NA TURE 



517 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1895. 



PERSONALITY. 



The Diseases of Personality. By Th. Ribot. Authorised 

 translation. Second revised edition. (Chicago : The 

 Open Court Publishing Company, 1S95.) 



THE importance of a work bears little relation to its 

 bulk, so no surprise need be felt at a masterly and 

 very suggestive resume of recent inquiries into a question 

 of the highest interest being compressed into this thin 

 volume of less than 160 pages of good readable type. 

 The work itself is not new, though it is so in its present 

 translated form. It is practically up to date, and affords 

 an excellent study for those to whom what Tennyson calls 

 " the abysmal deeps of Personality " are.-, wholly mys- 

 terious, as well as to those others who have sounded 

 them in part. 



First as regards consciousness: there are two views, 

 the old and the new. The old view regards -t as the 

 fundamental property of the soul or mind ; the new 

 view regards it as an event superadded to the more 

 regular activity of the brain, depending on conditions as 

 yet unknown, and appearing or disappearing according 

 to their presence or absence. The old view fails to 

 account for the vast substratum of unconscious mental 

 activity whose existence is now beyond dispute, and it 

 apparently fails to account for intermissions of con- 

 sciousness, whose e.xistence can hardly be denied even 

 when the fullest allowance is made for the effects of 

 forgetfulncss. The new view is simpler than the old one, 

 and much more consistent with observed facts, especially 

 such as are obtained from the study of mental disease, 

 which is a subtle analyser of mental functions. Many 

 persons are loth to admit that the highest manifestations 

 of the human mind are fugitive phenomena, subordinate 

 to those of a lower grade ; but whatever be the origin of 

 consciousness, its value is none the less. From the point 

 of view of the evolutionist, it is not the origin of a 

 faculty that is of consequence, but the elevation to which 

 that faculty attains. However consciousness may have 

 come into existence, its first appearance on the earth 

 must have been a fact of the first magnitude, for it is the 

 basis of the recollections, which capitalise the past of each 

 animal for the profit of its future, and give it new chances 

 of survival. On the automaton view of life, consciousness 

 I hanges the animal from a simple automaton into one of 

 .m incomparably higher order. The author quotes much 

 from " Les colonies animales " of Perrier, to show the 

 steps through which consciousness first became developed 

 in the animal world, starting from associations of indi- 

 viduals that arc almost independent of one another, but 

 which, owing to their contiguity and mutual pressure, 

 cannot be wholly unaffected by their neighbours. The 

 next step is the appearance of a colonial consciousness, 

 where a colony is formed of individuals in which some 

 division of labour takes place, and the function of loco- 

 motion is centralised. But because a colony acquires 

 colonial consciousness, it does not follow that each of the 

 individuals that compose it loses its particular conscious- 

 ness ; thus the severed ray of a star-fish continues to 

 ^0. 1 352, VOL. 17\ 



creep, to follow, or, it may be, to deviate under conditions 

 from a given route, and to quiver when excited, and thus 

 to betray a consciousness of its own which, before it was 

 severed, was subordinated to the consciousness of the 

 whole star-fish. By degrees this colonial consciousness 

 confiscates for its benefit all the particular ones. 



The author maintains that consciousness is not like a 

 central point from which alone feelings radiate and to 

 which they all arrive, but that it is a complexus of 

 separate phenomena, each of a particular class, bound up 

 with certain unknown conditions of the brain, existing 

 only when they exist, lacking when they disappear. 

 Hence the sum of the states of consciousness in man is ver)' 

 inferior to the sum of all his nervous actions. Conscious 

 personality is only an abstract of the vast amount of 

 work that takes place in the nervous centres. Its basis 

 is formed by the diffused bodily sensations which, being 

 elementary causes, serve as a warp upon which is woven 

 some gorgeous pattern of tapestry that corresponds to 

 the higher feelings. The general consciousness of the 

 organism serves as the support of all the rest, and 

 forms, in the author's opinion, the real basis of conscious 

 personality. 



Personal identity is an unsatisfactory phrase. A man 

 feels to be the same in his ego at difterent periods, be- 

 cause the great majority of his bodily feelings continue 

 the same, owing to his structural sameness. The so- 

 called identity is due to the large preponderance of un- 

 changing elements, which characterise a healthy state ; 

 but in disease this habitual predominance may fail either 

 wholly or temporarily, leading in the one case to a sense 

 of a complete change of personality, in the other to that 

 of multiple and alternating personalities. A few but 

 adequate number of specimen cases are given. A some- 

 what comic instance is that by Hack Tuke, of a patient 

 who had lost his ego (that is the one which was familiar 

 to him), and was in the habit of searching for himself 

 under his bed. {Cf. the speech of Saturn, " Search Thea, 

 search . . ." in Keats' "Hyperion.") 



The rather common cases in which a man believes 

 himself to have become changed into a new person, 

 are considered by the author to be mostly superficial ; 

 that is, to be due to local rather than to general disorder. 

 1 myself witnessed a case which showed that the 

 imagined personality was not well sustained. It was at 

 a lunatic asylum, where I went accompanied by a 

 photographer to take specimens for composite photo- 

 graphy. He mounted his camera in a ward, and a batch 

 of patients were brought up. One of them was duly 

 placed in front of the camera, the others were led to a 

 bench behind the operator to wait their turn. It hap- 

 pened that one of these had the mania that he was a great 

 commander, let us say, Alexander the Great, and he 

 chafed internally at not having had precedence. When 

 my photographers head was under the dark cloth, and 

 his body in the attitude appropriate to the occasion, 

 Alexander the Great could restrain himself no longer, but 

 nipped the projecting rotundity of the poor man's hinder 

 end with his teeth. I abstain from dwelling on the 

 tableau, or on the care with which the smarting photo- 

 gra])her, in his further operations, squeezed himself into a 

 corner that guarded his rear. The point is this, that a 

 man who was thoroughly pervaded with tlie idea of being 



