produced without limit. What they prove is, that we are dependent for the proper use of our faculties upon material conditions; the corpus sanum is one condition of the mens sana; but they do not prove the unreality of the attribute of personality any more than the existence of idiocy and insanity, or even the possibility of getting drunk and so losing all sense of who and what we are, prove it. Undoubtedly everything depends, in the case of a human being whose powers are exerted through material organs, upon the proper working condition of those organs, and a pressure of blood upon the brain may make a man of the holiest life and the most philosophical temper commit suicide, as experience proves. But all such morbid exceptions to the general rule can not destroy the belief which a man in his normal condition feels compelled by the conditions of his existence to hold, namely, that he is himself and no one else, that he is responsible for his actions, and that what he does now will bear fruit in his subsequent experience either for good or for evil, unless he becomes deranged. The author from whom I have taken the above case of double personality exclaims very naively: "Ah! comme il faut avoir un peu de saine complaisance pour les sept péchés capitaux! Jugez: un peu de sang de trop, peut être un centième de gramme mal dirigé au contact d'une pauvre petite résille de nerfs, et le voilà fait, l'orgueilleux, le vaniteux, le superbe!" True: we must be cautious in forming opinions of actions; and in any human court—we may believe also in the court divine—every circumstance connected with an action must be taken into account in order that a just judgment of it may be formed; but all this does not prove that there is no such thing as haughtiness, or vanity, or pride, or that sane men are not responsible for their temper of mind and the quality of their actions.
To come back, then, to the conception of personality. I can not but feel sure that this is the highest conception that I can possess of my own being, or of any kind of being. All history seems to transmute itself into a kind of phantasmagoria or illusive pantomime, unless the attribute of personality be conceded to the actors. Socrates, Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Cromwell, Napoleon, must be studied without reference to phosphorus, and upon principles lying altogether outside the territory of physical science. And this postulate of personality seems to me to lead, by an intellectual necessity, to the conception of personality in a region not of φωσφόρος, but of φῷς itself, the conception of the Person, ὀ ᾦν, of whom persons like ourselves are, as it were, a faint reflection.
The study of the being and doings of this Person would seem to be of necessity one of the most interesting that can be suggested to the mind of man. The study may be conducted upon different, though not crossing, lines; the chief lines being the physical, the metaphysical or philosophical, the moral, the religious. Each of these branches has its own method and its own sources of illumination; each also has
