CHAPTER XIII.. Abnormal and Morbid Characters.

ABNORMAL AND MORBID CHARACTERS.

Are all normal characters mutually equivalent?—Attempt at classification according to their value—Marks of abnormal character: absence of unity, impossibility of prevision—Class I. Successive contradictory characters: anomalies, conversions; their psychological mechanism. Alternating characters—Second class: Contradictory coexistent characters. Incomplete form: contradiction between principles and tendencies. Complete form. Contradiction between one tendency and another—Third class: Unstable characters. Their physiological and psychological characters—Psychological infantilism.

In the works already quoted—those of Perez (1892), Paulhan (1894), and Fouillée (1895)—and in the preceding chapter, the various forms of character have been classified, described, traced back to explanatory principles. In spite of divergent interpretations and differences of nomenclature, there are types universally accepted: the active, the sensitive, the apathetic. But are they equivalent? Such is the question put in the first instance when we pass from normal to morbid characters. It seems to be implicitly admitted that, each type having its qualities and defects, its advantages and disadvantages, they ought to be placed on the same level. The writer who confines himself to classification and description may, by going no further, avoid the difficulty. But as soon as we enter the region of frankly morbid characters, we are led to ask, in the first place, whether the characters reputed normal are all so in the same degree, or whether some are not, by their very nature, nearer to pathological forms, and more apt to undergo a retrogressive metamorphosis; in other words, we have now to establish, not a classification, but a hierarchy, a valuation often disputed, and difficult to fix.

A Russian anthropologist, N. Seeland, is the only writer, so far as I know, who has taken up the question from this point of view. In fact, the ancient authors, when classifying temperaments, and consequently characters, only divided them into strong (the choleric and melancholic) and weak (the sanguine and phlegmatic).

This division (recently accepted by Wundt) is not at bottom very clear, and might give rise to numerous objections. Seeland has once for all broken with tradition and abandoned the quadripartite division; he “does not look upon all temperaments, as having the same value, some approximating more to the idea of perfection, some less.” His classification is, therefore, in fact a hierarchy; and, beginning with the most perfect forms of character, may be briefly stated as follows:—

I. The strong or positive temperaments, including—

1. The gay temperament, a type of which the classic “sanguine” is only a variety; it comprehends three species: (a) the strong sanguine, vegetative life predominant, reactions rapid but appropriate, adapted to their end, without agitation; (b) the weaker sanguine, resembling the preceding, but with a mixture of the nervous type, the reactions are less moderate and controlled; the French and the Poles belong to this division; (c) the serene temperament which stands midway between the strong sanguine and the phlegmatic, uniting the advantages of both.

2. The phlegmatic or calm temperament never rises above medium intensity, and presents a singular uniformity; it is a mass whose movement can neither be accelerated nor retarded: but calm does not exclude the possibility of strength; on the contrary, it presupposes it. As nations, the English, the Dutch, the Norwegians belong to this type.

II. We descend a degree lower with the medium or neutral temperament, “unknown to science, though that of the majority of men.” It corresponds to the “balanced natures” of Paulhan, and to those whom elsewhere we call the amorphous, because they have no definite characteristic peculiar to themselves.

III. Lastly, we descend another step with the weak or negative characters. “Their reaction may be quick or slow, but what characterises them is the irregularity, the superfluity, and even the perversity of their manifestations. There are three varieties: (a) the pure melancholic, distinguished by sadness and apathy, without nervous symptoms, or at any rate, without dominant ones; (b) the nervous, versatile, with alternations of normal activity, and dejection, or excitement; (c) the choleric, which is not a genus, is tolerably rare and distinguished by irascibility, and may be combined with the melancholic or the weaker sanguine; the serene and the phlegmatic are incompatible with it.”

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Footnote 249:

“It has been asserted that every temperament is equal to every other, and that all are equally necessary to the progress of humanity: I do not believe this.”

