THE IMPORTANCE OF MENTAL PAIN 361 



and realizations, there is such a tormenting intrusion of painful self- 

 hood upon consciousness, that a desperate fight for place and favor, or 

 even for existence, is always on, and the issue seldom if ever comfort- 

 ably assured. Such people, in no sense technically " insane," are yet 

 so burdened with a veritable soul-pain, that it is only a " kind provi- 

 dence " which for the time being keeps them from becoming unbalanced 

 — a providence, however, which may yet some time call very loudly to 

 any one who happens to be at hand, to come to its help against this 

 " mighty " scourge, and all the indecisive conflicts which are part and 

 parcel of it. 



Undertaking now a yet closer study of this widely prevailing sickness 

 of soul, expressed in so many morbid variations of consciousness, it does 

 not take long to come upon the truth that probably the greater propor- 

 tion of these cases are primarily owing to the fact that the personality 

 itself has never from the first been properly harmonized, that is, has 

 never become thoroughly enough blended in the course of its develop- 

 ment to avoid remaining other than a veritable storm-center of all the 

 ragings of emotion and ideation and volition, which are here as incalcu- 

 lable as they are pain-producing. Whether this unblending is due to 

 such disparities and tendencies in the several ancestral lines as do not 

 admit of continuously close relationship and coordination, even in 

 distinct individuals, or whether the course of " bringing-up " from birth 

 onward has been such as never to overcome the natural heterogeneity of 

 the personal elements, probably common to the genesis of every human 

 being, does not matter. 1 The outcome, a heterogeneous or imperfectly 

 blended or ununified personality, may almost everywhere be discovered 

 as constituting at least a very natural soil in which rank psychalgias may 

 easily generate and grow and forever plague and choke the possessor 

 quite beyond description. To stand on the brink of a seething surging 

 crater, whose sulphurous fumes never cease to stifle, and whose erup- 

 tions are always immanent and frequently realized, might afford some 

 sort of parallel to the position occupied by some of the more deeply 

 afflicted of these cases; only, the man by the crater might possibly 

 recede from his danger at will; while no Prometheus was ever chained 

 more absolutely beyond self-help to his Caucasian rock, or was more 

 horribly subject to tormenting insults both from without and from 

 within, than is the one who finds himself inseparable from the miseries 

 of the species of psychalgia that are chiefly due to heterogeneity, or to 

 this in combination with all the imperfections of our natural growth 

 and conventional breeding. 



1 See Smith Baker, article ' ' Heterogeneous Personality, ' ' in the Journal 

 of Nervous and Mental Disease for September, 1893 ; also article ' ' Causes and 

 Prevention of Insanity" in The Popular Science Monthly for May, 1899; 

 also William James, in "Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 169. 



vol. lixix. — 25. 



