389 
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF HUMAN 
PERSONALITY? 
By HENRY J. SLACK, F.G.S., Sec. R.M.S. 
W HAT constitutes human personality? It is a kind of 
consciousness, complex in character. Memory is con- 
cerned in it, or we should not associate the past sufficiently 
with the present, or with the closely recent, to supply the means 
of forming the conception of continuity. A mere reproduction 
by memory of the image of the past would not be sufficient to 
aid us in this matter ; for, as Dr. Carpenter observes, “ there 
must be a recognition of the reproduced state of consciousness 
as one which has been formerly experienced ; and this involves 
a distinct mental state, which has been termed the consciousness 
of agreement.’ Without this recognition we should live in the 
present alone.” 
Thus a consciousness of existing now combined with this 
“ consciousness of agreement,” as relates to the past conditions 
which memory recalls, are necessary to the idea, or sensation of 
personality, as it exists in man unimpaired by disease. A lower 
kind of personality might comprehend present existence only ; 
but if a creature so constituted were able to profit by the 
results of experience, it would be as automatically as if it were 
a machine constructed to modify its action after receiving 
certain impulses. It would not be capable of human experience , 
that is of experience in the sense in which the word is usually 
employed to designate an impression that was once a subject of 
consciousness and its conscious recollection. 
Dugald Stewart remarked that “ we cannot properly be said 
to b& conscious of our existence, our knowledge of this fact 
being necessarily posterior in the order of time to the conscious- 
ness of those sensations by which it is suggested.” The time 
occupied in the transmission of an impression from, say a finger, 
with its sense of touch, to the sensorium, and its conversion 
into a sensation of resistance, hardness, softness, smoothness, or 
roughness, is a minute fraction of a second. Nerve action, like 