Footnote 250:

“Le tempérament au point de vue psychologique et anthropologique,” a paper published (in French) in the Bulletins du Congrès International d’Anthropologie, iv. St. Petersburg, 1892, pp. 91-154.

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In support of this classification follows a long anthropological inquiry, drawn up in six tables. Its subjects were 160 men and 40 women belonging to the four principal types, gay, phlegmatic, neutral, and melancholic. It includes comparative statistics of stature, chest measurement, neck and arm measurement, cubic capacity of the lungs, respiration, pulse, temperature, dynamometric pressure, cephalic indices, state of the senses, etc. The results are decidedly favourable to the gay and unfavourable to the melancholic temperament (see especially Table V., p. 114), the latter being ascertained to have less strength and less delicate senses, except as regards sensitiveness to pain. In women, the nervous group, which takes the place of the melancholic group in men, is the only one presenting any anomalies.

In his conclusions, this writer combats the “rooted tendency to seek the essence of the temperaments in the phenomena of the circulation and its satellite, the activity of tissues.” Eight soldiers in good health, four of whom belonged to the gay, and four to the melancholic type, were kept by him on the same diet and carefully watched for three days: the result of the analysis of weight, secretions, and excretions “does not show that a more rapid change of tissue took place in the case of the sanguine than in that of the melancholic subjects.”

Can so limited an experiment, and one of such short duration, be called decisive?

However that may be, rejecting the chemical theory, Seeland prefers a physical explanation. In his view, “the nervous tissue, besides its general activity, possesses an elementary life which is the basis of temperament and character.” Everything depends on the way in which the nervous system responds to external or internal excitation. The gay temperament would correspond to rapid and harmonious molecular vibrations; the phlegmatic to vibrations less rapid, but of imperturbable regularity; the neutral to slow but constant vibrations, and the negative forms to slow and discordant, or rapid and interrupted vibrations.

This arrangement in order of precedence is not free from objection. I give it merely as an instance of a classification according to the presumed value of characters, and as an introduction to the study of the morbid forms which we are about to commence.

In the first place, it is necessary to know by what signs we can recognise whether a character deviates from the normal types. Not to return to a subject already treated in the preceding chapter, we may briefly say:

1. A true character is reducible to one characteristic, one preponderant tendency which ensures its unity and stability throughout life. This conception is somewhat ideal, but definite characters tend, in varying degrees, to approximate thereto.

2. In practice, a clearly defined character always (except in rare cases, which explain themselves) permits us to foresee and foretell. We know beforehand what an active, a sensitive, a phlegmatic, or a contemplative will do under given circumstances. Neutrals, who are, properly speaking, not characters at all, are acted on by events or by other people, and calculations as to their future must start from a point, not within, but outside them.

One, if not both of these marks, is wanting in abnormal characters, and the further they depart from these two constituent conditions—unity and the possibility of foresight—the further they depart from the typical forms, to become at last unmistakably morbid.

We might be tempted to believe that the anomalies of character, as observed, are so varied in aspect, so manifold, as to elude all classification, so that it is impossible to find our way through the chaos. I think, however, that the determining characteristics given above will supply us with a clue. It is scarcely necessary to say that I exclude from the group of anomalies those slight, temporary, and intermittent deviations which are only passing infractions of the unity of character. Cæsar, Richelieu, Napoleon were well-defined types; yet, at certain points in their lives, they ceased to be themselves. On his journey to Elba, in face of the fury and the insults of the populace, Napoleon had moments of strange timidity. Facts of this kind prove, once more, that the complete character only exists as an ideal; but an indisposition lasting a few hours cannot be called an illness. Having made this reserve, we may, in our classification, follow the retrogressive march from co-ordinate unity to multiplicity, from stability to dissolution, and we thus have three groups departing more and more widely from the normal forms: (1) successive contradictory characters; (2) simultaneous contradictory characters; (3) unstable or polymorphic characters: the last stage of disaggregation. It only remains to study them, one by one, in their order.

