his passions. CHAPTER V. DISSOLUTION OF PERSONALITY. To complete our review of the facts, we have yet to treat of alterations of per- sonality in progressive dementia caused by old age, general paralysis, and all other morbid causes. If in the normal state personality is a psycho-physiological coordination of the highest degree possi- ble, which endures amid perpetual changes and partial and transitory incoordinations (such as sudden impulses, eccentric ideas, etc.), then dementia, which is a progres- sive movement toward physical and men- tal dissolution, must manifest itself by an ever increasing incoordination till at last the Me disappears in absolute incoher- ence, and there remain in the individual only the purely vital coordinations — those best organized, the lowest, the simplest, faced, dissolved, dissipated, resumes the primor- dial state, is immersed again in the original fluidity without form, or angles,- or fixed contours. This state is contemplation, not stupor: it is neither painful, nor joyous, nor sad ; it is beyond all special feeling and sentiment, as it is beyond all finite thought. It is the consciousness of Being (/' etre) and the consciousness of the omnipossibility latent in the depths of that Being. It is the sense of spiritual infinitude." Amiel, Journal Intime^ 1856. and consequently the most stable, but these in turn disappear also. And it is perhaps in these states of progressive and inevitable dissolution alone that we find instances of double personality in the strict sense, that is, of co-existent person- alities. In the course of this work we have seen cases of successive personali- ties (cases mentioned by Azam, Dufay, Camuset) ; of a new personality supplant- ing another that is forgotten or thrust out and held to be extraneous and foreign (the case cited by Leuret, and that of the soldier of Austerlitz) ; of an invasion of the normal personality by unwonted sen- sations which it resists with more or less success, and which at times, and momen- tarily lead the patient to think himself twain (cases noted by Krishaber, etc.) But in the subjects of dementia disorgan- ization becomes organized : the demented are double in personality, think them- selves double, act as double personalities. This admits of no doubt. They retain no trace of that indecision which, in the numerous cases we have cited, shows that the normal personality (or what remains of it) possesses some remainder of strength which, weeks or months later, will insure its return. To the demented it seems as natural to be double as to us to be of one personality. Such individu- als have no skepticism as to their own state and do not regard the opinions of others. Their mode of being, given to them by their consciousness, seems so clear to them, so evident, as to be above all question. This point is worthy of notice because it shows in these morbid forms of personality, that spontaneous- ness of affirmation and of action which is characteristic of every natural state. Here are two cases of this kind : A retired soldier, D ,who afterward was a police sergeant, having been sev- eral times struck on the head, lost his memory by degrees, and at last was sent to an asylum. His mind becoming more and more affected, at last he came to think himself double. " In talking he always uses the pronoun we: we will go, we have made a long march, etc. He uses this form of speech, he says, because there is another with him. At the table he says, ' I have had enough, but the other is still hungry.' Sometimes you see him running, and if you ask why, the answer is that he would rather sit still, but 'the other' makes him run. One day he at- tempted to choke a child to death, saying it was not himself but ' the other ' that was to blame. At last he attempted his own life to THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 43 slay ' the other,' whom he supposes to lie hid in the left side of his body. Hence he calls ' the other ' the left D while he himself is the right D . This patient soon fell into dementia."* A case reported by Langlois exhibits a still lower grade. " The man G is imbecile, loquacious, with no hesitation in utterance, no paralysis of the limbs, and no disturbance of the cutaneous sensibility. Though he talks continually he does but repeat the same stereotyped phrases. He always speaks of himself in the third person, and almost every morning greets us with ' G is sick, he must go to the infirmary.' Often he goes upon his knees, and gives himself a sound pummeling ; then bursts out laughing, and rubbing his hands exclaims, ' G has been bad, he has had to do penance.' Often he will take up his wooden shoe, and beat him- self violently on the head, or he will bury his nails in his flesh, or will scratch his face. These fits of rage come on suddenly, and while he is disfiguring himself his counte- nance is expressive of anger, but it wears a look of satisfaction, as soon as he has done correcting the other. At times when he is not overwrought by these imaginary resent- ments, we ask him ' Where is G ? ' ' Here he is.' he answers, striking his breast. We touch his head, asking whose that is. ' That,' he answers, ' is the pig's head.' ' Why do you beat it so ? ' ' Because I must punish the pig's head.' ' But you just now struck G .' 'No. G is not a bad boy to-day : it is the pig's head that has to be beaten.' For many months we asked him the same questions, and the answers were ever the same. Generally it is G that is displeased, but sometimes it is the other, and then it is not the head that is punished." t A certain subject of general paralysis, in a condition bordering on dementia, used to be continually giving himself advice, or reproaching himself. " Mr. G ," he would say, "you are aware that you have been placed in this institu- tion, and here you are. We tell you that we have no hope whatever of you," etc. As the general paralysis progressed his words became less intelligible, but in his raving this conversation with himself could always be made out. Sometimes he both asked the questions and answered them. When dementia had reached almost the last degree, he kept up the same practice. He would cry out, and show signs of agi- tation, but immediately growing calm would say in a low voice, and with a sig- * Jaffe, Archiv fiir Psychiatric, 1870. + Annates Medica-Psychologigues, vol. VI., p. nificant gesture, "Won't you be still; speak low." Then he would answer, " Yes, I am going to speak low." " Once we found him very busy, making all the motions of tasting [wines, etc.], and spitting out. We asked him, ' You are amusing yourself, Mr. G ? ' ' Which ? ' was his reply, and then he relapsed into incoherence. This reply, repeated here literally, may seem to be the result of chance, but it accords so well with the duality so long observed in this patient, that we have deemed it worthy of men- tion." \ In the following case the dissolution of personality is presented in a new aspect : the individual has no consciousness of a portion of himself, which is become for- eign to him, or hostile. We have already, while speaking of hallucinations, seen the patient coming by degrees to embody his hallucinations, and finally giving them objective existence. In the demented the case is more serious. The acts and states that are perfectly normal for a per- son of sound mind and that have none of the morbid or imaginative characters of hallucination, are for the subject of de- mentia something external to himself, nor is he conscious that he is himself their cause. How may we account for this curious situation without supposing a profound change in the cceneesthesis, and that certain portions of the body are no longer represented — or sensed — in the ruined brain. The sense of sight remains, as experience proves, but the patient sees his own movements as an external, an antagonistic phenomenon which he at- tributes neither to himself nor to others ; which he notices passively without more ado, because his internal sensations being effaced and his reasoning power reduced to impotence, there is no means of cor- recting this incoordination. Then we have the case of a general paralytic in the period of dementia, whose speech was almost unintelligible, and of + Descourtis, D71 Fonctionnement des Operations Cerebrales. et en particulier de leur Dedoublement dans les Psychopathies, Paris, 1883, p. 33. Possibly this second personality which advises and admon- ishes the other is only the purely passive reproduc- tion of the phrases addressed to the patient by his physician or his attendants. It may be remarked that not seldom the demented speak of themselves in the third person. The same is seen in young' children, and it has been accounted for by the fact that their personality is not yet formed. In my opinion we have here simply imitation. The in- fant is used to hearing such remarks as these : " Paul has been bad, he must get a whipping," etc He thus learns to speak of himself in the same way. Is the use of the third person by some sub- jects of dementia a sign of reversion ? 