What, to begin with, does Sitte signify, and in what sense do we use the word? It means for us, and means in every accurate reference we make of it, those principles of conduct which regulate people in their relations to each other, and which have become matter of habit and second nature at the stage of culture reached, and of which, therefore, we are not explicitly conscious. Principles, we call them, because we do not refer to the sort of conduct that is casual or is determined on casual grounds, but to the hidden and uniform ground of action which we assume to be present in the man whose action is not deflected and from which we can pretty certainly predict what he will do. Principles, we say, which have become a second nature and of which we are not explicitly conscious. We thus exclude all impulses and motives based on free individual choice, the inward aspect of Sittlichkeit, that is to say, morality, and also the outward side, or law, alike. For what a man has first to reflect over and then freely to resolve is not for him a habit in conduct; and in so far as habit in conduct is associated with a particular age, it is regarded as the unconscious instrument of the Time Spirit.
The system of ethical habit in a community is of a dominating character, for the decision and influence of the whole community is embodied in that social habit. Because such conduct is systematic and covers the whole of the field of society, the individual will is closely related by it to the will and the spirit of the community. And out of this relation arises the power of adequately controlling the conduct of the individual. If this power fails or becomes weak, the community degenerates and may fall to pieces. Different nations excel in their Sittlichkeit in different fashions. The spirit of the community and its ideals may vary greatly. There may be a low level of Sittlichkeit; and we have the spectacle of nations which have even degenerated in this respect. It may possibly conflict with law and morality, as in the case of the duel. But when its level is high in a nation we admire the system, for we see it not only guiding a people and binding them together for national effort, but affording the greatest freedom of thought and action for those who in daily life habitually act in harmony with the General Will.
Thus we have in the case of a community, be it the city or be it the state, an illustration of a sanction which is sufficient to compel observance of a rule without any question of the application of force. This kind of sanction may be of a highly compelling quality, and it often extends so far as to make the individual prefer the good of the community to his own. The development of many of our social institutions, of our hospitals, of our universities, and of other establishments of the kind, shows the extent to which it reaches and is powerful. But it has yet higher forms in which it approaches very nearly to the level of the obligation of conscience, although it is distinct from that form of obligation. I will try to make clear what I mean by illustrations. A man may be impelled to action of a high order by his sense of unity with the society to which he belongs, action of which, from the civic standpoint, all approve. What he does in such a case is natural to him, and is done without thought of reward or punishment; but it has reference to standards of conduct set up by society and accepted just because society has set them up. There is a poem by the late Sir Alfred Lyall which exemplifies the high level that may be reached in such conduct. The poem is called Theology in Extremis, and it describes the feelings of an Englishman who had been taken prisoner by Mahometan rebels in the Indian Mutiny. He is face to face with a cruel death. They offer him his life if he will repeat something from the Koran. If he complies, no one is likely ever to hear of it, and he will be free to return to England and to the woman he loves. Moreover, and here is the real point, he is not a believer in Christianity, so that it is no question of denying his Savior. What ought he to do? Deliverance is easy, and the relief and advantage would be unspeakably great. But he does not really hesitate, and every shadow of doubt disappears when he hears his fellow-prisoner, a half-caste, pattering eagerly the words demanded.
I will take another example, this time from the literature of ancient Greece. In one of the shortest but not least impressive of his Dialogues, the "Crito," Plato tells us of the character of Socrates, not as a philosopher, but as a good citizen. He has been unjustly condemned by the Athenians as an enemy to the good of the state. Crito comes to him in prison to persuade him to escape. He urges on him many arguments, his duty to his children included. But Socrates refuses. He chooses to follow, not what anyone in the crowd might do, but the example which the ideal citizen should set. It would be a breach of his duty to fly from the judgment duly passed in the Athens to which he belongs, even though he thinks the decree should have been different. For it is the decree of the established justice of his city state. He will not "play truant." He hears the words, "Listen, Socrates, to us who have brought you up"; and in reply he refuses to go away, in these final sentences: "This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is murmuring in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other. And I know that anything more which you may say will be vain."
