Part 20 (2/2)

The whole individual character is there inscribed, with its active and passive aptitudes, its syenius, its talent or its stupidity, its virtues and its vices, its torpor or its activity”[52]

[52] Ribot's ”Les Maladies de la Personalite” Quoted from F W H Myers's translation in his ”Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death,” vol i, p 10

Or, as the eist, Alfred Binet, declares:

”We have long been accustomed by habits of speech, fictions of law, and also by the results of introspection, to consider each person as constituting an indivisible unity Actual researches utterly modify this current notion It seeo be real, a quite different definition should be applied to it

It is not a single entity; for, if it were, one could not understand how in certain circu a phenos to nor that can be divided must consist of several parts Should a personality be able to become double or triple, this would be proof that it is co of, and a resultant from, several elements”[53]

[53] ”Les Alterations de la Personnalite,” p 316

But the brain, which Ribot identifies with the personality, is awith the body Does it follow that the self perishes with bodily death? Is it really without an abiding, indwelling principle superior to, and independent of, the physical organism--in short, a soul--that would enable it to survive the final catastrophe of earthly existence? Is man soulless? Does death end personality?

Aye, those who hold with Ribot would reply To speak of a soul is, in their view of the case, sheere of the molecules or ions of our brainof this chapter, I stated that, of all the labors of the ators of the nature of man, none would seem to be so irreparably destructive as the blows they have dealt at the traditional conception of human personality

Yet, e probe a little deeper, it will be found that the dae is not so irreparable as would at first appear; nay, it will even be found that by their searching inquiries, the advocates of the brain-stuff theory have unwittingly provided stronger reasons than were at any previous ti both on the actuality of the soul and the fundao

Undeniably, it is necessary to modify the old conception in some important respects After the discoveries that have beeneffects of natural and artificially induced sleep, of disease, of sudden frights, of profound es, etc, it is idle to pretend that unity and continuity are distinctive characteristics of the ordinary self of waking life So far as that self is concerned, its instability and divisibility are now plainly evident

What, however, if it can be shown that, equally with the secondary selves that may and so often do replace it, the prier self--a self which persists unchanged beneath all the mutations of spontaneous and experimental occurrence? In that case it will at once becoed completely, and that we are back to the traditional, the intuitive, the ”cole difference that the ter broader and nobler than e lieable self of ordinary consciousness

And it is precisely to such a view of the self that the discoveries of the ators, when closely scrutinized, irresistibly impel us If, I repeat, they have shown that e usually look upon as the self is liable to sudden extinction, they have likewise brought to light abundant evidence to prove that there is none the less an abiding self, a self not doanisanism

To be sure, it must be said that, as yet, comparatively few of those to e this evidence are prepared to admit that such is the ultimate outcome of their efforts All the sa, but rendering logically necessary, the hypothesis of a continuous, unitary ego, inclusive of, and superior to, all changing selves of outwardpowers thus far little utilized; but, under certain conditions, utilizable for our material, intellectual, and moral betterment

I have, in fact, in the previous chapters presentedthis view[54] All the phenomena of subconscious mental action--as variously exhibited in telepathy, crystal vision, auto, the cure of disease by wholly mental means--point unmistakably, I am persuaded, to the existence of a superior self to which the ordinary self of everyday life stands in much the same relation as does the secondary self of a hysterical patient to the ordinary, normal self of a healthy person

[54] See also my book, ”The Riddle of Personality,”

especially pp 69-70, 159-162

Not all the faculties of the larger self--for instance, the faculty involved in telepathic action--seem to be adapted for ready eue, of course, for a future state in which, freed fro limitations of the body, such faculties will have full s of the psychopathologists indicate plainly, so these hidden powers are amply available for use here and now, and may be so employed as to enable the self of ordinary consciousness to becoration, to ward off and conquer disease, to developproble to most of us at present