44 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. whose notions of the external world but little remained. " One day he was employed in picking peas. Though inexpert, and naturally right- handed, he employed only the left hand. Once the right hand came forward as though to take its share of the work, but hardly had it touched the peas when the other hand came down upon it, seized it and gave it a hard squeeze. The patient's countenance j meanwhile bore an expression of anger and he repeated in a tone of authority, 'No, no.' His body trembled and shook with passion and it was plain that a violent struggle was going on within him. On another occasion he had to be tied down in an armchair. His countenance grew clouded, and seizing his right hand in his left, he exclaimed : ' There ! It is all your fault; on your account they have tied me here,' and he struck the offend- ing hand again and again. Nor were such occurrences exceptional. Many times it was observed that on the right nand quitting its habitual state of inactivity the patient checked it with the left. He would become j angry and excited, and would beat it with all 1 the strength he had." * Some demented patients blame their j fellow patients for the noise they them- selves make, and complain of being dis- turbed by their cries. Finally, we will quote the case, observed by Hunter, of an old man, whose faculties were very much impaired. He always referred to the present time the occurrences of his early life. Though he was capable of acting correctly upon certain impressions, and of referring them to the portions of the body affected by them, he habitually at- tributed his own sensations to those around him. Thus he would tell his keeper and the attendants that he was sure they were hungry or thirsty. But when food or drink was offered him, it became apparent that this absurd idea had been suggested to him by his- -own feeling of hunger and thirst, and that the word they referred to himself, not to others. He had frequent violent fits of coughing, after each of which he would resume the thread of his conversation, first expressing in appropriate and sym- pathetic terms his concern on account of his friend's complaint. " It grieves me," he would say, " to see you suffering from so troublesome and so distressing a cough." f Little by little all these cases steadily advance toward absolute incoordination and complete incoherence. They come * Descouftis. Op. cit., p. 37. t Hunter, quoted by Winslow, Obscure Diseases 0/ the Brain, p. 278. to resemble congenital imbecility that has never been able to reach the mean level of human personality. In the gradual and progressive coordination which con- stitutes normal man, the idiot has met with arrest of development. In him the evolution has not preceded beyond the early stages : it has made provision for the physical life and some few elementary manifestations of the psychic life ; but the conditions of an ulterior development are lacking. We have now in conclusion to consider this fact of coordination as the groundwork of personality. But we must first attempt a rapid classification of the perturbations of per- sonality of which we have given so many illustrations, all so different from one an- other that it might seem impossible to refer them to a few fundamental types. Though in the normal state the bodily sense (ccenassthesis) undergoes different changes in the course of one's life — in the evolution which goes on from birth to death — this change is usually so slow, so continuous, that the assimilation of new sensations proceeds little by little, and the transformation is brought about in- sensibly, so producing what we call iden- tity, i.e., apparent permanence amid inces- sant variations. Nevertheless all serious maladies, as well as all profound changes (puberty, change of life) import more or less of indecision : between the new state and the old there is not immediate fu- sion and as it has been well expressed, " at first these new sensations present themselves to the old Me as an extrane- ous Thee." But should the general bod- ily sense (ccena-sthesisj be modified sud- denly; should there be a large instanta- neous influx of unwonted states, then the fundamental element of the Me is com- pletely transformed : the individual is parted from his prior personality, and he appears to himself like another. More usually there is a period of disturbance and incertitude, and the break is not in- stantaneous. When the morbid state has become fixed, one or other of these three principal types of diseases of per- sonality will be presented : 1. The general bodily sense is changed completely. The new state serves as basis for a new psychic life (new ways of sensing, perceiving, thinking, hence a new memory). Of the former Me there remain only the completely organized processes (language, manual dexterity, power of walking, etc.), activities that are THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 45 purely automatic and almost unconscious, faculties that are like slaves ready to serve any master. But it must be re- marked that in reality this type is subject to exceptions. Sometimes a portion of the automatic acquisitions are not trans- ferred to the new Me. Again, at long intervals, some few traces of the old per- sonality reappear, and produce momen- tary indecision in the new. Looking at the matter as a whole, and disregarding slight deviations, we may say that here we have an alienation of personality, the old personality having become alien to the new, so that the individual has no knowledge of his former life, or, when he is reminded of it, regards it objectively, as something apart from him. Of this we see an excellent example in the woman inmate of La Salpetriere who ever after her forty-eighth vear spoke of herself as " the person of myself" (la persomie de moi- meme). She gave a fairly correct account of her former personality, always, how- ever, identifying it with another. " La personne de moi-meme does not know the one that was born in 1779" — her former personality. * The case of Father Lambert belongs also to this type. Hack Tuke tells of a patient at the Bed- lam hospital who had lost his Me, that is, the Me that was familiar to him, and would often go looking for himself under his bad. t 2. The second type has for its funda- mental character alternation of two per- sonalities, and to this type in particular properly belongs the current designation of double consciousness. As we have said, there are transition forms intermedi- ate between the first type and this one, but at present we are concerned only with what is clear and well defined. The physical cause of this alternation is very obscure, unknown we may say. At the point where the new personality first ap- pears, this case differs in nothing from those of the preceding class : the differ- ence begins when the first personality reappears. The hypothesis seems inevi- table, that