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CHAPTER IV
PERSONALITY
The conscience, the ME, is the center of the being, the foundation of the personality. To be a person is
to have a conscience, a ME, which reflects, examines remembers. But can we analyze and describe the ME, its
mysterious windings, its latent forces, its fertile germs, and its secret activities? The philosophies of the past
have attempted it in vain. They have only skimmed the surface of conscious being; its internal and profound
parts remained obscure and inaccessible up to the hour when hypnotism and spiritual phenomena projected
therein some rays of light; and since then we have been enabled to see that in us is reflected the whole universe
in its double immensity of space and time. We say space, for the soul, in its full, free manifestations, knows
not distance. We say time, because all the past sleeps in the soul, and the future dwells there in an embryo
state. The old schools admitted the verity and the continuity of the ME; the permanence and identity of the
human personality and its survival. Their studies were based upon the sense which we today call introspection.
The new experimental psychology considers the personality as an aggregation, a composite, a
‘colony’. The ME is regarded as a transient arrangement of cells without stability, which decompose
eventually. These ideas are based on intellectual observations of alterations of personality, and the relation of
maladies of memory to lesions of the brain, etc.
How shall we conciliate these dissimilar theories and observe both? Scientifically, in a most simple
fashion. By observation itself - vigorous, attentive. Frederick Myers has given the subject the most magnificent
effort that has been attempted by the human mind, in his book The Survival of Human Personality. He says in
this work (which is recommended to all readers of this volume), ‘After fourteen years of careful research, at
the end of a long series of reflections based upon numberless proofs, I have come to the conclusion that the
consciousness and the faculties of earth life assert themselves newly, in all their strength, after death.’
There are certain cases when there appears in us a being wholly different from our normal selves,
possessing not only knowledge and aptitude more extensive than those of the ordinary personality, but besides,
an endowment of more varied and more powerful perceptions. Often the observers of the phenomena of
second personality believe they are in the presence of another individual.
It is necessary for the student to make the distinction between these cases and the controls of spiritual
entities. The proofs furnished by careful students of these different manifestations permit no confusion. The
cases of G. Pelham, of Robert Hyslop, and Fourcade, furnished in the book In the Invisible, are among these
proofs. Dr. Binet, in his Alterations of the Personality, as does Myers, Dr. James, Dr. Merton Prince, Dr.
Bouru and Dr. Bruat, all men of scientific renown. All the examples given by them demonstrate one thing.
Above all the level of the normal consciousness, outside of the ordinary personality, there exists in us planes of
consciousness - zones or layers, placed in such a manner that under certain conditions one can prove the
alterations between these planes.
We see emerging to the surface, and manifesting themselves for a given time, attributes and faculties,
which penetrate to a deeper consciousness: then they disappear, to plunge again into shadow and inaction. The
ordinary superficial ME seems but a fragment of the ME total.
In the one is registered a world of facts, information, of memories reaching to a long past of the soul.
During the normal life all these reservoirs remain hidden, as if buried under a material envelope. They appear
in the somnambulistic state. The call of the will, the suggestion, mobilizes them; they come into action and
produce the strange phenomena that the physiologist observes, but has no power to explain. All the cases of
double personality, all the phenomena of clairvoyance, telepathy, premonition, enter the scene of the new
senses and unknown faculties. All the ensemble of innumerable facts, constantly increasing, should be
attributed to the intervention of the hidden personality. The somnambulistic state, which permits these
manifestations, should not be regarded as morbid, but rather a superior state, following the experience of
Myers’ Evolution. It is true that organic degeneracy and weakness sometimes serves to facilitate the
somnambulistic state. In a general way, it might be stated that all that reduces the physical vigor assists in
allowing the spirit to free itself. The clear vision often found in the dying gives testimony to this fact.
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