GOD AND NATURE. 35 



produced without limit. What they prove is, that we are dependent 

 for the proper use of our faculties upon material conditions ; the cor- 

 pus sanum is one condition of the mens sana hut they do not prove 

 the unreality of the attribute of personality any more than the exist- 

 ence of idiocy and insanity, or even the possibility of getting drunk 

 and so losing all sense of who and what we are, prove it. Undoubtedly 

 everything depends, in the case of a human being whose powers are 

 exerted through material organs, upon the proper working condition 

 of those organs, and a pressure of blood upon the brain may make a 

 man of the holiest life and the most philosophical temper commit sui- 

 cide, as experience proves. But all such morbid exceptions to the gen- 

 eral rule can not destroy the belief which a man in his normal condi- 

 tion feels compelled by the conditions of his existence to hold, namely, 

 that he is himself and no one else, that he is responsible for his actions, 

 and that what he does now will bear fruit in his subsequent experience 

 either for good or for evil, unless he becomes deranged. The author 

 from whom I have taken the above case of double personality exclaims 

 very naively : "Ah ! comme il f aut avoir un peu de saine complaisance 

 pour les sept peches capitaux ! Jugez : un peu de sang de trop, peut- 

 etre un centieme de gramme mal dirige au contact d'une pauvre petite 

 resille de nerfs, et le voila fait, l'orgueilleux, le vaniteux, le superbe ! " 

 True : we must be cautious in forming opinions of actions ; and in any 

 human court we may believe also in the court divine every circum- 

 stance connected with an action must be taken into account in order 

 that a just judgment of it may be formed ; but all this does not prove 

 that there is no such thing as haughtiness, or vanity, or pride, or that 

 sane men are not responsible for their temper of mind and the quality 

 of their actions. 



To come back, then, to the conception of personality. I can not but 

 feel sure that this is the highest conception that I can possess of my 

 own being, or of any kind of being. All history seems to transmute 

 itself into a kind of phantasmagoria or illusive pantomime, unless the 

 attribute of personality be conceded to the actors. Socrates, Alexan- 

 der, Julius Csesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, must be studied without refer- 

 ence to phosphorus, and upon principles lying altogether outside the 

 territory of physical science. And this postulate of personality seems 

 to me to lead, by an intellectual necessity, to the conception of per- 

 sonality in a region not of cbaocpopog, but of $wc itself, the conception 

 of the Person, 6 wv, of whom persons like ourselves are, as it were, a 

 faint reflection. 



The study of the being and doings of this Person would seem to 

 be of necessity one of the most interesting that can be suggested to 

 the mind of man. The study may be conducted upon different, though 

 not crossing, lines ; the chief lines being the physical, the metaphysi- 

 cal or philosophical, the moral, the religious. Each of these branches 

 has its own method and its own sources of illumination ; each also has 