in these subjects (who as a rule are hysterical, that is to say instable in a high degree) there exist, with secondary variations, two distinct habits in the phys- ical life, each serving as groundwork for a psychic organization. The hypothesis appears all the more probable when it is remarked that the alternation bears upon * See the full details in Leuret, Frag. Psychoid pp. 121-124. t Journal of Mental Science, April, 1883. character, the thing that in personality is inmost, and which most fully expresses the individual nature. (Cases observed by Azam, Dufay, Camuset.) Of this alternation type too, we have different forms. Sometimes the two per- sonalities know nothing of each other ( Macnish). Again, one touches the whole life, while the other is but partial : such is the case observed by Azam. In this case, the most instructive of all because it now covers a period of twenty-eight years, we see the second personality con- tinually encroaching upon the first. In the beginning, the duration of the first personality was very protracted, but by degrees it has come to be shorter and shorter, so that in time it promises to disappear entirely, leaving the second to stand alone. It would hence appear that this state of alternation, when prolonged, tends necessarily to be converted into the first type : thus it holds a place interme- diate between the normal state and com- plete alienation of personality. 3. The third type is more superficial : I will call it substitution of personality. To this type I refer the rather frequent case oflndividuals imagining themselves to have changed from one sex to the other — from man to woman, and vice versa, or from ragman to king, etc. The state of certain hypnotized subjects already mentioned may serve as an example of this whole class. The alteration is rather psychical, in the narrower sense of the term, than organic. I do not for a mo- ment suppose that it arises, or that it per- sists, without material conditions. I mean only to say that it is not caused and main- tained, like the other two groups, by any profound modification of the ccenaesthesis, involving a complete transformation of the personality. It arises from the brain, and not from the inner recesses of the organism. It is a local rather than a gen- eral disorder — the hypertrophy of a fixed idea, which makes impossible that co- ordination which is necessary for the normal psychic life. Hence, while in alienation and alternation of personality all conspires and co-operates, exhibiting the inner unity and logic of the organic processes, here, oftentimes, the one who says he is a king admits that he has been a laborer, and the imaginary millionaire that once he earned only a couple of francs a day. Even outside of cases where the incoordination is manifest, we see that a fixed idea is a weak excrescence which does not at all imply total transformation of the individual. 4 6 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. This classification, proceeding from the gravest forms to the slightest, does not pretend to be rigorously exact. It may serve to array the facts in something like order, and to show how they differ, and especially to show once again that per- sonality has its roots in the organism, un- dergoing like it change and transforma- tion. CHAPTER VI. CONCLUSION. It follows necessarily from the doctrine of evolution that the higher forms of in- dividuality must have arisen out of the lower by aggregation and coalescence. It follows, also, that individuality in its highest degree, in man, must be the ac- cumulation and condensation in the corti- cal layer of the brain, of elemental con- sciousnesses that originally were auton- omous and dispersed through the organ- ism. The different types of psychic individ- uality in the animal scale, from lowest to highest, cannot be described and defined save by a zoo-psychologist who makes his way cautiously through the tangle of facts, often trusting to conjecture. Hence we cannot do any more here than to note a few forms, in view of the principal aim of this work, which is to show that the ascending progress toward higher indi- viduality is ever toward greater complex- ity and coordination. There is no plainer term than "indi- vidual," when there is question of a man, a vertebrate animal, even an insect : but no term is more obscure as you descend the scale : on this point all zoologists are agreed. * According to its etymology, that is individual \individuuiri) which is not divided. The individual, in this sense, must be sought far down in the scale. While there are no limits to the dimen- sions of inorganic compounds (crystals), " every protoplasmic mass having a max- imum diameter of a few tenths of a milli- meter splits up spontaneously into two or more distinct masses equivalent to the mass from which they come, and which in them is reproduced. Hence, proto- plasm does not exist save in the individ- ual state, having a .limited magnitude, * See in particular Hackel. General Morphology, I., p. 241 (French trans.) ; Gesrenbaur, Comparative A natomy, p. 24 et seq. (French trans.) ; Espinas, Socie'te's A nil/tales, 2d ed.. Appendix II.; Pouchet, Revue Scientijique, 10 Feb., 1883. and hence it is that all living things are necessarily made up of cells." f Life never attains any considerable augmentation except through the indefinite repetition of this fundamental theme, by the aggrega- tion of an infinite number of these minute elements, true types of individuality. The living, homogeneous matter which constitutes these elemental, primordial individualities, expands, contracts, draws itself out in slender filaments, creeps up to substances capable of affording it nour- ishment, involves them in its own sub- stance, decomposes them, and assimilates their debris. We hear of " rudiments of consciousness " in this connection — of a sort of will reaching its determinations through external stimulations, and of vague wants. One may employ the term for want of a better, but let him not forget that it has for us no precise signif- ication. In an homogeneous mass pre- senting not the slightest trace of differ- entiation, and in which the essential vital properties (nutrition, generation) are in a diffused, indistinct state, the sole repre- sentative (and it is a lowly one indeed) of psychic activity is the irritability com- mon to all living things, and which will later, in the course of evolution, become general sensibility, special sensibility, and so on. May we call it a consciousness ? The first step toward a higher individ- uality consists of an association of indi- viduals almost completely independent of one another. " The forced contiguity, the continuity of tissues, the nearly con- stant unity of the digestive apparatus, es- tablish between them a number of rela- tions, and these prevent the several indi- viduals from remaining altogether stran- gers to what is taking place among their next neighbors : such is the case with sponges, colonies of Hydra polypes, co- rolla polypes, bryozoa, and some colonies of ascidia." \ But this is, properly speak- ing, only a juxtaposition of a number of contiguous, homogeneous conscious- nesses, having between them nothing in common save the limitation of their ag- gregate in space. The rise of the colony individuality, and of the colony consciousness marks a great step toward coordination. The colony, made up of elemental individuals, has a tendency toward transformation into an + Perrier, Les Colonies A nimales et la Formatinn drs Organismes. Paris, 1881, p. 41. According to Cattaneo, Le Colonic Lineari e la Morfologia del Molluschi, the division is carried farther still. \ Perrier, Op. cit., p. 774 ; Espinas, Societes An- imates, section 2. THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 47 individuality of a higher order, in which there shall be division of labor. In colo- nies of Hydractmia we find seven differ- ent kinds of individuals — the nurses, the sexed individuals (male, female), those