THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 13 



of us nevertheless appears to himself a single entity, a unity 

 experiencing and acting as one individual. In a way the more far- 

 reaching and many-sided the reactions of which a mind is capable 

 the more need, as well as the more scope, for their consolidation to 

 one. True, each one of us is in some sense not one self, but a multiple 

 system of selves. Yet how closely those selves are united and integrated 

 to one personality. Even in those extremes of so-called double per- 

 sonality one of their mystifying features is that the individual seems 

 to himself at any one time wholly either this personality or that, never 

 the two commingled. The view that regards hysteria as a mental 

 dissociation illustrates the integrative trend of the total healthy mind. 

 Circumstances can stress in the individual some perhaps lower instinc- 

 tive tendency that conflicts with what may be termed his normal per- 

 sonality. This latter, to master the conflicting trend, can judge it in 

 relation to his main self's general ethical ideals and duties to self and 

 the community. Thus intellectualising it, he can destroy it or con- 

 sciously subordinate it to some aim in harmony with the rest of his 

 personality. By so doing there is gain in power of will and in personal 

 coherence of the individual. But if the morbid situation be too strong 

 or the mental self too weak, instead of thus assimilating the contentious 

 element the mind may shun and, so to say, endeavour to ignore it. 

 That way lies danger. The discordant factor escaped from the sway 

 of the conscious mind produces stress and strain of the conscious self ; 

 hence, to use customary terminology, dissociation of the self sets in, 

 bringing in its train those disabilities., mental or nervous or both, 

 which characterise the sufferer from hysteria. The normal action of the 

 mind is to make up from its components one unified personality. 

 When we remember the manifold complexity of composition of the 

 lumuui individual, can we observe a greater instance of solidarity of 

 working of an organism than that presented by the human individual 

 intent and concentrated, as the phrase goes, upon some higher act of 

 strenuous will? Physiologically the supreme development of the 

 brain, psychologically the mental powers attaching thereto, seem to 

 represent from the biological standpoint the very culmination of the 

 integration of the animal organism. 



The mental attributes of the nervous system would be, then, the 

 coping-stone of the construction of the individual. Surveyed in their 

 broad biological aspect, we see them carrying integration even further 

 still. They do not stop at the individual ; they proceed beyond the 

 individual ; tliey integrate from individuals t-ommunities. Wiien we re- 

 view, as far as we can judge it, the distribution of mind within the range 

 of animal forms, we meet two peaks of its development — one in insect 

 life, the other in the vertebrate, with its acme finally in man. True, 

 in the insect the type of mind is not rationnl but instinctive, whereas 