By successive contradictory characters, I understand two opposite forms or manners of feeling and acting, so that the life taken as a whole seems to be that of two individuals, one preceding, the other following the crisis.

Before dealing with the genuine cases, we must eliminate:

1. The apparently contradictory characters abounding in political history, such as the triumvir Octavius and emperor Augustus. Cromwell, by turns an illuminated mystic and a practical joker, retained, under these appearances, the fundamental tendencies of an entirely practical nature. So far from contradicting themselves and being unstable, the character is single and homogeneous throughout: there is perfect unity in the aims: it is only in the means that contradiction appears. The moralist has a perfect right to call them false characters, because they wear masks; for the psychologist they are quite normal and well marked. They may frequently be met with in ordinary life, and there one need not be an actor on a great stage to appear to contradict one’s self; it is enough to be faithful to the end in view and unscrupulous in the choice of means. Those whom, in revolutionary times, fear makes suddenly cruel belong to the same category; their unity lies in the instinct of self-preservation.

2. The transformations produced by the evolution of life and the change of circumstances. Thus an active character may show itself successively in love, in dangerous adventures, in ambition, and in the pursuit of riches.

Having got rid of doubtful cases, we may divide the successive contradictory characters into two classes: the first including anomalies, the second pathological forms.

I. As, in our classification, we start from the normal state and gradually leave it behind us, we must begin with the modified forms which are simple deviations from the ideal of the character—i.e., from a constant and undisturbed unity. Apart from all ideals, the successive characters are exceptional with regard to the generality of people; for even neutrals have throughout their lives a kind of unity, that of their perpetual plasticity.

In this first class I distinguish two cases. The reader may find these divisions and subdivisions excessively minute, yet they are necessary. There is no classification without distinctions, and it is impossible to follow a retrogressive order without marking every step on the way to dissolution.

1. The simplest case, and the nearest to the normal condition, consists in a change of direction in one and the same predominant tendency in the individual. Such is the case of Raymond Lulli, the change of the profane loves which occupied the first part of his life into the platonic and chivalrous love which filled the second; while the converse case, too, is not rare, and examples might be found among the mystics. Such are sincere conversions in religion or in politics (St. Paul, Luther). The same may be said of the cases where the fire of the temperament, having previously expended itself for good, now does so for evil, or conversely. All this, from the moralist’s point of view, is a complete change—i.e., there are two men; from the psychologist’s, it is simply a change of direction, and there is only one man. It is easy to see that, under the two contrasts, there is a common foundation, a latent unity, the same quantity or the same quality of energy directed to different ends; but we can recognise the chrysalis in the butterfly without difficulty.

2. These last are the modified forms; the clear cases, which depart further from the rule, imply a fundamental and genuine duality—e.g., the passage from a life of orgies to a lasting ascetic one (if it does not last, the change is only a passing accident), from active to contemplative life (Diocletian), from contemplative to active life (Julian the Apostate); in short, all the cases where men burn what they have worshipped and worship what they have burnt, where we find two individuals in the same person. The common language calls this “a conversion.” It may be religious, moral, political, artistic, philosophical, scientific, etc., but it always consists in the substitution of one tendency or group of tendencies for the contrary, of one belief for its opposite, of one form of unity for another form, synonymous expressions which express the different psychological aspects of transformation. We may note, in passing, that in men who have passed through two opposite phases, common opinion is only cognisant of one, usually the final, or else the one of longest duration and the most conspicuous, the other being overlooked. We understand by St. Augustine, the man of the post-conversion, by Diocletian, the man of the pre-abdication period. This judgment is founded on the need for simplification and unity of mind as applied to character.

How does this change, dividing life in extreme cases into two contradictory phases, come about? It is impossible to reply in general terms; each particular case supposes special conditions. We may try, however, to determine, approximately, the causes oftenest in action.

