IT is impossible not to lay down this work on
what Dr. Sidia and Dr. Goodhart are pleased to call "Multiple Personality" without the feeling that, whatever its positive merits may be, the extraordinary jargon in which it is written and the painful dogmatism of its authors go far to obscure those merits. The mediaeval tradition that it is necessary to drape scientific thought and investigation in words abominable alike to eye, ear, and mind dies hard, and it especially lingers in those obscure regions of investigation where physical and meta- physical thought meet. The use of a jargon of this type arouses suspicion. Jargon has no necessary place in science. In a book of such severity of thought as Mr. Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics there are not a dozen words that a well-educated English reader would not understand. In the book before us such words occur by the hundred, though the volume does not contain a single passage which demands any- thing that can be called severe mental exertion. It is true that in new spheres of thought new words are sometimes • (1) Multiple Personality : an Experimental Investigation into the Nature of Human Individuality. By Boris Sidle, M.A., Ph.D. (Harvard), and Simon P. Goodhart, Ph.D. (Yale), M.D. London : Sidney Appleton. [10s. 85. uet.1 —(2) Pragnwnts in Philosophy and Science. By ja111138 Mark Baldwin, Ph.D. (Princetown), Hon. D.Sc. (Oxford). London : J. C. Nimmo and Co. [10e. ttd.]
—(3) Experimental Psychology and its Bearing upon Culture. By G. M. Stratton. M.A. (Yale), Ph.D. (Leipzig). London Macmillan and Co. [8e. 6d. net.
needed, and Mr. Frederic Myers in his work on Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death has shown the world how this can be done without falling into the grievous literary faults that mar this book. It is interesting to com- pare the two works, for here much that is valuable is darkened by obscurity of style and thought, while Mr. Myers almost persuaded the world to accept his theories by the charm of his style.
This work and that of Mr. Myers have, however, a definite relationship which we must consider here. Mr. Myers en- deavoured to evolve from a mass of incoherent, and, as we believe, frequently fraudulent, phenomena the doctrine of an ultimate ego which, while it contains all sorts of phases of consciousness, is yet an ego, surviving all earthly changes, including "the crowning disintegration of bodily death.". In reviewing Mr. Myers's book (Spectator, March 7th, 1903) we stated, as we now state again, that we accepted this position as a matter of faith, but that its physical demonstration seemed to us, as it still seems, unattained, and probably un- attainable. The most curious must, we fear, abide their seventy years in patience. We may, however, add now what it was not necessary for the purposes of that review to add then; namely, that Mr. Myers's elaborate examination of man's personality through its various phases—its normal condition, the abnormal manifestation of genius, the phases of sleep, of somnambulism, hypnotism, trance, ecstasy, and hallucination, and finally (if at all) telepathy—nowhere creates doubt as to the existence of an ultimate ego or personality. In this life the physical or psychological phenomena seem to us to be everywhere manifestations of an indivisible ego. We go with Mr. Myers as far as this : we are unconvinced by his alleged spiritual phenomena, but we think it is most reasonable to believe that the ego which seems so indivisible must survive "the crowning disintegration of bodily death," as well as the bodily changes by which, in a sense, we may be said to die every hour. It was, therefore, with interest that we carefully read this work on "Multiple Personality." If Dr. Sidle and Dr. Goodhart have actually established the fact of multiple personalities in one human frame, it is difficult to see how the hope of immortality, as the Christian, at any rate, under- stands that word, can be retained. We may as well say at once that, in our opinion, no such fact is established, and that the interesting phenomena here investigated have no relation to the fundamental problem of personal immortality.
Dr. Sidis starts with the proposition that "the individual is an aggregate of systems of simpler individuals." • Here, at the very outset, the true psychological idea is missed. Any individual is, no doubt, an aggregate, but it is such an aggre- gate that if it loses any part of its aggregation it ceases to be the individual in question. Experimental psychology consists in an investigation of the parts that form the aggre- gate without disturbing the aggregation. The notion of an individual is simple, its physical manifestation is complex. The notion and the manifestation can only represent an equality as between themselves if the notion can be made complex. In the case of an individual who is self-conscious, • in order to demonstrate an equality between the notion and the manifestation it is necessary to inquire into the nature of the real ego, which is neither the ego of self-consciousness (namely, the notion of self), nor the manifested ego of which self-consciousness is conscious. The true personality is neither the notion of self nor the phenomenal manifestation of self, but is something possessing a multiplicity of con- sciousness which can abolish any contradiction between the former two. This is Herbart's position, and as Professor Baldwin says in his "Postulates of Physiological Psychology" —perhaps one of the most brilliant chapters in his Fragments —" whatever we may think of this metaphysic, we see in Herbart's idea of the interaction of representations or images, considered as forces, a new conception of internal facts." In truth, the value of the new psychology is that it is show. ing us the way by which eventually we shall be able in a measure to look into the structure of the absolute personality without thereby destroying it. The mystery of personality is akin to that of life. We can analyse the life-germ, but cannot reconstruct it. We shall hope one day to analyse, by weighing subjective phenomena, the germ of personality, though we shall never be able to reconstruct it. But mental biology, though the final mystery will be shrouded, will not be less valuable than the biology of physical form. It is
therefore useful to record cases such as that of Mr. Thomas Carson Hanna in the elaborate detail set forth by Dr. Sidis and Dr. Goodhart.