which capture prey, etc. In the Siphon- ophora and allied types, the faculty of lo- comotion is perfectly centralized : the in- dividuals seem independent as long as the animal lets the common axis float about, on which they are implanted : but when any danger impends, or if the animal is to perform any complex movement, then the axis contracts, carrying with it all the polypes. The Prysalia knows how to quicken or to slacken its movement, can at will rise above the surface, or descend below it, can move straight ahead, or turn about, all its organ-individuals concurring to perform these complicated acts. The wandering life of these creatures, as Per- rier remarks, favors the development of individuality. " From it necessarily results greater inter- dependence of the individuals ; closer ties are formed between them ; impressions pro- duced upon any part of the whole must nec- essarily be transmitted to the locomotive air- bladders ; and the movements of these must needs be coordinated, else all is disorder. Hence arises a sort of ' colony conscious- ness,' and this tends to pro luce a new unity, to form what we call an individual." * In other colonies the common con- sciousness has its rise in a different way. In Botrylus, a genus of Tunicata, there is a common orifice, which is the cloaca around which all the individuals are ar- ranged. Each of these sends out in the direction of the cloaca a tongue -shaped process provided with nerves, whereby communication can be established per- manently between all the members of a group, t " But it by no means follows that because a colony gains the notion of its existence as a colony, therefore each of the individuals com- posing it loses its particular consciousness. On the contrary, each of these continues to act as if it stood alone. In some star-fishes, each severed branch keeps moving on, or turns aside, as the occasion may require : in short, appears to be conscious. Neverthe- less, the consciousness of each of the rays is subordina:e to the consciousness of the star- fish, as is proved by the harmony between the movements of the several parts when the creature changes position." J * Perner, Op cit., p. 232. + Id. ibid., p. 771. $ Ibid., pp. 772, 773. It is difficult for man, in whom central- ization is carried to so high a degree, to have anything like a clear idea of a mode of psychic existence in which partial indi- vidualities co-exist with a collective indi- viduality. We might find some analogon in certain morbid states. So too it might be said that the human individual has consciousness of himself both as a person and as a member of the body social. But 1 do not wish to make comparisons that might be contested. But looking at the question objectively and from with- out, we see that- this " colony conscious- ness," however imperfectly coordinated, however intermittent it may be in the be- ginning, has profound significance as re- gards evolution. It is the germ of the higher individualities, of personality. It will, little by little, rise to the highest grade, turning to its own advantage all these special individualities. In the po- litical order we see a like evolution in thoroughly centralized governments. There the central power, at first very weak and hardly recognized, oftentimes inferior to that of the constituent parts, or provinces, gains strength at their ex- pense, and by degrees absorbs them. The development of the nervous svs- tem, which is the coordinating agency par excelleiice, is the visible sign of an advance toward a more complex and a more harmonious individuality. But this centralization is not brought about in a moment. In the Annelida the brain-like ganglia which send out nerves to the or- gans of sense seem to perform the same functions as the brain in vertebrates . but these ganglia are by no means fully or- ganized. The psychological independ- ence of the several rings is very evident. " Consciousness, while pretty distinct in the brain, seems to grow fainter in pro- portion as the number of rings is greater. Some species of Eunice, which often at- tain a length of five or six feet, bite the posterior part of their own bodies with- out appearing to notice it. To this dim- inution of consciousness no doubt we must attribute the fact that Annelids kept in captivity, under unfavorable con- ditions, readily prey upon themselves." In linear colonies, the individual that holds the front position, since it has to give the initiative, to advance or to re- treat, to modify the gait of the colony which it draws after itself, becomes a head ; but the term head is here em- ployed by zoologists analogically only, and we must not suppose it to have the same meaning as when we speak of the 4 8 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. head of an insect or of any articulate an- imal. The individuality it represents is so indefinite that in certain annulates, made up of forty rings or more, we may see the head of a sexed individual ap- pearing at the level of the third ring, ac- quiring tentacles and antennas, then sepa- rating itself from the original individual, and setting up for itself.* For details the reader is referred to special treatises. As regards the higher animals, there is no need to dwellupon the subject : in them individuality, in the received meaning of the term, is estab- lished, being represented by the brain, which becomes more and more predom- inant. This excursus over the domain of zoology will not have been in vain if it shall have taught us that this coordina- tion, of which we have had so much to say, is not a mere subjective view, but on the contrary an objective fact, visible and tangible ; and that, in the words of Es- pinas, the psychic individuality and the physiological individuality are parallel — that consciousness becomes unified or diffused with the organism. Neverthe- less the term " consciousness," or "psy- chic individuality " is highly ambiguous. If the psychic individuality is, as we maintain, simply the subjective expression of the organism, then the farther we go from the human type, the greater is the obscurity that surrounds us. Conscious- ness is a function that may be compared to generation, inasmuch as they both ex- press the whole individual. Grant that the most elementary organisms possess a consciousness, and that like all their vital properties, and generation, in particular, it is diffused throughout their physical structure: now as regards g*.eration, we see that this function, as the animal grade rises, becomes localized, and ap- propriates a part of the organism, and that this part, after countless modifica- tions, becomes, with respect to that func- tion and that alone, the representative of the whole organism. The psychic func- tion takes a like course. In its highest grade it is strictly localized, and has ap- propriated to itself a part of the organ- ism which becomes, for that function and f ir it only, the representative of the whole organism. In virtue of a long se- ries of successive transfers of function, the brain of the higher animals now con centrates in itself most of the psychic ac- tivity of the colony . it has been entrusted, so to speak, with one function after an- other, till at last its associates have made complete abdication in its favor.f But take at random any species of animal, and who shall say to just what degree this delegation of psychic functions has in it proceeded. Physiologists have made many experiments upon the spinal cord in frogs is its psychic value relatively the same in man ? We may well doubt it. Return we to man, and let us consider first his purely physical personality. We will for the nonce eliminate all states of consciousness, and will consider only the material groundwork of personality. i. There is no need to show at length the very close relations subsisting be- tween all the organs of the so-called veg- etative life — the heart, Vessels, lungs, in- testinal canal, liver, kidneys, etc. — how- ever foreign they may appear