Why do men of this stamp act so, it may be when leading the battle line, it may be at critical moments of quite other kinds? It is, I think, because they are more than mere individuals. Individual they are, but completely real, even as individual, only in their relation to organic and social wholes in which they are members, such as the family, the city, the state. There is in every truly organized community a Common Will which is willed by those who compose that community, and who in so willing are more than isolated men and women. It is not, indeed, as unrelated atoms that they have lived. They have grown, from the receptive days of childhood up to maturity, in an atmosphere of example and general custom, and their lives have widened out from one little world to other and higher worlds, so that, through occupying successive stations in life, they more and more come to make their own the life of the social whole in which they move and have their being. They cannot mark off or define their own individualities without reference to the individualities of others. And so they unconsciously find themselves as in truth pulse-beats of the whole system, and themselves the whole system. It is real in them and they in it. They are real only because they are social. The notion that the individual is the highest form of reality, and that the relationship of individuals is one of mere contract, the notion of Hobbes and of Bentham and of Austin, turns out to be quite inadequate. Even of an everyday contract, that of marriage, it has been well said that it is a contract to pass out of the sphere of contract, and that it is possible only because the contracting parties are already beyond and above that sphere. As a modern writer, F. H. Bradley of Oxford, to whose investigations in these regions we owe much, has finely said: "The moral organism is not a mere animal organism. In the latter the member is not aware of itself as such, while in the former it knows itself, and therefore knows the whole in itself. The narrow external function of the man is not the whole man. He has a life which we cannot see with our eyes, and there is no duty so mean that it is not the realization of this, and knowable as such. What counts is not the visible outer work so much as the spirit in which it is done. The breadth of my life is not measured by the multitude of my pursuits, nor the space I take up amongst other men; but by the fulness of the whole life which I know as mine. It is true that less now depends on each of us as this or that man; it is not true that our individuality is therefore lessened; that therefore we have less in us."
There is, according to this view, a General Will with which the will of the good citizen is in accord. He feels that he would despise himself were his private will not in harmony with it. The notion of the reality of such a will is no new one. It is as old as the Greeks, for whom the moral order and the city state were closely related; and we find it in modern books in which we do not look for it. Jean Jacques Rousseau is probably best known to the world by the famous words in which he begins the first chapter of the Social Contract: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves to be the masters of others cease not to be greater slaves than the people they govern." He goes on in the next paragraph to tell us that if he were only to consider force and the effects of it, he would say that if a nation was constrained to obey and did obey, it did well, but that whenever it could throw off its yoke and did throw it off, it acted better. His words, written in 1762, became a text for the pioneers of the French Revolution. But they would have done well to read further into the book. As Rousseau goes on, we find a different conception. He passes from considering the fiction of a social contract to a discussion of the power over the individual of the General Will, by virtue of which a people becomes a people. This General Will, the Volonté Générale, he distinguishes from the Volonté de Tous, which is a mere numerical sum of individual wills. These particular wills do not rise above themselves. The General Will, on the other hand, represents what is greater than the individual volition of those who compose the society of which it is the will. On occasions, this higher will is more apparent than at other times. But it may, if there is social slackness, be difficult to distinguish from a mere aggregate of voices, from the will of a mob. What is interesting is that Rousseau, so often associated with doctrine of quite another kind, should finally recognize the bond of a General Will as what really holds the community together. For him, as for those who have had a yet clearer grasp of the principle, in willing the General Will we not only realize our true selves but we may rise above our ordinary habit of mind. We may reach heights which we could not reach, or which at all events most of us could not reach, in isolation. There are few observers who have not been impressed with the wonderful unity and concentration of purpose which an entire nation may display—above all, in a period of crisis. We see it in time of war, when a nation is fighting for its life or for a great cause. We have marvelled at the illustrations with which history abounds of the General Will rising to heights of which but few of the individual citizens in whom it is embodied have ever before been conscious even in their dreams.
By leadership a common ideal can be made to penetrate the soul of a people and to take complete possession of it. The ideal may be very high, or it may be of so ordinary a kind that we are not conscious of it without the effort of reflection. But when it is there it influences and guides daily conduct. Such idealism passes beyond the sphere of law, which provides only what is necessary for mutual protection and liberty of just action. It falls short, on the other hand, in quality of the dictates of what Kant called the Categorical Imperative that rules the private and individual conscience, but that alone, an Imperative which therefore gives insufficient guidance for ordinary and daily social life. Yet the ideal of which I speak is not the less binding; and it is recognized as so binding that the conduct of all good men conforms to it.
