who take the trouble to investigate, discover more wonderful things every day, and they realize that we have here a whole universe of knowledge, to which we have as yet barely opened the doors. Consider, for example, the facts which we are acquiring on the subject of personality and what it means. You would say, perhaps, that if there is anything you know positively, it is that you are one person, and have never been anybody else, and that your body belongs to you, and that nobody else ever has used or ever can use it. But what would you say if I told you that tomorrow "you" might cease to be, and somebody else might be in possession of your body, walking it around and wearing its clothes and spending its money? What if I were to tell you that there might be in "you," or in your body, half a dozen different personalities which you have never known or dreamed of, and that tomorrow there might break out a war between them and "you," as to which of the half dozen people should hear with your ears and speak with your tongue and walk about with your clothes on? Unless you are familiar with the literature of multiple personality, you would surely say that this was unbelievable—quite as much so as a mathematical horse!
Let us begin with the case of the Reverend Ansel Bourne, who was many years ago a perfectly respectable clergyman in a Rhode Island town. One day he disappeared, and his family did not hear of him. A year or two later there was a store-keeper in a town in Pennsylvania, who suddenly came to himself as the Reverend Ansel Bourne, not knowing what he had been in the meantime, or how he came to be keeping a store. Under hypnotism it developed that he had in him two personalities, and his trance personality recollected all that had been happening in the meantime and told about it freely.
Or take the still more fascinating case of the young lady who is known in the literature of psychotherapy as Miss Beauchamp. Her story is told in a book, "The Dissociation of a Personality," by Dr. Morton Prince of Boston. Some thirty years ago Miss Beauchamp, a very conscientious and dignified young lady, became nervous and ill, and took to doing strange things, which were a source of shame and humiliation to her. Under hypnotism it was discovered to be a case of multiple personality. The other personality, who finally gave herself the name of Sally, was entirely different in character from Miss Beauchamp, being mischievous, vain, and primitive as a child. She conceived an intense dislike for Miss Beauchamp, whom she called by abusive names; at times when she could get possession of Miss Beauchamp's body, she delighted in playing humiliating tricks upon her enemy, spending her money, running her into debt, breaking her engagements, disgracing her before her friends. Sally was always well and Miss Beauchamp was always ill, and Sally would take the body, for which they fought for possession, and take it for long and exhausting walks, and leave it cold and miserable, lost and penniless, in the possession of Miss Beauchamp! And of course this made Miss Beauchamp more and more a wreck, and Sally took possession of more and more of her time. Sally knew everything that Miss Beauchamp did and thought, but Miss Beauchamp did not know about Sally. She only knew that there were gaps in her life, during which she did things she could not explain. And because she did not want her friends to think her insane, she would try to hide this dreadful condition of affairs; but Sally would spoil her plans by writing letters to her friends, and also by writing insulting letters for Miss Beauchamp to find when she took possession again.
Then one day, after several years of treatment, there appeared yet another personality, who knew nothing about Miss Beauchamp or Sally either, and only knew what Miss Beauchamp had known up to some years before. Miss Beauchamp had a college education, and wrote and spoke French; Sally knew no French, and tried in vain to learn it; the new personality did not have a college education at all. Nevertheless, after long experiment, the story of which is as fascinating as any novel you ever read, Dr. Prince discovered that this was the real Miss Beauchamp; the others were "split off" personalities. He traced the cause to a severe mental shock, and succeeded in the end in combining the first Miss Beauchamp with the last, and in suppressing the obstinate and wanton Sally. As you read this story, you watch him mentally murdering a human being; "Sally" clamors pitifully for life, but he condemns her to death, and relentlessly executes his sentence. It is a "movie" thriller with a happy ending, and I should think it would make disconcerting reading to persons who believe that each of us is one immortal soul, or "has" one immortal soul, and is responsible for it to a personal God.
There is never any end to the problems of these multiple personalities, and each case is a test of the judgment and ingenuity of the specialist. He will try to make one personality "stick," and will fail, and will have to accept another, or a combination of two. In one case, he found that he could not get the right personality to "stick" except under hypnosis, so he decided to leave the man in a mild state of trance, and the new personality lived all the rest of its life in that condition. If you wish to know more about this subject you can find books in any well-equipped library. I mention one, "The Riddle of Personality," by H. Addington Bruce, because it contains in the appendix an excellent list of the literature of the subconscious in all its many aspects.
There is another, and most fascinating method of exploring this underworld of the mind, and that is the study of dreams. Some fifteen years ago a psychotherapist in New York told me about the discoveries of a physician in Vienna, and gave me some pamphlets, written in very difficult and technical German. Since then this Professor Freud has been translated, and has become a fad, and the absurdities of his followers make one a little apologetic for him. But we do not give up Jesus because of the torturers and bigots who call themselves Christians, and in the same way we have no right to blame Freud for all the absurdities of the psychoanalysts.
Probably there never was a time in human history when there were not people who interpreted dreams, and you can still buy "dream books" for twenty-five cents, and learn that a white horse means that you are going to get a letter from your sweetheart tomorrow; then you can buy another dream book, telling you that a white horse means there is going to be a death in your family within the year. Naturally this prejudices thinking people against dream analysis; yet, dreams are facts, and every fact has its cause, and if you dream about a white horse, there must assuredly be some reason for your dreaming this particular thing. Of course we know that if you eat mince-pie and welsh-rabbit at midnight, you will dream about something terrible; but will it be snakes, or will it be a railroad wreck, or will it be white horses trampling over you? Obviously, it may be a million different unpleasant things; and what is it that picks out this or that from the infinite store of your memory, and brings it into the region of half-consciousness which we call the dream?
Professor Freud's discovery is in brief that the dream is a wish-fulfillment. Our instincts present to our consciousness a great mass of impulses and desires, and among these the consciousness selects what it pleases, and represses and refuses to recognize or to act upon the others. But maybe these decisions are not altogether satisfactory to the subconsciousness. The mind of the body is in rebellion against the mind—shall we say of reason, or shall we say of society? The mind of society, otherwise known as the moral law, says that you shall be a good little boy, and shall go to school and learn what you are told, and on Sunday go to church and sit very still through a long sermon; whereas, the body of a boy would rather be a savage, hunting birds' nests and scalping enemies and exploring magic caves full of precious jewels. So the subconsciousness of the boy, balked and miserable, awaits its time, and finds its satisfaction when the boy is asleep and his moral censor has relaxed its control.
This dream mind is not a logical and orderly thing like the conscious mind; it is not business-like and civilized, it does not deal in abstractions. It is far more interested in things than in words; it does not present us with formulas, but with pictures, and with stories of weird and wonderful happenings. It is like the mind of the race, which we study in legends and religions. It does not tell us that the sun is a mass of incandescent hydrogen gas, so and so many miles in diameter; it tells us that the sun is a cosmic hero who slays the black dragon of night. So the mind of our body presents us with innumerable pictures and symbols, exactly such as we find in poetry. There may be, and frequently is, dispute as to just what a poet meant by this or that particular image, but if we read all the work of any particular poet, we get a certain impression of that poet's individuality. If he is always talking about the perfume of women's hair and the gleam of the white flesh of nymphs in the thickets, we are not left in doubt as to what is wrong