to be one to another, and however much engrossed with their several tasks. The multitudi- nous agents in this coordination are cen- tripetal and centrifugal nerves of the great sympathetic and of the cerebrospi- nal system (the difference between these two tends to disappear) together with their ganglia. Is their activity restricted to the simple molecular disturbance which constitutes the nervous influx, or has it also a psychic, conscious effect ? No doubt it has such an effect, in morbid cases: it is then felt. In the normal state it simply calls forth that vague con- sciousness of life of which we have so often spoken. But vague or not, that is of no importance. May we maintain that these nerve actions, which represent the totality of life, are the fundamental facts of personality, and that, as such, their value is, so to speak, in inverse ratio to their psychological intensity ? They do far more than just to call forth a few transitory, superficial states of conscious- ness ; they shape the nerve centers, give them tone, give them a habit. Consider for a moment the enormous power of these actions (feeble though they appear) going on unceasingly, untiringly, repeat- ing forever the self-same theme with few variations. Why should they not result in forming organic states, that is (as im- plied in the definition of " organic ") sta- ble and continuous states which shall represent, anatomically and physiologi- cally, the inward life ? Of course all this does not depend on the viscera alone, for *Perricr, Op. cit., pp. 448, 491, 501. t Espinas, Les Societes Animates, p. 520. THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 49 the nerve centers too have their own proper constitution, in virtue of which they react. They are not merely recep- tive but incitative also, and they are not to be separated from the organs they represent, and with which they form one whole : between both there is reciprocity of action. Where do all these nerve actions come together and meet ? where do we find the resume of the organic life ? We know not. Ferrier thinks that the occipi- tal lobes have a special relation to the sensibility of the viscera, constituting the anatomical substratum of their sensa- tions. Taking this view simply as a working hypothesis, it follows that by successive stages, by one transfer after another, the visceral life has at last found here its ultimate representation ; that it is writ here in a language unknown to us indeed but which expresses the in- ward individuality and that only, to the exclusion of all other individuality. But in truth whether this anatomic represen- tation exists in the occipital 'lobes or elsewhere, and whether it be localized or diffused, does not affect our conclusion, provided only it exists. I have the less hesitation in dwelling on this subject, because this coordination of the multi- tudinous nervous actions of organic life is the groundwork of the physical and psychical personality, since all the other coordinations are based upon this ; be- cause this coordination is the inner man, the material form of his subjectivity, the ultimate reason of his feeling and action, the source of his instincts, sentiments and passions, and in the language of the mediaeval schoolmen, his principle of in- dividuation. To pass now from the inward to the outward, the periphery of the body forms a surface over which the nerve terminals are unequally distributed. Whether few or many, the nerve filaments receive and transmit from the different parts of the body impressions (that is to say, molecu- lar disturbances) ; are centralized in the spinal cord, and thence pass to the me- dulla oblongata and the pons Varolii. There a new contingent is added — that from the cranial nerves: and now the transmission of sensorial impressions is complete. We must not overlook the centrifugal nerves, which act in a simi- lar way, but in the direction of an in- creasing decentralization. In short, the spinal cord, which is a string of super- posed ganglia, and more particularly the medulla oblongata with its special centers (of respiration, phonation, deglutition, etc.), while they are all organs of trans- mission, represent the reduction to unity of a vast multitude of nervous actions diffused throughout the organism. At the point we have reached the question becomes full of obscurity. The mesencephalon seems to possess a more complex function than the medulla ob- longata, and that a more complex func- tion than the spinal cord. The corpora striata would seem to be the center in which are organized the habitual or au- tomatic 'actions, and the optic thalami to be the point where the sense impres- sions are reflexed in movements. However this may be, we know that the fasciculated portion of the crus cerebri, a bundle of white brain substance con- tinuous with the peduncle, traverses the opto-striate bodies, penetrating into the strait between the optic thalami and the lenticular nucleus, and that it branches out in the hemisphere, forming the cor- ona radiata of Reil. It is a pathway over which pass all the sensorial and motor fibers running to or from the opposite side of the body. The anterior portion contains only motor fibers. The pos- terior portion contains all the sensorial fibers, a certain number of motor fibers, and all the fibers coming from the sense organs. The bundle of sensorial fibers having received its full complement, divides into two : one portion ascends to the fronto-parietal convolution ; the other is turned back to the occipital lobe, and the bundle of motor fibers is distributed through the gray cortex of the motor zones. These details, tiresome as they will be to the reader despite their brevity, show the close interdependence of the different parts of the body and the cerebral hem- ispheres. Here the study of the localiza- tion of functions, though not yet carried very far, has settled a few points, as that there is a motor zone (formed of the as- cending frontal and ascending parietal convolutions, the paracentral lobe, and the base of the frontal convolutions) in which are represented the movements of the different parts of the body ; and that there is a sensitive zone far less clearly defined (embracing the occipital lobes and the temporo-parietal region). As for the frontal lobes, we have no definite knowledge with regard to them, but we may in passing notice the hypothesis re- cently offered by Dr. Hughlings Jackson that they represent, with respect to the other centers, combinations and coordi-. 50 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. nations of a more complex kind, being- thus a representation of representations. * We cannot notice past and present dis- cussions upon the physiological and psy- chological role of these centers : to do so would require a volume. But we may say that the cortical substance represents all the forms of nerve activity — visceral muscular, tactile, visual, auditory, olfac- tory, gustatory, motor, signincatory. This representation is not direct. An impression does not go from the pe- riphery of the brain as a telegram goes from one office to another near by. In one case, where the spinal cord was re- duced to the size of a goosequill and the gray substance was extremely small, the subject possessed sensation. But though indirect or even doubly indirect, this representation is, or may be, a total representation. Between the equivalents of these nervous actions dis- tributed throughout the body there exist innumerable connections — commissures between the two hemispheres and between the several centers of each hemisphere — some of them innate, the others estab- lished by experience, having all possible degrees, from highly stable to highly instable. The physical personality, or in more precise language, its ultimate rep- resentation, thus appears to us not as a ^central point whence all radiates and where all converges — Descartes's pineal gland — but as a wonderfully complex net-work where histology, anatomy and physiology