First, the physical causes. A serious illness may, by changing the constitution, transform the character, thus showing how far it depends on cœnæsthesia. It is immaterial whether we suppose the ultimate condition to consist of chemical (or nutritive), or of physical modifications, the latter being the view of Henle and Seeland. There are violent shocks, more especially injuries to the head, of which we shall take occasion to speak later on. Azam gives some examples of these metamorphoses. A steady, industrious man sustains a complicated fracture of the leg and subsequently becomes impulsive and ill-tempered; the author supposes that there must have been cerebral ischæmia. Another, under similar circumstances, exchanges a cheerful disposition for incurable melancholia. Persistent facial neuralgia has transformed a thoroughly kind-hearted man into a spiteful and morose being.

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Footnote 251:

Le Caractère dans les Maladies, p. 188 et seq.

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We now come to the moral causes. They appear to act like a shock whose effect is either immediate or falls due some time later; hence the change is either sudden or consequent on a long incubation. The type of the former is found in conversions following an unforeseen crisis: St. Paul and his vision, Pascal and his accident, Raymond Lulli and the revelation of one of his mistresses; the Spanish nobleman, Maraña, whose story has so often been told, who, for half his life, was a Don Juan, and was suddenly changed by listening to church music. The “sudden conversions” of theologians involve a psychological truth. Those of the second type do not take place all at once, but after a struggle between the old and new tendencies. St. Augustine, Luther, Loyola, Francisco de Borgia, who, on seeing the corpse of his empress (Charles V.’s wife), resolved to renounce the world, but did not do so for many years after. To these illustrious names each reader may add for himself less known ones from among his own acquaintances.

We may ask whether even the most sudden changes are, in truth, as much so as they seem, if they have not their antecedent conditions in the life of the individual in question, and are not the accelerated result of a subconscious process. Whatever we may think, the psychological mechanism of conversions is very similar to that of irresistible impulses. In its complete evolution it passes through three stages: (1) the conception of an opposite aim or ideal; this may happen to any one without lasting or leading to action; this state will produce no effect if it merely passes through the mind. (2) This conception must become a fixed idea, with the permanence, the predominance, the overmastering possession, which are the peculiarities of such ideas. (3) The action takes place because already included in the fixed idea, and because the fixed idea is a belief, and all beliefs presuppose something existing or about to exist. In short, there is no result till the idea becomes an impulse. In the cases where the individual is, so to speak, struck by lightning, the impetuous movement of the passion springs up suddenly and triumphs immediately. This is yet another point of resemblance to the irresistible impulses which pass into action, sometimes after a period of struggle, sometimes in a sudden ecstasy.

There is, in any case, this difference, that the new character—i.e., new ways of feeling, thinking, and acting—is lasting. This could not be, if in both stages, incubation and eruption, a profound change had not taken place in the individual constitution. Conversions do not create a new tendency, but they show that the greatest antitheses are latent in us, and that one may replace the other, not by an act of the will, which is always precarious, but by a radical transformation of our sensibility.

2. This division includes the alternating characters, whose phases sometimes succeed one another with such rapidity and frequency as to approximate to the simultaneous contradictory characters. Instead of two different characters, one before and one after the crisis, whose formula for the whole life of the individual would be A, B, we have the alternation of two forms of character, with or without intermediary crises, and the formula would be A, B, A, B, and so on.

This alternation is found in the normal or quasi-normal state, but is too fugitive or too difficult to fix, to be distinguished from the unstable characters; but the case is not the same with the morbid types which show it in an exaggerated form. Such are the phenomena so much studied in our own day, under the name of alterations, diseases, disorders of personality. They will be known to the reader, but they are not altogether germane to our subject, and I only touch upon them in order to elucidate a particular point, the variations of character.

In cases of alternating personality we may consider either the physiological changes, which are rather obscure, or the intellectual changes, which have been referred, on the whole, to the memory, or the emotional changes, which have been somewhat neglected and in some observations omitted altogether. It is these last alone which interest us, because they may be summed up as alternations of character.