The organism and the brain, as its highest representation, constitute the real personality, containing in itself all that we have been, and the possibility of all that we shall be. The complete individual character is inscribed there with all its active and passive aptitudes, sympathies, and antipathies; its genius, talents, or stupidity; its virtues, vices, torpor, or activity. Of all these, what emerges and actually reaches consciousness is only a small item compared with what remains buried below, albeit still active. Conscious personality is always but a feeble portion of physical personality.
The unity of the ego, consequently, is not that of the one-entity of spiritualists which is dispersed into multiple phenomena, but the co-ordination of a certain number of incessantly renascent states, having for their support the vague sense of our bodies. This unity does not pass from above to below, but from below to above; the unity of the ego is not an initial, but a terminal point.
Does there really exist a perfect unity? Evidently not in the strict, mathematical sense. In a relative sense it is met with, rarely and incidentally. In a clever marksman in the act of taking aim, or in a skilled surgeon performing a difficult operation all is found to converge, both physically and mentally. Still, let us take note of the result: in these conditions the awareness of real personality disappears; the conscious individual is reduced to an idea; whence it would follow that perfect unity of consciousness and the awareness of personality exclude each other. By a different course we again reach the same conclusion; the ego is a co-ordination. It oscillates between two extreme points at which it ceases to exist: viz., perfect unity and absolute inco-ordination. All the intermediate degrees are met with, in fact, and without any line of demarcation between the healthy and the morbid; the one encroaches upon the other.
Even in the normal state the co-ordination is often sufficiently loose to allow several series to coexist separately. We can walk or perform manual work with a vague and intermittent consciousness of the movements, at the same time singing, musing; but if the activity of thought increases, the singing will cease. With many people it is a kind of substitute for intellectual activity, an intermediate state between thinking and not-thinking.
The unity of the ego, in a psychological sense, is, therefore, the cohesion, during 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, without being accompanied by consciousness like the others, yet operate as much as, and even more than, the former. Unity, in fact, means co-ordination. The conclusion to be drawn from the above remarks is namely this, that the consensus of consciousness being subordinate to the consensus of the organism, the problem of the unity of the ego is, in its ultimate form, a biological problem. To biology pertains the task of explaining, if it can, the genesis of organisms and the solidarity of their component parts. Psychological interpretation can only follow in its wake.
Ideas, after being experienced in consciousness, become dormant (conserved as physiological dispositions) and may or may not afterward be reawakened in consciousness as memories. Many such ideas, under conditions with some of which we are all familiar, tend to form part of our voluntary or involuntary memories and many do not. But when such is the case, the memories do not ordinarily include the whole of a given mental experience, but only excerpts or abstracts of it. Hence one reason for the fallibility of human memory and consequent testimony.
Now under special conditions, the ideas making up an experience at any given moment tend to become organized into a system or complex, so that when we later think of the experience or recall any of the ideas belonging to it, the complex as a whole is revived. This is one of the principles underlying the mechanism of memory. Thus it happens that memory may, to a large extent, be made up of complexes. These complexes may be very loosely organized in that the elementary ideas are weakly bound together, in which case, when we try to recall the original experience, only a part of it is recalled. Or a complex may be very strongly organized, owing to the conditions under which it is formed, and then a large part of the experience can be recalled. In this case, any idea associated with some element in the complex may, by the law of association, revive the whole original complex. If, for instance, we have gone through a railroad accident involving exciting incidents, loss of life, etc., the words "railroad," "accident," "death," or a sudden crashing sound, or the sight of blood, or even riding in a railroad train may recall the experience from beginning to end, or at least the prominent features in it, i.e., so much as was organized. The memory of the greater part of this experience is well organized, while the earlier events and those succeeding the accident may have passed out of all possibility of voluntary recall.
To take an instance commonplace enough but which happens to have just come within my observation: A fireman was injured severely by being thrown from a hose wagon rushing to a fire against a telegraph pole with which the wagon collided. He narrowly escaped death. Although three years have passed he still cannot ride on a wagon to a fire without the memory of the whole accident rising in his mind. When he does so he again lives through the accident, including the thoughts just previous to the actual collision when, realizing his situation, he was overcome with terror, and he again manifests all the organic physical expressions of fear, viz.: perspiration, tremor, and muscular weakness. Here is a well-organized and fairly limited complex.