are baffled every moment. From this very imperfect sketch the reader may see that the terms consen- sus, coordination, are not mere flatus voczs, abstractions, but that they truly express facts. Let us reinstate now the psychic ele- ment hitherto eliminated, and note the re- sult. It must be remembered that ac- cording to our view consciousness is not an entity, but a sum of states each of which is a specific phenomenon depend- ent on certain conditions of the brain's activity ; that it is present when these are, is lacking when they are absent, disap- pears when they disappear. It follows - that the sum of a man's states of con- sciousness is far inferior to the sum of his .nerve-actions (that is, his reflex actions , of .every kind, from the simplest to the most composite). A period of five min- . * Lectures on the Evolution and Dissolut ion of the Nfrpp.tfS -System, 1884. utes may embrace a multitude of sensa- tions, feelings, images, ideas, acts, and it is possible to determine the number of these with some degree of exactness. During the same lapse of time there will be a much larger number of nerve-ac- . tions. Hence the conscious personality cannot represent all that is going on in the nerve centers : it is only an abstract, an epitome of them. This follows nec- essarily from the nature of our mental constitution : our states of consciousness range themselves in time, not in space, 2nd according to one dimension, not all dimensions. By a fusion and an integra- tion of simple states are formed highly complex states, and these enter into the series as if they were simple : they may in some measure co-exist for a little time ; but after all the compass (or extension) of consciousness [Umfang des Bewusst- seinsj, and particularly the compass of clear consciousness, is always very lim- ited. Hence we cannot regard the con- scious personality, in its relation to the objective, cerebral personality, as a trac- ing which corresponds exactly with the drawing from which it is copied : it rather resembles a topographical sketch as related to the face of the country it represents. Why do some nerve-actions (and which ones?) become conscious? To answer this question would be to solve the problem of the conditions of con- sciousness : but these, as we have said, are in great part unknown. There has also been much discussion as to the part played in the genesis of consciousness oy the five layers of the cortical cells, but on this point we have nothing save pure hypotheses. These we need not con- sider here, for it cannot be of any advan- tage to psychology to rest its conclusions upon an insecure physiological founda- tion. We know that states of conscious- ness, always unstable, evoke and sup- plant one another. This is the result of a transmission of force, and of a con- flict among forces ; and, for us, it is not a conflict between states of consciousness, as commonly supposed, but between the nervous elements which underlie and produce them. These associations and these antagonisms, which have been the object of deep study in our day, do not however belong to the present inquiry : we must go further back and consider the conditions of their organic unity. For states of consciousness are no ignes fatui, now flaring, anon extinguished : there is something which unites them. THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. 51 and which is the subjective expression of their objective coordination : in this we find the ultimate ground of their continu- ity. Though we have already studied this point, it is so important that I have no hesitation about returning to it and viewing it under another aspect. Be it remarked that we are not speak- ing just now of self-conscious personality, but of that spontaneous, natural sense of our own being which exists in every nor- mal individual. Every one of my states of consciousness possesses the twofold character of being such or such a state, and of being 7iiine ; pain is not simply pain, but my pain ; seeing a tree is not simply seeing it but my seeing it. Each one has a mark whereby it is known to me as mine only, and without which it seems foreign to me, as in some morbid cases already referred to. This mark common to all my states of consciousness is a sign of their common origin, and whence can it come if not from the organ- ism ? Suppose we were able to obliterate in a man the five special senses and with them their entire psychological product, such as perceptions, images, ideas, asso- ciations of ideas with one another and of emotions with ideas. In that case there would still remain the inward, organic life with its proper sensibility to the state and functionment of each organ, to the gen- eral or local variations of the organs, and to the elevation or the depression of the vital tone. The state of a man who is sound asleep pretty fully realizes these conditions. If now we try the opposite hypothesis, we find it absurd, contradic- tory. We cannot imagine to ourselves the special senses, together with the psy- chic life which they sustain, isolated from the general sensibility and suspended in vacuo. None of our sense-apparatus is an abstraction : there is no such thing as a visual or an auditive apparatus in gen- eral, as they are described in physiologi- cal treatises, but only a concrete, invidid- ual apparatus, and never, save perhaps sometimes in twins, are these apparatus alike in two individuals. Nor is this all, for not only is the sense apparatus of ' each individual peculiarly constituted — a peculiarity directly and necessarily com- municated to all its products — but it is at all times and in every respect dependent on the organic life — on the circulation, digestion, respiration, secretion and so forth. These several expressions of the individuality attach to every perception, emotion, idea, and become one with them, like the harmonics with- the fun- damental tone in music. The personal and possessive character of our states of consciousness therefore is not, as some authors have held, the result of a more or less explicit judgment affirming them to be mine at the instant they arise. The personal character is not superadded, but inherent : it is an integral part of the fact, and results from its physiologi- gal conditions. We do not find out the origin of a state of consciousness by ob- serving itself alone, for it cannot be at once effect and cause, subjective state and nerve-action. The pathological facts confirm this conclusion. As we have seen, the con- sciousness of selfhood rises or falls ac- cording to the state of the organism, and hence some patients declare that their " sensations are changed " — the explana- tion being that in their case the fundamen- tal tone has no longer the same harmon- ics. 'So too we have seen states of con- sciousness lose by degrees their personal character, becoming for the individual ob- jective and extraneous. Can such facts be accounted for on any other theory? John Stuart Mill, in an oft-quoted passage, asks what is the bond, what the " organic union " between one state of consciousness and another — the common and lasting element ; and his conclusion is that we can affirm nothing definitively of mind but states of consciousness.; That is doubtless so if we confine our- i selves to pure ideology. But a group': of effects is not a cause, and however I minutely we study these, unless we go' deeper our labor is incomplete — that is, ! unless we descend into that obscure region where, as Taine says, "innumerable cur- rents are ever circulating quite beyond our consciousness." The organic nexus desiderated by Mill exists by definition, so to speak, in the organism. The organism and the brain, its supreme representation, is the real per- sonality, containing in itself the remi- niscence of what we have been and the possibilities of what we shall be. On it is inscribed the entire individual character with all its aptitudes, active or passive, its sympathies and antipathies, its genius and talent or its