If, in fact, we take complete observations, it will be seen that the two personalities (there are sometimes more) do not consist merely in the alternation of two memories, but also in that of two distinct and usually opposite affective dispositions. Azam’s celebrated Félida is, in her first state, gloomy, cold, and reserved; in her second, cheerful, talkative, lively to the point of coquetry and boisterousness. In the case of Mary Reynolds, reported by Weir Mitchell, we have first a melancholy, silent, retiring woman; then, in her new personality, “her disposition is totally and absolutely changed,” she is fond of pleasure, noisy, always seeking company, except when taking long rides and walks through the woods and over the mountains, delighting in the spectacle of nature and absolutely unconscious of fear. These alternations lasted for sixteen years, after which “the emotional opposition between the two states seems gradually to have effaced itself,” and resolved itself into a medium state between the two—"a well-balanced temperament," which for a quarter of a century coincided with her now permanent second state. We may also recall the well-known case of L. V., who spontaneously showed at the same time two opposite forms of character: at one time, talkative, arrogant, violent, brutal, insubordinate, a thief, ready to kill any one who gave him an order; at another, gentle, polite, silent, sober, of an almost child-like timidity. I say, spontaneously, for MM. Bourru and Burot have artificially produced physical modifications in V. which are accompanied by some modifications in his character; but I am only speaking of natural changes. For other instances I refer the reader to special works on the alteration of personality.

I am inclined to believe that alternations of memory, though the strongest and most disturbing phenomena, result from an alternation of the affective dispositions (in other words, of the character), which themselves result from physiological changes, so that, in the last resort, we arrive at cœnæsthesia as the ultimate cause. When we see, e.g., that in L. V. the violent character always accompanies hemiplegia and anæsthesia on the right side, and the gentle character, hemiplegia and anæsthesia on the left side, not to mention the partial modifications accompanying the paraplegia, total anæsthesia, etc., artificially produced in the hypnotic state, it is difficult not to admit that changes in memory, in character, and in physical habit form an almost indissoluble whole, which is also the conclusion drawn by Bourru and Burot from their experiments.

In default of positive proofs that the change of cœnæsthesia is primordial in these alternations of character, we may compare them with a mental disease, where the alternation, being still simpler, allows us more easily to detect its physiological conditions. This is that duplex form of madness, sometimes called folie circulaire, or “alternating insanity,” etc. It consists in the regular alternation of two periods, that of depression and that of exaltation. The transition from one to the other is instantaneous, or takes place by imperceptible gradations, but nothing can be clearer than the contrast between the two periods.

During the depression, the affective symptoms are: melancholy, feeling of fatigue, torpor, indifference, vague terror, uneasiness with regard to everything. Physically, the patient is emaciated, aged, broken down, the temperature is lowered, and there is an enormous decrease in the pulse, the secretions and excretions, and the weight of the body, the latter going down as much as ten pounds in one week.

During the period of excitement the reverse takes place, point for point: a feeling of well-being, joy, pride, exuberant activity; the patient looks younger, grows stout, and his organic functions go on extensively and regularly. “This contrast,” says an alienist, “is one of the most curious and interesting peculiarities of mental medicine.”

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Footnote 252:

Régis, Maladies mentales, p. 200.

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Here the connection between the affective disposition and the somatic state is quite clear, and seems to be referable to a tropho-neurosis of the brain (Schüle, Krafft-Ebing). It must be recognised that this disease, which is the extreme form, and the alternations of personality, which are modified forms, supply us with none but pathological examples; but the germs of morbid manifestations are present in normal life. Unfortunately, these alternations are only perceptible where strongly marked, and therefore none but exaggerated cases can be quoted. Compared to the successive characters, where the second has destroyed the first, the alternating characters mark a new stage on the road to dissolution, and form a transition to our second group—the coexistent contradictory characters.

II.

They consist in the coexistence of two opposite tendencies of equal force and mutually incompatible; there are two characters, two contradictory springs of action, and, tested by our practical criterion, there are, in any given circumstances, two possible and equally probable courses to be foreseen. They differ, both from the successive characters, in which the second man has eliminated the first, and from the alternating characters, which occupy the stage, in turn, exclusively, and for some time. They present themselves under two principal forms.

