"WHAT IS THE MEANING OF HUMAN PERSONALITY ? 3 9 
molecules arranged in patterns somewhat analogous to those of 
steel-filings under the influences of a magnet, but that in some- 
way the direction of the forces — or vibrations — may he changed 
in them. The pattern will then he different, and the position 
of supposed organs altered. If this be true, the search should 
not he for organs, but for centres of action, which in healthy 
brains may have fixed positions. 
Leaving this and other guesses for what they are worth, we 
must admit that personality as we know it is a result of organi- 
sation, and that a molecular change, or a variation in the rate, 
or character, of those chemical actions and decompositions that 
are the invariable physical antecedents of thought, sensation, or 
volition, can instantly convert one personality into another, in 
which that sense of continuity which links the personality of 
yesterday with that of to-day may be wholly or partially des- 
troyed. Thus we may see realised something like Circe’s magical 
transformation of men into beasts, or a new man created sur- 
passing the old. 
Many will be startled at the notion of their personality being 
intermittent, not continuous ; but if it consists in a series of 
impressions converted into consciousness, with the memory’s 
links tying them together, the sense of the continuity of our 
existence, which we all feel, must be like the sensation of a 
continuous sound produced by successive beats at small inter- 
vals, or of continuous light from rapidly recurring impressions. 
If our modes of consciousness enabled us to take note of 
infinitesimally minute time intervals, and of infinitesimally 
minute molecular changes, each second would be crowded with 
a corresponding infinity of impressions, and a personality last- 
ing a few minutes would be more amply filled with incidents 
and recollections than a human life of the longest term of years. 
If, with our present limitations of power to perceive minute 
time intervals, we were able to notice the molecular changes 
that took place between one pulsation of personal consciousness 
and another, we should suppose that nature, contrary to the old 
adage, did act by jumps. If a being could exist with enor- 
mously slower pulsations of conscious existence, these jumps would 
seem enormous, and, in an extreme case of such a supposition, 
the world that existed in one period might be extinguished and 
rearranged before another came on. The whole philosophy of 
such a being would differ from ours. 
But if intermittence and change be the condition of our 
lives, is there nothing permanent to which we can cling ? 
Physical Science has to do, in its present stage, only with 
facts belonging to the regions of incessant change ; but man 
must, from his constitution, form an ideal of the continuous and 
the enduring towards which he aspires, and in which, in spite 
of doubts, he in the long run believes. 