stupidity, its virtues and its vices, its sloth or its activity. What comes forth in the consciousness is little compared with what lies hid though still active. The conscious personality is only a small part of the physical personality. Hence the unity of the Me is not, as 52 THE DISEASES OF PERSONALITY. taught by the spiritualists,* the unity of one entity manifested in multiple phenomena, but the coordination of a number of states that are continually arising, and its one basis is the vague sense of our own bodies — ccenaesthesis. This unity does not proceed from above downward, but from beneath upward : it is not an initial but a terminal point. Does such perfect unity exist ? In the strict sense, clearly not. In the relative | sense it is seen, but rarely and momen- tarily. In the skilled marksman as he takes aim, or in the surgeon as he is per- forming an operation, there is a converg- ence of all the faculties mental and physi- cal. But observe the result : in such cir- cumstances the sense of the real person- ality disappears, and thus we see that perfect unity of consciousness and the sense of the personality are mutually ex- clusive. And we may reach the same conclusion by another route. The Me is a coordination. It oscillates between two extreme points — perfect unity and absolute incoordination — else it ceases to be ; and we find all the intermediate degrees exemplified without any line of * Opposed to Materialists. demarkation between normal and abnor- mal, health and disease, the one trench- ing upon the other.+ The unity of the Me then, in the psy- chological sense, is the cohesion, for a given time, of a certain number of clear states of consciousness, accompanied by others less clear and by a multitude of physiological states, which, though unac- companied by consciousness, are not less effective than the conscious states, and even more effective. Unity means co- ordination. The gist of the whole matter is that the co7isensus of the consciousness, being subordinate to the consensus of the organism, the problem of the unity of the Me is, in the last resort, a biological problem, and it is for biology to explain, if it can, the genesis of organisms and the solidarity of their parts : the psycho- logical explanation can come only then. This we endeavored to show in detail by analyzing and discussing morbid cases. Here then our task ends. t Even in the normal state the coordination is often so lax that several series co-exist separately. One may walk about, or perform manual work with a vague, intermittent consciousness of his move- ments, at the same time singing and musing ; but as he begins to think more intently, he stops sing- ing. CONTENTS. PAGB Chap. I. Introduction i Chap. II. Organic Disturbance 7 Chap. III. Affective Disturbance 18 Chap. IV. Intellective Disturbance 30 Chap. V. Dissolution of Personality 42 Chap. VI. 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Contents : — Introductory ; Origin of Physical Theories ; Relation of Theories to Experience •, Chromatic Phenomena produced by Crystals ; Range of Vision and Range of Radiation ; Spec- trum Analysis. Nos. 3S and 39. Geological Sltetches at Mome and Abroad 5 in two Parts, each complete in itself. By Archibald Geikie, F.R.S. Contents : Part I : — My first Geological Excur- sion ; " The Old Man of- Hoy " ; the Baron's Stone of Killochan ; the Colliers of Carrick ; Among the Volcanoes of Central France ; the Old Glaciers of Norway and Scotland ; Rock-Weathering meas- ured by Decay of Tombstones. Part II : A Frag- ment of Primeval Europe ; In Wyoming ; The Geysers of the Yellowstone ; the Lava fields - of Northwestern Europe ; the Scottish School of Geology ; Geographical Evolution ; the Geologi- cal influences which have affected the course of British History. No. 40. The Scientific Evidence of Or- ganic Evolution. By George J. Romanes, F.R.S. Contents (in part) : — The Argument from Classi- fication — from Morphology or Structure — from Geology — from Geographical Distribution — from Embr3'ology, etc., etc. No. 41. Current XHseussions in Sci- ence. By W. M. Williams, F.C.S. Contents (in part): The Fuel of the Sun; Ori- gin of Lunar Volcanoes ; Aerial Exploration of the Arctic Regions ; The Air of Stove-heated Rooms, etc., etc. No. 42. History of the Science of Poli- tics. By Frederick Pollock. Contents: The Place of Politics in Human Knowledge ; The Classic Period — Pericles — Soc- rates— Plato— Aristotle, etc.; the Medieval Period —the Papacy and the Empire ; Beginning of the Modern Period — Maohiavelli — Hobbes ; the Mod- era Period — Locke— Hooker— Blackst ine— Hume— Montesquieu— Burke ; the Present Cfcritury — Ben- thaui— Austin— Kant — Savigny — Herbert Spencer. No. 43. DariTin and EumboMt, tneir iiives and Woriis s — contains a series of notices of Darwin, by Huxley, Romanes, Geikie, Thisciton Dyer ; also the laie Prof. Agassiz's Centennial Address on the Life and Work of Alexander von Humboldt. - Nos. 44 and. 45. Ilie Bawa of History : an introduction to Pre-Historic Study. .Edited fay C. K Keary, M.A., of the British Museum. In two Par;.,. Contents of Part I : Earliest Traces of Man ; the Second Stone Age; the Growth of Languages: Families of Languages ; the Nations of the Old World ; Early Social Life ; the Village Community. Contents of Part II : Religion ; Aryan Religion ; the Other World: Mythologies and Folk Tales ; Pieture Writing ; Phonetic Writing ; Conclusion. Wo. 46. IFlze ISiseases of Memory. By Th. Ribot. (Translated from the French by J. Fitzgerald.) Contents: — Memory as a Biological Fact ; Gen- eral Amnesia ; Partial Amnesia ; Exaltation of Memory, or Hyperi-.nesia ; Conclusion. No. 47. Tlie Cliildiaood of Keligions. By Edward Clodd, F.R.A.S. Contents (in part) :— Legends of the Past about Creation ; Creation as told by Science ; Legends of the Past about Mankind ; Ancient and Modern Hindu Religions, etc., etc. No. 4S. It lie In Nature. By James Hinton, Author of " Man and his Dwelling Place." Contents (in part) . — Function ,• Living Forms ; Is Life Universal? Nutrition; Nature and Man; the Life of Man, etc., etc. No. 49. TCIie Sua: — its Constitution; its Phe- nomena; its Condition. By Nathan T. Carr, LL.D., Judge of the Ninth Judicial Circuit of Indiana. Contents (in part) : — The Sun's Atmosphere ; the Chromosphere ; the Photosphere ; Production of the Sun's" Spots ; the Question of the Extinction of the Sun, etc., etc. Nos. .50 asid 51. Money and tfee Meeli- anissn of Ezsceliange. By Prof. W. Stan- ley Jevons, F.R.S. Contents (in part): — The Functions of Money; Early History of Money ; the Metals as Money ; Principles of Circulation ; Promissory Notes ; the Banking System; the Clearing House; Quantity of Money needed by a Nation, etc., etc. No. 52. Tlae "diseases of tSie Will. By Th. Ribot. (^ i ransiated from the French b) r J. Fitzgerald.) Contents : — The Question Stated ; Impairment of the Will — Lack of Impulsion — Excess of Impul- sion ; Impairment of Voluntary attention ; Caprice ; Extinction of the Will ; Conclusion. No. 53. Aj-iEaal Automatism, and Other Essays. By Prof. T. H. Huxley, F.R.S. Contents : — Animal Automatism ; Science and Culture ; elementary Instruction in Physiology ; the Border Territory between Animals and Plants ; Universities, Actual and Ideal. No. 54. Tlte Birtu and Growtli of Mytll. By Edward Clodd, F.R.A.S. Contents (in parO : — Nature as viewed by Primi- ' ; ! ian ; Sun and Moon in Mythology ; the Hindu Sun and Cloud Myth ; Demonology ; Beast Fables ; Totemism, etc., etc. Mo. 55. TJie Scientific Blasts of Morals, 'and Other Essays. By William Kingdom Clifford, F.R.S. Contents ■ — Scientific Basis of Morals ; Right and Wrong ; the Ethics of Belief ; the Ethics of Re- gion. Nos. 58 and 57. Illusions: A Psy« eliological Study. By James Sully. Contents : — The Study of Illusion ; Classification of Illusions ; Illusions of Perception ; Dreams ; Illusions of Introspection ; Other Quasi-Presenta- tive illusions ; Illusions of Memory ; Illusions of Belief. Nos. 