1. The first form is not a pure or complete type. It is the result of a contradiction between thought and feeling, between theory and practice, between principle and tendency. Nothing is less rare, and I need scarcely adduce examples: the contrast between a man’s private and public life, between his aspect as a scientific man and his aspect as a believer. One who, in a question of scientific proof, is quite intractable, will show, in religion or in love, an unparalleled simplicity and ingenuousness. As for those who loudly profess any given doctrine, and contradict it by their actions, there is no lack of them. Schopenhauer, in theory a pessimist and misogynist, penetrated with compassion for all living beings, a professed ascetic, was nothing of the sort in practice. He is an instance of unreconciled contradiction, to which we may oppose the perfect unity of a Spinoza.

A man who was, ex hypothesi, entirely intellectual, and yet (if that were possible) capable of acting, would, by his constitution, escape this contradictory duality. The magistrate, observed by Esquirol, who, though perfectly lucid in mind, had lost all sensibility, and was “as indifferent to his family and everything else as to a theorem of Euclid,” approximates to it. We find modified forms of the same in the apathetic-intellectual division.

But this contradictory duality is so common that we should not venture to insist on it were it not that it completely exposes the inanity of the widespread prejudice that it is sufficient to inculcate principles, rules, and ideas, in order to make them result in action. No doubt, authority, education, law, have no other means of influencing men; but these means, by themselves, are not efficacious; they may succeed, or they may fail. The question which the experiment is intended to solve amounts to this: Do the intellectual character (if there are, as some writers admit, such things as intellectual characters, properly speaking) and the emotional keep an even rate of progress?

2. The second form is pure and complete; it involves a deeper contradiction because subsisting between two ways of feeling, two tendencies, two modes of action, one of which is the negative of the other. These characters bring us to our last group, the unstable; there are incoherent beings who will not or cannot resolve the contradiction in them. One of the commonest instances is that of those men who carry to an extreme degree both religious sincerity and licentiousness of conduct. Popular opinion judges them severely and considers them hypocrites, thus confounding two very distinct cases, that of voluntary dissimulation and that of incurable contradiction. The religious and the sexual sentiment, both deeply rooted in their natures, act on them, each in its turn; and they make no attempt to reconcile the two. We may also mention those men who are divided between the craving for activity and that for repose, passing incessantly from the one to the other; the lover who feels for his mistress at the same time an ardent love and a violent contempt. In towns and countries where the monarchical sentiment is still deeply rooted we find an analogous state of mind in some subjects, who feel an unutterable loyalty to the throne and a profound contempt for the person of the king. In studying the “composite characters,” Paulhan reminds us that Rubens, calm, tranquil, and of decent behaviour in practical life, became a prey to a tragic fermentation as soon as he seized his brush. It has been said of a celebrated contemporary (Wagner) that he had in him “the instincts of an ascetic and of a satyr, cravings for love and hatred, an appetite for enjoyment and a thirst for the ideal, a haughty dignity and a cringing courtiership, a mixture of devotion and base treachery.” This portrait might suit many others. It denotes something more than a contradictory duality, for it cannot be reduced to two essential points; but it is not yet the genuine type of the unstable.

If we might trust certain authors, the cause of simultaneous contradictory characters would be very simple, being due merely to the dual form of the brain. It is known that the two cerebral hemispheres, even when normal, are asymmetrical, differing in weight, in the distribution of the arteries, and in functional importance, the left having the preponderance; that hallucinations may be unilateral or bilateral, vary in character, etc. In short, cerebral dualism is undeniable; but that it should suffice to explain the duality of character is a hypothesis of such exceeding naïveté that I am unwilling to waste any time in discussing it.

