390 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
electrical action, appears to consist in pulsations, and the 'per- 
sonality of the supposed simpler creature with the lower person- 
ality would consist in intermittent productions of consciousness. 
But, if personality is a matter of consciousness, and is thus 
distinguished from the mere individual or distinct existence be- 
longing to minerals, such a being would be, and not be, a person, 
in alternations, like the beats of a clock. The unconscious 
intervals might be long or short ; the sensation would be the 
same. It is conceivable that beings might exist whose pulsa- 
tions of consciousness and personality varied from millionths of 
a second to millions of years. If able to think, and satisfied 
with Descartes’ maxim, cogito ergo sum — “I think therefore 
I am ” — one such would be certified of its existence through 
either alternating millionths of a second or millions of years. 
Dr. Carpenter’s view of personality involves a series of 
nervous actions, each of which may be regarded as pulsations ; 
and we have no reason to affirm that the rate of our nerve 
action, or pulsation, is the only one that can answer the purpose 
of producing a sense of personality bearing analogy to our own. 
We set our clocks by the beats of seconds; but if we lived 
on the sun, and had sight of the central sun round which he is 
supposed to move and carry his attendant worlds in millions of 
years, we might substitute centuries for seconds as our time 
units, and perhaps could do well with nerve pulsations propor- 
tionably long in their intermittent intervals. At each beat we 
should be persons, in the intervals no persons; but memory 
and consciousness would tie together the periods of personality, 
and those of no personality could be known only as inferences 
which knowledge might enable us to draw. 
If personality, such as Dr. Carpenter defines it,, could exist 
in all the stages of insect life — egg, grub, chrysalis, butterfly — 
the sense of continuity would be handed on through quite 
different states of existence. In the case of man, his healthiest 
normal personality runs through periods in which he develops, 
or changes, within limits that are much narrower, and which 
cause him to retain one character, or nature, throughout. In 
many cases of insanity, however, the change of character is so 
great that the afflicted person may be said to have become some 
one else. “A man beside himself” is a well-known phrase, 
intimating the sort of dual being that passion, or disease, or 
narcotics, may make of what should be an orderly uniform 
being. 
The perceptive, the intellectual, and the moral faculties, are 
all subject to modification from cerebral disturbance, or disease. 
In some cases the sufferer is conscious of his errors, or delusions ; 
and a well-known physician, having the care of the insane, 
informs the writer that hopes and prospects of cure are then 