Among the loosely organized complexes in many individuals, and possibly in all of us, there are certain dispositions toward views of life which represent natural inclinations, desires, and modes of activity which, for one reason or another, we tend to suppress or are unable to give full play to. Many individuals, for example, are compelled by the exactions of their duties and responsibilities to lead serious lives, to devote themselves to pursuits which demand all their energies and thought and which, therefore, do not permit of indulgence in the lighter enjoyments of life, and yet there may be a natural inclination to partake of the pleasures which innately appeal to all mankind and which many pursue. The longing for these recurs from time to time. The mind dwells on them, the imagination is excited and weaves a fabric of pictures, thoughts, and emotions which thus become associated into a complex. There may be a rebellion and "kicking against the pricks" and thereby a liberation of the emotional force that impresses a stronger organization on the whole process. The recurrence of such a complex is one form of what we call a "mood," which has a distinctly emotional tone of its own. The revival of this feeling tone tends to revive the associated ideas and vice versa. Such a feeling-idea complex is often spoken of as "a side to one's character," to which a person may from time to time give play. Or the converse of this may hold, and a person who devotes his life to the lighter enjoyments may have aspirations and longings for more serious pursuits, and in this respect the imagination may similarly build up a complex which may express itself in a mood. Thus a person is often said to have "many sides to his character," and exhibits certain alternations of personality which may be regarded as normal prototypes of those which occur as abnormal states.
Most of what has been said about the formation of complexes is a statement of commonplace facts, and I would not repeat it here were it not that, in certain abnormal conditions, disposition, subject, and other complexes, though loosely organized, often play an important part. This is not the place to enter into an explanation of dissociated personality, but in such conditions we sometimes find that disposition complexes, for instance, come to the surface and displace or substitute themselves for the other complexes which make up a personality. A complex which is only a mood or a "side of the character" of a normal individual may, in conditions of dissociation, become the main, perhaps sole, complex and chief characteristic of the new personality. In Miss Beauchamp, for instance, the personality known as BI was made up almost entirely of the religious and ethical ideas which formed one side of the original self. In the personality known as Sally we had for the most part the complex which represented the enjoyment of youthful pleasures and sports, the freedom from conventionalities and artificial restraints generally imposed by duties and responsibilities. In BIV the complex represented the ambitions and activities of practical life. In Miss Beauchamp as a whole, normal, without disintegration, it was easy to recognize all three dispositions as "sides of her character," though each was kept ordinarily within proper bounds by the correcting influence of the others. It was only necessary to put her in an environment which encouraged one or the other side, to associate her with people who strongly suggested one or the other of her own characteristics, whether religious, social, pleasure loving, or intellectual, to see the characteristics of BI, Sally, or BIV stand out in relief as the predominant personality. Then we had the alternating play of these different sides of her character.
In fact, the total of our complexes, which, regarded as a whole and in view of their reaction to the environment, their behavior under the various conditions of social life, their aptitudes, feeling-tones, "habits," and faculties, we term character and personality, are in large part predetermined by the mental experiences of the past and the vestiges of memory which have been left as residual from these experiences. We are the offspring of our past.
The great mass of our ideas involve associations of the origin of which we are unaware because the memories of the original experience have become split and a large portion thus has become forgotten even if ever fully appreciated. We all have our prejudices, our likes and dislikes, our tastes and aversions; it would tax our ingenuity to give a sufficient psychological account of their origin. They were born long ago in educational, social, personal, and other experiences, the details of which we have this many a year forgotten. It is the residua of these experiences that have persisted and become associated into complexes which are retained as traits of our personality.
Suggestion may have its end and aim in the creation of a new personality. The experimenter then chooses the sort of personality he wishes to induce and obliges the subject to realize it. Experiments of this kind succeeding in a great many somnambulists, and usually producing very curious results, have long been known and have been repeated, one might say, almost to satiety within the last few years.
When we are awake and in full possession of all our faculties we can imagine sensations different from those which we ordinarily experience. For example, when I am sitting quietly at my table engaged in writing this book, I can conceive the sensations that a soldier, a woman, an artist, or an Englishman would experience in such and such a situation. But, however fantastic the conceptions may be that we form, we do not cease to be conscious withal of our own personal existence. Imagination has taken flight fairly in space, but the memory of ourselves always remains behind. Each of us knows that he is himself and not another, that he did this yesterday, that he has just written a letter, that he must write another such letter tomorrow, that he was out of Paris for a week, etc. It is this memory of passed facts—a memory always present to the mind—that constitutes the consciousness of our normal personality.
It is entirely different in the case of the two women, A—— and B——, that M. Richet studied.
