170 Human Personality. 



join and set up a communal life. By sentient contact 

 with each other a new, larger personality comes into ex- 

 istence, as if around a new axis of consciousness. Several 

 cell lives are thrown into one. The ionic relationship, or 

 reciprocity, suddenly, instantaneously changes. A new 

 sentient polarity is struck ; as if earth and moon came in 

 contact and a new center of gravity M'ere set up in the 

 contiguous masses. 



Personality' is not resident in any one prominent neuron, 

 or monarch cell, but in all the cells, consentient together. 

 There is no "king cell" ruling the others, in which per- 

 sonal identity centers, no sovereign " monad." This view 

 had its day and has been wholly discredited. No more is 

 the human intellect located at any one portion or particu- 

 lar tract of the brain, as for example, the corpus striatum ; 

 this notion, too, had its day and passed to the limbo of 

 similar contentions, made before the consentience of the 

 neurons was understood. Personality is a coherent blende 

 of the lives of all the neurons, dissoluble and terminable 

 in sleep, or from shock, or at death of the organism. 



This faculty or ability of the cell to unite its life with 

 other cells, surrendering that life to become, for the time, 

 part of a life greater than its own, has never received 

 much recognition, as yet. None the less, it is the key- 

 note of human personality ; and no adequate conception 

 of that personality, or soul, can be formed until it is 

 comprehended. 



