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Insane patients frequently attribute to others the sounds. they utter themselves, and complain of being disturbed by their cries. Others are victims of compelling "voices" which seem to come from without. Still others lose the reference for their own physical needs. A case is reported of an old man whose faculties were extremely enfeebled, and who had the habit of constantly imputing his own sensations to the people who surrounded him. "Thus he would say to his keeper and the assistants that he was sure they were hungry or thirsty. He was subject to violent fits of coughing. After each paroxysm he would resume the thread of his conversation, but only after having expressed in appropriate terms how sorry he was to perceive the sad state of his friends' health. "I am grieved," he would say, "to see you suffering from such a painful and exhausting cough." " 1

It will have been noted that I have said nothing about "double personality" or "multiple personality." The reason is that they do not constitute separate categories of the variable self. Reference to what has been already said repeatedly about the multifarious potential selves which constitute our personality or character, and another glance at diagram A will sufficiently explain double personality. It will thus appear only as a special variation of the general case. The 'double' is simply one of the many other possible selves which has attained a considerable degree of coherence and, as it were, remains suspended in the subconscious until a favorable somatic variation enables it to pop into the place of the reigning self. Another organic revolution will in turn hurl it from the throne. The anesthesia existing between the rival personalities need not detain us here as it has no particular bearing on the general process.2

1 Cited from Hunter by Ribot, p. 132; for other cases from French sources see ibid., 127-31.

2 The case of Rev. T. C. Hanna, described by Sidis and Goodhart in their Multiple Personality, pp. 81-226, illustrates many of the points brought out

Another interesting phase of this problem suggests itself, but cannot here be followed up. Put into the form of a question it is this: Would multiple personality in any way account for the curious explanations which primitive men offer for changes in personality? Can it be that our minds may split themselves up into, say, critical, credulous, alert, passive personalities, corresponding to some lines of cleavage as yet undiscovered? Would such a theory account for the "water-tight compartments" which some men are accused of having set up in their minds? There is a strong temptation at this point to loose rein and canter over into the field of metaphysics, for it has been suggested that such a cleavage in the Infinite Personality might account for the problem of evil.

What after all is the 'identity of the ego'? It is simply a question of quantity, of potential rather than actual unity or identity. "Identity persists so long as the sum of the states that remain relatively fixed is greater than the sum of the states that are added to or detached from this stable group." Am I one person, then, or many? Am I in my essential nature under the despotism of a single self? Or, at the other antipode, am I the victim of the most exaggerated sort of anarchy and mobocracy? Or is my mental life a combination of the two into a well-balanced limited monarchy? The latter metaphor seems to represent the relation of the self to the entire content of the mind as nearly as a phase of life lends itself to a symbol of language.

in this chapter organic unity, functional dissociation, struggle between rival selves, sudden alternations between selves; it also illustrates with startling clearness the lack of dualism in primitive minds: see particularly p. 116. Boodin (Am. Jour. Sociol. 19: 22) observes: "What the pathological cases bring out is that normally the so-called individual self is in reality a colony of selves, an integration of systems of tendencies, fusing more or less into a common field and to a greater or less extent dominated by a common purpose."

1 Ribot, l. c., 28.

But whatever the identity or unity of the ego is, the problem, or situation, and our response to it are the means by which identity and unity are achieved or conferred. A certain constancy of situations, problems, needs (e.g. food or sex) begets certain pretty uniform responses. This uniformity of response when consciously felt constitutes our habitual selves. Thus habit or some dominant idea forms what we have sometimes called a 'nodule of selfhood.' Psychologically this means that personality involves some sort of psychic tension the lowering of which dissolves the unity of personality. Practically this tension may be conceived of as purpose or motive.

What do we extract, then, as the net results of psychology for our discussion of the Self in human nature? In the first place, we are any number of possible personalities or selves. Our selves are constantly changing. To recall a single example, puberty completely reorientates our selves. Our self is at any given moment only a sort of organic coalition, a tacit working unity. The study of normal and pathologic minds among our own people, and the comparative study of tribal mentality agree in the suggestion that "the logical unity of the thinking subject, which is taken for granted by the majority of philosophers, is rather a desideratum than a fact." There is in all normal individuals a certain basis in the somatic consciousness for a persistent sense of the self. But this of itself is manifestly insufficient to yield that habitual coherence of the personality necessary to confront society and the world with equanimity. For a man may lose his arms or legs, or other members, without any abridgment of his sense of self. Furthermore, recent developments in mental therapeutics and hypnotism prove that what we might call the 'suggested self' can dominate and change bodily sensations; hence, as it were, recreate somatic consciousness according to a pattern suggested

either from without or within. The real basis for the solidarity and permanence of the core or nodule of selfhood appears to lie in uniform reactions upon certain situations. These situations or problems are not mere food questions, belly problems. Responses to such situations yield only a general or vegetative sense of self and not the highly specialized self of human nature. (Apparently social situations and problems alone could develop such a self. And the reason, in psychological terms, is that this idea of the self as a member of a coherent group becomes a dominant and unifying idea in all normal persons. It is the social self, then, that is the predominant self (at least for the practical administrator), and it is participation in the give-and-take of social life that unifies consciousness into selfhood.

This principle suggests a variety of fascinating problems. Are men, as Lombroso thought, by nature either conservative or progressive? Are we the blind victims of blind Fate - Heredity? Is it all a question of temperament or physiology? Do I get my notion of myself as a conservative from my grandfather, from my mother's body, or from my actual experiences? Can the leopard not change his spots? Are my radical spots dyed in or am I a chameleon? Am I born with a rigid "set" to my mind, and therefore to my self, or do I acquire my "set" from social contacts and experiences? If social activity unifies our consciousness into a coherent and permanent sense of the social self, will a certain type of activity produce a certain typical sense of self? Will, for example, coöperative activity in home or schoolroom develop a self that thinks of itself as a coöperator? Such are the problems which the psychological interpretation of the self raises but does not answer. Sociology, or perhaps better, social psychology alone seems in a position to answer them.

CHAPTER IV

SELF AS A SOCIAL PRODUCT

"No man can take a walk without bringing home an influence on his eternity." (Jean Paul)

"Nothing can injure a man who is a member of a community which does not injure the community." (Marcus Aurelius)

THE mind of the new-born child is not a tabula rasa as the empiric psychologists were prone to believe. But, in truth, so little is written thereon, the ink so pale, the characters so fragmentary, that the tabula, for any purposes of life, is little better than some torn and faded manuscript unless the characters be brought out, the writing completed. What, in the case of the child's mind, is this bringer-out or completer of the writing? Speaking popularly it is experience; speaking scientifically it is social heredity. But what is social heredity? It is the process by which the stock of incomplete instincts and tendencies secured to the individual by natural selection is completed, strengthened, shaped, and matured. In other words, it is the process by which the individual who arrives into the world with only a very incomplete kit of rude life-tools is enabled to fill up his kit with sharp tools which he knows how to use, and to go on his way equipped in the struggle for life. Briefly, it is education conceived in its widest sense. It is a social process, the social process. This is what we mean when we say that the human mind is a social product.

But if this is true of the mind as a whole, it is, if possible,

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