58 and. 59 (two double aumbers, 30 cents eaca). Tlie Origin of Species. By Charles Darwin. * : >* This is Darwin's famous work complete, with index and glossary. No. 60. IMie Claildliood of tlie WorlcL By Edward Clodd, f .k..a.s. Contents (in part) : — Man's First Wants, Man's First Tools. Fire, Dwellings, Use of Metals ; Lan- guage, 7 iti ( unting, Myths about Sun and Moon, Stars. Eclipses ; Ideas about the Soul, Be- lief in Witchcraft, Fetichism, Idolatry, etc., etc. No. 61. Miscellaneous Essays. By Rich- ard A. Proctor. Contents: — Strange Coincidences; Coincidences and Superstitions ; Gambling Superstitions ; Learning Languages ; Strange Sea-Creatures ; the Origin of Whales ; Prayer and Weather. No. 62 (Double number, 30 cents"). Tlie Be' ligions of tlse Ancient World. Contents: — Religions of the Ancient Egyptians, ancient Iranians, Assyrians, Babylonians, ancien/ Sanskritic Indians. Phoenicians. Carthaginians, Etruscans, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans. No. 63. Progressive Morality. By Thomas Fowler, F.S.A., President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Contents: — The Sanctions of Conduct; th e Moral Sanction, or Moral Sentiment ; Analysis and Formation of the Moral Sentiment ; the Moral Test ; Examples of the practical applications o{ the Moral Test. No. 64. The Distribution of ILSfe. By Alferd Russel Wallace and W. T. Thiseltos Dyer. Contents (in part) : — Geographical Distribution of Land Animals ; Distribution of Marine Anu mals ; Relations of Marine with Terrestrial Zoolog- ical Regions ; Distribution of Vegetable Life \ Northern, Southern, Tropical Flora, etc., etc. No. 65. Conditions of Mental Bevel*> opment, and Other Essays. By William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S. Contents :— Conditions of Mental Development; Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought ; Atoms ; The First and the Last Catastrophe. No. 66. Teclinical^ Education, rud other Essays. By Thomas H. Huxley, F.R.S. Contents : — Technical Education ; The Connec- tion of the Biological Sciences with Medicine; Joseph Priestley ; On Sensation and the Unity of Structure of the Sensiferous Organs; On Certain Errors respecting the Structure of the Heart at- tributed to Aristotle. No. 67. The Blacl£ Death; An account of the Great Pestilence of the 14th Century. By J. F. C. Hecker, M.D. Contents : — General Observations ; the Disease ; Causes — Spread, Mortality ; Moral Effects ; Physi- cians ; Appendix. No. 68 (Special Number, 10 cents). Three Essays, viz.: Laws, and the Order of their Discovery ; Origin of Animal Worship ; Politi- cal Fetichism. By Herbert Spencer. No. 69 (Double Number, 30 cents). Fetich^ Ism : A Contribution to Anthropology and the History of Religion. By Fritz Schultze, Ph.D. Translated from the German by J. Fitzgerald, M.A. Contents :— The Mind of the_ Savage ; Relation between the Savage Mind and its Object ; Fetich- ism as a Religion ; Various Objects of Fetich Wor- ship;— The Highest Grade of Fetichism; Aim of Fetichism. No. 70. Essays, Speculative and Prac- tical. By Herbert spencer. Contents:— Specialized Administration; "The Collective Wisdom;" Morals and Moral Senti- ments ; Reasons for Dissenting from the Philos- ophy of Cornte ; What is Electricity? No. 71. Anthropology. By Daniel Wil- son, LL.D. Contents : — Scope of the Science ; Man's Place in Nature ; Origin of Man ; Races of Mankind ; An- tiquity of Man Language ; Development of Civ- ilization. No. 72. The Dancing Mania of the Middle Ages. By J. F. C. Hecker, M.D. Contents (in part) :— The Dancing Mania in Ger- many and the Netherlands; The Dancing Mania in Italy ; The Dancing Mania in Abyssinia. No. 73. Evolution iu History, Lan- guage, and Science. Lectures delivered at tne London Crystal Palace School of Art, Sci- ence, and Literature. Contents: — The Principle of Causal Evolution; Scientific Study of Geography ; Hereditary Ten- dencies ; Vicissitudes of the English Language. Nos. 74, 75, 76, 77. The Descent of Man, and Selection in delation to Sex. By Charles Darwin. *** Price, Parts 74, 75, 76, fifteen cents each ; No. 77 (double number), thirty cents ; the entire work, seventy-five cents. No. 78. Historical Sketch of the Dis- tribution of ILand in England. By- Prof. Wh. Lloyd Birkbeck, Cambridge Uni- versity. Contents :— Anglo-Saxon Agriculture ; Origin of Land Properties ; Saxon Law of Succession to Land ; Norman Law of Succession ; Inclosure of Waste Lands, etc. No. 79. Scientific Aspects of Some Fa- miliar Things. By W. M. Williams, ■ F.R.S., F.C.S. Contents :— Social Benefits of Paraffin; Forma- tion of Coal ; Chemistry of Bog Reclamation ; The Coloring of Green Tea ; " Iron Filings "■ in Tea ; Origin of Soap ; Action of Frost on Building Ma- terials, etc. ; Fire-Clay and Anthracite ; Rumford's Cooking-Stoves; Stove -heated Rooms; Domestic Ventilation. No. 80. Charles Darwin s His JBJife and Work. By Grant Allen. (Double Numoer, 30 cents.) No. 81. The Mystery of Matter. Also The Philosophy of Ignorance. By J. Allanson Picton. No. 82. . Illusions of the Senses and Other Essays. By Richard A. Proctor. Contents: — Illusions of the Senses; Animals of the Present and the Past ; Life in Other Worlds ; Earthquakes; Our Dual Brain; A New Star in a Star Cloud ; Monster Sea-Serpents ; Origin of Comets. No. 83. Profit-Sharing Between La- bor and Capital. By Sedley Taylor. Contents: — Profit-Sharing in the Maison Le- claire ; Profit-Sharing in Industry ; Profit-Sharing in the Paris-Orleans' R.R. Co. ; Profit-Sharing in Agriculture ; An Irish Experiment ; Profit-Shar- ing in Distributive Enterprise. No. 84. Studies of Animated Nature. Uy W. S. Dallas. Contents: — Bats; Dragon-Flies; The Glow- Worm and other Phosphorescent Animals; Minute Organisms. No. 85. The Essential Nature of Be- ligion. By J. Allanson Picton. Contents: Religion and Freedom of Thought; Evolution of Religion; Fetichism; Nature-Wor- ship; Prophetic Religions; Religious Dogma; The Future of Religion. No. 86, The Unseen Universe. Also, The Philosophy of the irure Science ; By Wh. Kingdom Clifford, F.R.S. Contents; — The Unseen LTniverse; Philosophy of the Pure Sciences ; Statement of the Question ; Knowledge and Feeling; Postulates of the Science of Space; The Universal Statements of Arithmetic. No. 87. The Morphine Habit iMor- phinoinauia.) With Four oilier lectures. By Prof B. Ball, M.D. Contents : — General Description of Morphino- mania; Effects of the Abuse of Morphine; Effects of Abstinence; The Borderland of Insanity, Pro- longed Dreams ; Cerebral Dualism ; Insanity in Twins. No. 88. Science and Crime, and other Essays. By Andrew Wilson, b .R.S.E. Contents: — Science and Crime; Earliest known Life-Relic; About Kangaroos; On Giants; The Polity of a Pond; Skates and Rays; Leaves. No. 89. The Genesis of Science. By Herbert Spencer. To which is added : The Coming of Age of " The Origin of Species " By T. H. Huxley. No. 90. Notes on Earthquakes : with other Essays. By Richard A. Proctor. Contents : — Notes on Earthquakes ; Photograph- ing Fifteen Million Stars; Story of the Moon; The Earth's Past ; Story of the Earth ; Falls of Niagara ; The Unknowable ; Sun- Worship ; Her- bert Spencer on Priesthoods - Star of Bethlehem and a Bible Comet ; An Historical Puzzle ; Galileo, Darwin, and the Pope ; Science and Politics ; Parents and Children. No. 91. The Rise off Universities. By S. S. Laurie, LL.D (Double number, 30 cents.) Contents : — Romano-Hellenic Schools; Influence of Christianity on Education; Charlemagne and the Ninth Century; The First Universities; Saler num School; University of Naples; of Bologna; of Paris, Constitution of Universities; Graduation; Oxford and Cambridge; University of Prague, etc. No. 92. Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Earth- Worms, with "Observations on their Habits. By Charles Darwin. (Double Num- ber, 30 cents.) No. 93. Scientific Methods of Capital Punishment. By J Mount Bleyer, M.D. (Price ten cents.) 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