Put to sleep and subjected to certain influences, A—— and B—— forget their identity; their age, their clothing, their sex, their social position, their nationality, the place and the time of their life—all this has entirely disappeared. Only a single idea remains—a single consciousness—it is the consciousness of the idea and of the new being that dawns upon their imagination.
They have lost the idea of their late existence. They live, talk, and think exactly like the type that is suggested to them. With what tremendous intensity of life these types are realized, only those who have been present at these experiments can know. Description can only give a weak and imperfect idea of it.
Instead of imagining a character simply, they realize it, objectify it. It is not like a hallucination, of which one witnesses the images unfolding before him, as a spectator would. He is rather like an actor who is seized with passion, imagines that the drama he plays is a reality, not a fiction, and that he has been transformed, body and soul, into the personality that he sets himself to play.
In order to have this transformation of personality work it is sufficient to pronounce a word with some authority. I say to A——, "You are an old woman," she considers herself changed into an old woman, and her countenance, her bearing, her feelings, become those of an old woman. I say to B——, "You are a little girl," and she immediately assumes the language, games, and tastes of a little girl.
Although the account of these scenes is quite dull and colorless compared with the sight of the astonishing and sudden transformations themselves, I shall attempt, nevertheless, to describe some of them. I quote some of M——'s objectivations:
As a peasant.—She rubs her eyes and stretches herself. "What time is it? Four o'clock in the morning!" She walks as if she were dragging sabots. "Now, then, I must get up. Let us go to the stable. Come up, red one! come up, get about!" She seems to be milking a cow. "Let me alone, Gros-Jean, let me alone, I tell you. When I am through my work. You know well enough that I have not finished my work. Oh! yes, yes, later."
As an actress.—Her face took a smiling aspect instead of the dull and listless manner which she had just had. "You see my skirt? Well, my manager makes me wear it so long. These managers are too tiresome. As for me, the shorter the skirt the better I like it. There is always too much of it. A simple fig leaf! Mon Dieu, that is enough! You agree with me, don't you, my dear, that it is not necessary to have more than a fig leaf? Look then at this great dowdy Lucie—where are her legs, eh?"
As a priest.—She imagines that she is the Archbishop of Paris. Her face becomes very grave. Her voice is mildly sweet and drawling, which forms a great contrast with the harsh, blunt tone she had as a general. (Aside.) "But I must accomplish my charge." She leans her head on her hand and reflects. (Aloud.) "Ah! it is you, Monsieur Grand Vicar; what is your business with me? I do not wish to be disturbed. Yes, today is the first of January, and I must go to the cathedral. This throng of people is very respectful, don't you think so, monsieur? There is a great deal of religion in the people, whatever one does. Ah! a child! let him come to me to be blessed. There, my child." She holds out to him her imaginary bishop's ring to kiss. During this whole scene she is making gestures of benediction with her right hand on all sides. "Now I have a duty to perform. I must go and pay my respects to the president of the Republic. Ah! Mr. President, I come to offer you my allegiance. It is the wish of the church that you may have many years of life. She knows that she has nothing to fear, notwithstanding cruel attacks, while such an honorable man is at the head of the Republic." She is silent and seems to listen attentively. (Aside.) "Yes, fair promises. Now let us pray!" She kneels down.
As a religious sister.—She immediately kneels down and begins to say her prayers, making a great many signs of the cross; then she arises. "Now to the hospital. There is a wounded man in this ward. Well, my friend, you are a little better this morning, aren't you? Now, then, let me take off your bandage." She gestures as if she were unrolling a bandage. "I shall do it very gently; doesn't that relieve you? There! my poor friend, be as courageous before pain as you were before the enemy."
I might cite other objectivations from A——'s case, in the character of old woman, little girl, young man, gay woman, etc. But the examples given seem sufficient to give some idea of the entire transformation of the personality into this or that imaginary type. It is not a simple dream, it is a living dream.
The complete transformation of feelings is not the least curious phenomenon of these objectivations. A—— is timid, but she becomes very daring when she thinks herself a bold person. B—— is silent, she becomes talkative when she represents a talkative person. The disposition is thus completely changed. Old tastes disappear and give place to the new tastes that the new character represented is supposed to have.
In a more recent paper, prepared with the co-operation of M. Ferrari and M. Hericourt, M. Richet has added a curious detail to the preceding experiments. He has shown that the subject on whom a change of personality is imposed not only adapts his speech, gestures, and attitudes to the new personality, but that even his handwriting is modified and brought into relation with the new ideas that absorb his consciousness. This modification of handwriting is an especially interesting discovery, since handwriting, according to current theories, is nothing more than a sort of imitation. I cite some examples borrowed from these authors.