An explanation drawn from psychology is less simple, but also less easily overthrown. To understand how characters are constituted, the following process seems to me the best. Let us take as our starting-point the well-balanced, “completely unified” characters, which present a graduated co-ordination of the various tendencies. The first step towards a break is marked by the predominance of a single tendency: the character is active, contemplative, sensitive, etc. It is still a unity; but, instead of a convergent unity which may be compared to a federation, we have a unity of preponderance reminding us of an absolute monarchy. A second decisive step is marked by the appearance of two dominant tendencies, but, to fulfil the conditions, they must be contradictory. Thus, Miguel Cervantes, who, after a life of chivalrous adventure, became the great novelist, gives us an instance of a complex and composite but by no means contradictory nature. The contradiction is found in cases analogous to that of the devout libertine, because, while asserting in words the rule of morals prescribed by his religion, he denies it by his acts. Hence two un-coordinated tendencies. Yet this is only the exaggeration of a perfectly normal occurrence. A man of grave demeanour may have sudden fits of mad spirits; another may be seized upon by a passion at variance with all his habits. If this transitory, episodic state becomes stable and permanent, the contradictory character is established. This transformation may be assigned to circumstances. I believe that it is still more dependent on innate tendencies inherent in the individual constitution, which are only developed by opportunity.

Speaking decisively, we may maintain, without paradox, that these characters are or are not contradictory, according to the point of view adopted. They are so for the logic of the intellect, but not for the logic of the feelings.

When we judge a contradictory character, whether our own or another person’s, we are apt to proceed objectively; we ascertain in the individual the simultaneous existence of two governing ideas, one of which negatives the other; we rationally declare this to be illogical, because the principle of contradiction is the pith of all our affirmations, and the logic of the intellect rests on it.

The logic of the feelings is subjective; it is ruled by the principle of finality or adaptation. The individual, as a purely emotional being, aims at one end only, the satisfaction of his desires; and in him every special tendency makes for its own special end, its own special good. If, therefore, the scholar, moved by the love of truth, strives after strict truth, and moved by a strong religious sentiment, satisfies himself with childish beliefs, there is not and cannot be any contradiction between these two desires; the discrepancy exists only objectively, in the region of ideas.

The logic of the feelings also has its illogicalities, but of another sort, and I can only find two: (1) when an isolated tendency, in attaining its end, is the cause of injury or ruin to the whole individual; and (2) when the individual is quite content with his own destruction, as in the case of the “luxury of grief,” which we have studied elsewhere, and whose highest term is the fascination of suicide.

III.

Unstable or polymorphic characters cannot be called “characters” except by an abuse of that word, for there is neither unity, stability, nor possibility of prevision. How will they act? Every fresh moment brings us face to face with another enigma. In fact, we have here to do with the decay of character, and all the specimens given in this group are pathological.

It is needless to describe them, for they are self-evident. Their principal types are to be met with in the hysterical, whose Protean psychology has so often and so thoroughly been studied that we need not dwell on it; in the adventurer, whose history, with its numberless variations, is, in the main, always the same, and may be summarised thus: precocity, insubordination at home or at school, frequent flights, inaptitude for all sustained work; he passes suddenly from enthusiasm to disgust, tries everything in turn and drops it, drifting at the caprice of impulse or circumstance, till some final catastrophe lands him in the prisoner’s dock or the lunatic asylum.

The causes of this instability are either congenital or acquired.

The spasmodic diathesis, as Maudsley calls it, is most usually innate. It is characterised by the various symptoms comprised under the name of degeneration, grouped as physical and psychical stigmata; they are too well known to need enumeration.

The instability acquired in the course of life is left behind by certain maladies, especially injuries or shocks to the brain, and above all, lesions of the frontal lobe. Such is the conclusion resulting from the observations of David Ferrier, Boyer, Lépine, and others. More recently, Allen Starr, out of forty-six cases, has ascertained that, in twenty-three, the only symptoms were mental obtuseness, impossibility of attention, irritability, un-coordinated and impulsive acts, absence of voluntary control and the loss of inhibitory power, phenomena specially coinciding with lesions on the left side of the frontal region.

