Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/432

416 steps we are led to the pivotal idea through a radius of reasonings, from the simpler to the more complex forms constituting the human personality. Through this process the attempt is apparent to keep in a measure abreast of modern scientific research, and supply a truer interpretation of the meaning of human life. This, in turn, necessarily involves an ethical significance, not so much aimed at by the author as connoted by the reader in his perusal. Throughout the whole field of view selected, suggestions occur which mark a decided modification in, if not an entire elimination of, the popularly accepted idea of man's individual existence in duo. Withal, facts and ideas are so grouped as not to identify polemics with the object to be attained.

Among the more familiar doctrines treated of is that the real relations of things are not necessarily elucidated by, nor do they at all times express, their apparent conditions, more particularly so in the domain of natural phenomena. The belief in the homogeneity of man's personality received its primal shock and break when the differentiation of body and soul became an authorized concept in the past. Then, for the first, we discover a distinct personality expressed as attaching to the two entities. Organism and spirit had their distinguishing features and their separate functions, whether in union or disjoined. As with the mental attributes and moral affinities, any one of which might undergo change or be absolutely lost—as in numerous cases of insanity—so, though not in so marked a degree, a process distinct in character, supervenes the necessary changes which accompany growth outputs in the human organism, either marking secedenceprecedence [sic] to senility, or the progressive steps to maturity. The human system, therefore, is no longer the self-contained individual, but each group of living activities within it has its special range of duties and relations, even down to the germ with its individualized potencies, which we discover only narrowly removed from the plasma. Hence we find in the human organic co-ordination, "not only the ruling and working subpersonalities of an individual character," but "the associate actions of combined and representative personalities the same as in a state; and, as in a state one personality may be attached to another as a check, so diverse organic attributes check other organic attributes and regulate the general equipoise by their varied interactions. As with the organic, so with the mental attributes."

Starting with the assumption that coordination, or growth combination, constitutes the governing principle of the human personality differentiated under distinct subpersonalities, the author proceeds to show that these latter in their content are but aggregates of a still lower class of differentiations. From the nomad to the man, this principle characterizes all growths. Further, while life exists these organic co-ordinations may separate or blend, and tissues are found to degenerate or advance, to be repellent or to severally work in unison. In each and every occurring and recurring complexity, however, the earlier differentiations which marked individual changes are never wholly forfeited; in brief, the evolutionary principle remains intact.

In Book I of the first volume we have inclusive the nature and origin of the human personality, the phylogenic stages of growth, the phylogenic sexual forms, and the co-ordination of faculties and functions. The forms of mental and organic co-ordination are covered by the second book under three classes and several chapters, all of which are written with a succinctness that sensibly diminishes the reader's labor, and include under "normal forms of co-ordination" the active wakeful state, quiescent repose, the state of reverie, somnambulism, and the induced mental and physical states. We gather from the "forms of co-ordinate variation" the law of variability in human personality, variations resulting from transference and variations through growth. From a review of the abnormal discordinate states, including physical abnormals and discordinatious mental and organic, we are introduced to the second volume. This deals mainly with reversions to the lower civilized states, the semicivilized and barbaric states, the state of savages, and finally animal consciousness. Here the third and last book induces reflection on the internal and external relations of man, the modes of self-government in the co-ordinate personality, which betimes becomes alternate and multiple, and the power of self and external suggestion. In a lucid appendix,