Mr. Hanna was born in 1872. His ancestry shows no flaws, either physical or mental, and on attaining manhood he proved to be a man of sound constitution with an able but normal mind in which religious conviction was deeply planted at an early age. He became in due course a Baptist minister.
On the evening of April 15th, 1897, he was driving, and in an attempt to alight "in order to adjust the harness, lost his footing and fell to the ground bead foremost." He was picked up unconscious and for two hours lay as if dead. "Large doses of strychnine were hypodermically injected," and con- sciousness—apparently a new consciousness—was at length restored. The blow on the head, combined with the effect of the strychnine, had given to the world a Mr. Hanna to whom the past was a blank, to whom the visible world was something absolutely new, who could do none of the things, mental or physical, which he had learnt to do in the quarter of a century that he had lived, who had not even the new-born baby's instinctive power of eating and seeking food. In fact, at seven o'clock in the evening of April 15th, 1897, Mr. Hanna was a normal American citizen, and at ten o'clock he was mentally disconnected from the physical universe, including his own physical frame. He was, however, conscious, and when the first immensely difficult step of connecting the dis- connected brain with outward facts was overcome—the connecting the sensation of hunger with the necessity of food—the patient rapidly recovered. The brain at once
reasserted its power. Within four weeks Mr. Hanna was again able to read, write, and think with, if anything, an in- creased power. His capacity for music was indeed deepened, and he learnt in a few hours, as many musical or semi-musical people do, to play the banjo. Everything was re-learnt, not revived. His handwriting, for instance, was quite changed. The events and knowledge of the period before April 15th were apparently obliterated. His memory stopped with that date. The past was, nevertheless, not really dead. Some weeks after the accident of April 15th he had a second accident. He fell from his horse and injured his spine. We are told that this had no "psychic effect." In fact, however, after this second accident he began to have strange dreams that troubled him. He dreamt, indeed, about his previous life, and he was made to realise this. The old life gradually pushed its way into his present life. He had been a Hebrew scholar, and one day, though he had not learnt Hebrew anew, on hearing a sentence read he exclaimed "I remember !" and completed it. Again, an old familiar song was sung to him, and though he could not recall it, the sound recalled to his mind persons who had sung it to him three years before. In fine, the records of the past were intact, and gradually and naturally they became daily more imperative as his physical condition approached normality. At last the stage was reached when he would live in this past life altogether for a period, and then would relapse into the "post April 15" life. What in this book is called "an alternation of personality" took place, becoming appar- ently more and more rapid. There was something terribly weird about such a mental condition, and it is perhaps not surprising that it gave the idea of a double personality. But it does not appear to us surprising. The mind, as the result of two severe accidents to the head and spine and the remedies applied, was in a condition of unstable equilibrium. The machinery of memory in its efforts to attain a condition of stability first rested in the "pre April 15" stage, then in the "post April 15" stage, but neither stage, of course, could give equilibrium. So long as life lasted the equilibrium would be sought, and no doubt the drugs and other stimuli continually applied by the doctors hastened the moment when it was found. The struggle for the two memories to unite was a severe one, involving, as was to be expected, curious physiological phenomena, and perhaps with the buzz of foolish talk about multiple personalities around him, did really induce the unhappy patient to wonder "which of the two lives I should reject" The final moment at length came, and after a fierce physical struggle the two memories united.
This very fact seems to us in itself to condemn as mere pseudo-science the conception of dual or multiple personalities, —many other instances of which are alleged in this book. What we do learn is that there is now opening for investi-
gation a region of mental physics which will tell us much about real personality. Books like that of Dr. Stratton on Experimental Psychology and its Bearing upon Culture place this science on a sound basis. From an experimental basis we shall be able to obtain a knowledge of the mind, and its conscious and unconscious working, which will throw light in two directions,—upward on the personality that inspires the body, downward on the body that is the temple of the soul. Then perhaps we shall slowly, in ages yet far away, come to learn something of the mystery that neither Darwin nor Weismann can solve,—how it is that a germ can not only build up the temple, but bring into it the personality, with its infinite possibilities. That is the final mystery : the relation- ship of life and personality. As Dr. Stratton finely says, "in the end it will be clear that man can never be understood until he is regarded not simply as a physical fact, not merely as a group of psychological phenomena, but as a centre and source of activities—as an underlying reality." To such a reality we may well believe that death is "a period of adjust- ment, when there comes into effect new laws, both inner and outer, that are better suited to the altered wants of the person." In fact, science and philosophy can no longer lay an embargo on the immortality of man.
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