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Footnote 253:

Brain, No. 32, p. 570, and Brain Surgery (1863), chap. i.

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M. Paulhan, in his book on Characters, when studying those whom he calls the unquiet, the nervous, and the contradictory (contrariants), gives several instances; among others, Alfred de Musset, from his own portrait, confirmed by that given by G. Sand. Let us listen to each of them in turn.

“When these frightful scenes were over, a strange love, an exaltation carried to excess, made me treat my mistress as a divinity. A quarter of an hour after I had insulted her I was at her knees; as soon as I ceased to accuse her I asked her pardon; the moment I was no longer uttering bitter words I burst into tears” (Musset). “His reactions were sudden and violent in proportion to the acuteness of his joys.... One might have thought that two souls were engaged in a desperate contest as to which should animate his body.... It was an invariable rule, unheard of, but absolute in this strange organisation, that, sleep changing all his resolutions, he would go to rest with his heart full of tenderness, and awaken in the morning eager for battle and murder; but if he had left in the evening cursing, he returned next morning to bless” (G. Sand). Hence, and from analogous cases, Paulhan concludes that “these types result from the predominance of association by contrast.” It seems to me impossible to refer the psychology of the unstable, and of the contradictory characters which come nearest to them, to this single fact. In the first place, association by contrast is not a primary fact. Psychologists are right in connecting it indirectly with association by resemblance, sometimes mixed with elements of contiguity. Furthermore, contrasts only exist in couples, and in the “nervous, unquiet, and contradictory” there is not merely a transition from contrast to contrast, but from difference to difference—they traverse the whole scale. Lastly, association by contrast only has a precise form as an intellectual phenomenon, and it could not be maintained that love, as a representation, would suggest the representation of violence, or the i.e. of jealousy that of indifference. Here the association of ideas is only an effect, a result, a rendering to the consciousness of deeper occurrences belonging to the emotional or even the organic part of us. If Musset, having represented George Sand to himself as a divinity, rages at her immediately afterwards, as a brutal planter might at a slave, his change of attitude is in his feelings, not in his thoughts. I see rather the effect of a rapid but partial exhaustion,—a frequent occurrence in unbalanced natures. If we insist on retaining the word contrast, it will have to be taken, not in its psychological sense, but in that given to it by physiologists when they speak of “successive contrast,” and attribute it, rightly or wrongly, to the fatigue of certain portions of the retina.

The formula which, in my opinion, sums up and explains the unstable is this: psychological infantilism. We might also call it arrest of development, but this latter expression would not be applicable to all cases.

If, in fact, we consider the distinctive marks of the character of children, apart from exceptions, we find, first, mobility. They wish for one thing, and then another and another; they pass rapidly from one extreme to the opposite, from eagerness to disgust, from laughter to tears; the character is an un-coordinated bundle of appetites and wishes, each of which, in turn, drives out the rest. Then there is weakness or total absence of will under its higher inhibitory form, which rules and co-ordinates. Are they impulsive for want of inhibition, or incapable of controlling themselves through the excess of their impulses? Both these cases are met with, and the result is the same. The formula of their character, which we need not enumerate in detail, is the same as that of the unstable—i.e., there is no constituted character.

The term infantilism is equally applicable to the congenital and the acquired forms. The former have never left their childhood behind, the latter return to it; they are on the same level, the first through not having climbed high enough, the second through having descended too far. In the one case we have arrested development, in the other retrogression. It is no objection to say that this instability has often been met with in minds of a superior calibre; genius is one thing, character another, and we are here dealing with character only. The populace, who, struck by the incoherence of their conduct, call these people “grown-up children,” have hit on the right expression, without any subtleties of analysis.

In short, beginning with the true character (i.e., the affirmation of a personality under a stable form consistent with itself), which is never completely realised, or free from transient eclipses, there are all possible shades of deviation from unity and stability, till we reach that stage of uncoordinated multiplicity at which character has either not come into being or has ceased to exist.