THE 8TREAM OF THOUGHT. 227 



from anything to be found in the mental procession. But if 

 that procession be itself the very ' original ' of the notion of 

 personality, to personify it cannot possibly be wrong. It is 

 already personified. There are no marks of personality to 

 be gathered aliunde, and then found lacking in the train of 

 thought. It has them all already ; so that to whatever 

 farther analysis we may subject that form of personal self- 

 hood under which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain, 

 true that the thoughts which psychology studies do contin- 

 ually tend to appear as parts of personal selves. 



I say 'tend to appear' rather than 'appear,' on account 

 of those facts of sub- conscious jDersonality, automatic writ- 

 ing, etc., of which we studied a few in the last chapter. 

 The buried feelings and thoughts proved now to exist in 

 hysterical anaesthetics, in recipients of post-hypnotic sug- 

 gestion, etc., themselves are parts of secondary personal 

 selves. These selves are for the most part very stupid and 

 contracted, and are cut off at ordinary times from commu- 

 nication with the regular and normal self of the individual ; 

 but still they form conscious unities, have continuous mem- 

 ories, speak, write, invent distinct names for themselves, or 

 adopt names that are suggested ; and, in short, are entirely 

 worthy of that title of secondary personalities which is now 

 commonly given them. According to M. Janet these second- 

 ary personalities are always abnormal, and result from the 

 splitting of what ought to be a single complete self into two 

 parts, of which one lurks in the background whilst the other 

 appears on the surface as the only self the man or woman 

 has. For our present purpose it is unimportant whether 

 this account of the origin of secondary selves is applicable 

 to all possible cases of them or not, for it certainly is true 

 of a large number of them. Now although the size of a 

 secondary self thus formed will depend on the number of 

 thoughts that are thus split-off from the main conscious- 

 ness, the form of it tends to personality, and the later 

 thoughts pertaining to it remember the earlier ones and 

 adopt them as their own. M. Janet caught the actual mo- 

 ment of inspissation (so to speak) of one of these secondary 

 personalities in his anaesthetic somnambulist Lucie. He 

 found that when this young woman's attention was absorbed 



