Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/247

227 THE STREAM OF TEOUOHT. 227 from anything to be found in the mental procession. But if that procession be itself the very ' original ' of the notion of personality, to personify it cannot possibly be wrong. It is already personified. There are no marks of personality to be gathered aliunde, and then found lacking in the train of thought. It has them all already ; so that to whatever farther analysis we may subject that form of personal self- hood under which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain, true that the thoughts which psychology studies do contin- ually tend to appear as parts of personal selves. I say ' tend to appear' rather than 'appear,' on account of those facts of sub- conscious personality, automatic writ- ing, etc., of which we studied a few in the last chapter. The buried feelings and thoughts proved now to exist in hysterical anaesthetics, in recipients of post-hypnotic sug- gestion, etc., themselves are parts of secondary personal selves. These selves are for the most part very stupid and contracted, and are cut off at ordinary times from commu- nication with the regular and normal self of the individual ; but still they form conscious unities, have continuous mem- ories, speak, write, invent distinct names for themselves, or adopt names that are suggested ; and, in short, are entirely worthy of that title of secondary personalities which is now commonly given them. According to M. Janet these second- ary personalities are always abnormal, and result from the splitting of what ought to be a single complete self into two parts, of which one lurks in the background whilst the other appears on the surface as the only self the man or woman has. For our present purpose it is unimportant whether this account of the origin of secondary selves is applicable to all possible cases of them or not, for it certainly is true of a large number of them. Now although the size of a secondary self thus formed will depend on the number of thoughts that are thus split-off from the main conscious- ness, the form of it tends to personality, and the later thoughts pertaining to it remember the earlier ones and adopt them as their own. M. Janet caught the actual mo- ment of inspissation (so to speak) of one of these secondary personalities in his angesthetic somnambulist Lucie. He found that when this young woman's attention was absorbed