It is suggested in succession to a young student that he is a sly and crafty peasant, then a miser, and finally a very old man. While the subject's features and behavior generally are modified and brought into harmony with the idea of the personality suggested, we may observe also that his handwriting undergoes similar modifications which are not less marked. It has a special character peculiar to each of the new states of personality. In short, the graphic movements change like the gestures generally.
In a note on the handwriting of hysterical patients, I have shown that under the influence of suggested emotions, or under the influence of sensorial stimulations, the handwriting of a hysterical patient may be modified. It gets larger, for example, in cases of dynamogenic excitation.
The characteristic of the suggestion that we have just studied is that it does not bear exclusively on perception or movement—that is to say, on a limited psychic element; but there are comprehensive suggestions. They impose a topic on the subject that he is obliged to develop with all the resources of his intellect and imagination, and if the observations be carefully examined, it will also be seen that in these suggestions the faculties of perception are affected and perverted by the same standard as that of ideation. Thus the subject, under the influence of his assumed personality, ceases to perceive the external world as it exists. He has hallucinations in connection with his new psychological personality. When a bishop, he thinks he is in Notre Dame, and sees a host of the faithful. When a general, he thinks he is surrounded by troops, etc. Things that harmonize with the suggestion are conjured up. This systematic development of states of consciousness belongs to all kinds of suggestions, but is perhaps nowhere else so marked as in these transformations of personality.
On the other hand, everything that is inconsistent with the suggestion gets inhibited and leaves the subject's consciousness. As has been said, alterations of personality imply phenomena of amnesia. In order that the subject may assume the fictitious personality he must begin by forgetting his true personality. The infinite number of memories that represent his past experience and constitute the basis of his normal ego are for the time being effaced, because these memories are inconsistent with the ideal of the suggestion.
Somewhat after the order of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde I seem to possess two distinct personalities, being both at the same time but presenting no such striking contrast as the Jekyll-Hyde combination. They are about equally virtuous. Their main difference seems to be one of age, one being a decade or so in advance of the other.
At times they work harmoniously together and again at cross-purposes. I do not seem to have developed equally. Part of me sits humbly at the feet of the other part of me and receives advice and instruction. Part of me feels constrained to confess to the other part of me when it has done wrong and meekly receives rebuke. Part of me tries to shock the other part of me and to force the more dignified part to misbehave and giggle and do things not considered correct in polite society.
My younger part delights to tease the older, to doubt her motives, to interrupt her meditations. It wants to play, while my older self is more seriously inclined. My younger self is only twelve years old. This is my real self. To my own mind I am still a little girl with short dresses and a bunch of curls. For some reason my idea of self has never advanced beyond this point. The long dress and the hair piled high will never seem natural. Sometimes I enjoy this duality and again I do not. Sometimes the two parts mingle delightfully together, again they wrangle atrociously, while I (there seems to be a third part of me) sit off and watch the outcome.
The older part gets tired before the younger. The younger, still fresh and in a good humor, undertakes to furnish amusement for the older. I have often thrown myself on the bed wearied and exhausted and been made to shake with laughter at the capers of the younger part of me. They are capers indeed. On these occasions she will carry on conversations with friends—real friends—fairly bristling with witticisms, and although taking both parts herself, the parry and thrust is delightful.
Sometimes, however, the younger part of me seems to get up all awry. She will carry on quarrels—heated quarrels—from morning to night, taking both sides herself, with persons whom I (the combination) dearly love, and against whom I have no grievance whatever. These are a great distress to my older self.
On other days she seems to take the greatest delight in torturing me with imaginary horrors. She cuts my throat, pulls my eyes out of their sockets, removes tumors, and amputates limbs until I wonder that there is anything left of me. She does it all without administering anæsthetics and seems to enjoy my horror and disgust.
Again, some little jingle or tune will take her fancy and she will repeat it to herself until I am almost driven to madness. Sometimes it is only a word, but it seems to have a fascination for her and she rolls it as a sweet morsel under her tongue until sleep puts an end to it.
Again, if I (the combination) fall ill, one part of me, I have never discovered which, invariably hints that I am not ill at all but merely pretending. So much so that it has become with me a recognized symptom of incipient illness.
Moreover, the younger and older are never on the same side of any question. One leans to wisdom, the other to fun. I am a house divided against itself. The younger longs to dance, to go to the theater and to play cards, all of which the older disapproves. The younger mocks the older, calls her a hypocrite and the like until the older well-nigh believes it herself and almost yields to her pleadings. The older listens sedately to the sermon, while the younger plans her Easter suit or makes fun of the preacher.
The older declares she will never marry, while the younger scouts the idea of being an old maid. But even if she could gain the consent of the older, it were but little better, they differ so as to their ideals.
In society the difference is more marked. I seem to be a combination chaperone and protégée. The older appears at ease, the younger shy and awkward—she has never made her début. If one addresses a remark to her she is thrown into utter confusion until the older rushes to the rescue. My sympathy is with the younger, however, for even to this day I, the combination, can scarce resist the temptation to say nothing when there is nothing to say.
There is something tragic to me in this Siamese-twins arrangement of two so uncongenial. I am at one and the same time pupil and teacher, offender and judge, performer and critic, chaperone and protégée, a prim, precise, old maid and a rollicking schoolgirl, a tomboy and a prude, a saint and sinner. What can result from such a combination? That we get on tolerably is a wonder. Some days, however, we get on admirably together, part of me paying compliments to the other part of me—whole days being given to this—until each of us has such a good opinion of herself and the other that we feel on equal terms and are at our happiest.
But how dreadful are the days when we turn against each other! There are not words enough to express the contempt which we feel for ourselves. We seem to set each other in the corner and the combination as a whole is utterly miserable.
I can but wonder and enjoy and wait to see what Myself and I will make of Me.
Two ways of looking at life are characteristic respectively of what we call the healthy-minded, who need to be born only once, and of the sick souls, who must be twice-born in order to be happy. The result is two different conceptions of the universe of our experience. In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilineal or one-storied affair, whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient; there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is by death, if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism, the two types are violently contrasted; though here, as in most other current classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat ideal abstractions, and the concrete human beings whom we oftenest meet are intermediate varieties and mixtures. Practically, however, you all recognize the difference: you understand, for example, the disdain of the Methodist convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the inversion of natural appearances the essence of God's truth.
The psychological basis of the twice-born character seems to be a certain discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject, an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution.
"Homo duplex, homo duplex!" writes Alphonse Daudet. "The first time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, 'He is dead, he is dead!' While my first self wept, my second self thought, 'How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theater.' I was then fourteen years old. This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!"
Some persons are born with an inner constitution which is harmonious and well balanced from the outset. Their impulses are consistent with one another, their will follows without trouble the guidance of their intellect, their passions are not excessive, and their lives are little haunted by regrets. Others are oppositely constituted; and are so in degrees which may vary from something so slight as to result in a merely odd or whimsical inconsistency, to a discordancy of which the consequences may be inconvenient in the extreme. Of the more innocent kinds of heterogeneity I find a good example in Mrs. Annie Besant's autobiography.
I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that every eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink away from strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I was full of eager gratitude to anyone who noticed me kindly; as the young mistress of a house I was afraid of my servants, and would let careless work pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer; when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it. Combative on the platform in defense of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or disapproval in the house, and am a coward at heart in private while a good fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming some lad or lass for doing their work badly. An unkind look or word has availed to make me shrink myself as a snail into its shell, while, on the platform, opposition makes me speak my best.
This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness; but a stronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the subject's life. There are persons whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.
Whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament. All writers about that temperament make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to a man at all. A dégénéré supérieur is simply a man of sensibility in many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common in keeping his spiritual house in order and running his furrow straight, because his feelings and impulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psychopathic temperament when it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples of heterogeneous personality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, "Sell Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him, sell him!" which would run through his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breath with retorting, "I will not, I will not," he impulsively said, "Let him go if he will," and this loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a year. The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions, ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan.
St. Augustine's case is a classic example of discordant personality. You all remember his half-pagan, half-Christian bringing up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan, his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent skepticism, and his restless search for truth and purity of life; and finally how, distracted by the struggle between the two souls in his breast, and ashamed of his own weakness of will when so many others whom he knew and knew of had thrown off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and the higher life, he heard a voice in the garden say, "Sume, lege" (take and read), and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, "not in chambering and wantonness," etc., which seemed directly sent to his address, and laid the inner storm to rest forever. Augustine's psychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having a divided self which has never been surpassed.