HUMAN PERSONALITY

 THERE are three distinct meanings for the term "personality," two of them general and popular and the third technical and philosophical. The first and most general meaning is that personality is the sum of the characteristics which make up physical and mental being. These include appearance, manners, habits, tastes and moral character. The second meaning emphasizes the characteristics that distinguish one person from another. The two meanings overlap or merge into each other, as the first considers all characteristics pertaining to the individual, without comparing him with others, while the second sees the same facts in relation to the outside world and fixes attention mainly upon the features that distinguish the subject from his fellows. This second meaning is equivalent to individuality. It represents a widely prevalent conception of the term.

 But the third meaning is the most important, and is the only conception of any value to the psychic researcher and the philosopher or psychologist. This conception of personality is concerned only with mental characteristics; it makes no distinction between common and specific marks. In fact it connotes mental processes rather than fixed qualities. The capacity for having mental states, or the fact of having them, constitutes personality for the psychologist and the philosopher. Personality is thus the stream of consciousness, regardless of the question whether any special state is constant or casual, essential or unessential. Physical marks will have no place in this conception, unless they may serve as symbols of mental states. It abstracts from them and denotes only the stream of mental phenomena.

 This third meaning is so radically different from the other two that it gives rise to perpetual misunderstandings between the philosopher and the public. These misunderstandings arise particularly in the discussion of survival after death. The layman with his conception of personality, looks for physical phenomena of some kind to illustrate or prove it. Consequently, if interested in psychic phenomena at all, he prefers materialization, which best satisfies his conception of personality. He cannot take the point of view of the psychologist or the philosopher, who neglects these purely sensory characteristics, and fixes his attention on mental states as the proper conception of the personality which may survive. Materialization would supply the very characteristics which the layman fixes upon to represent personality. But precisely the fact that mental states are not presented to sense, leads the philosopher to conceive of immortality as possible.

 If the layman's conception were correct the philosopher and psychologist would deny the possibility of survival with entire confidence, as a necessary implication of bodily dissolution. The day could be saved only by the doctrine of a "spiritual body," an It astral body," or an "ethereal organism," supposedly a replica of the physical organism in its spatial and other characteristics. These represent personality after the manner or analogy of the physical body. The real spirit may indeed have a transcendental bodily form; but the stream of consciousness remains the same whether there is any "spiritual body" or "ethereal organism" or not. This is the fundamental element in all conceptions of spiritual reality. It is not necessary to decide the question of a "spiritual body" or "ethereal organism" as the condition of believing in the existence of spirits. That is another and perhaps a secondary problem. What we need to know is, whether the stream of consciousness survives, whether the personal memory continues, not how it continues. The fact of survival is to be considered first and the condition of it afterwards.

 We have to determine the survival of personality in the same way that we determine whether another person in the body is conscious. We are so accustomed to think that we have direct knowledge of other personalities, that we forget the exceedingly complicated nature of the process of ascertaining whether other people are conscious. That this process is the same as that of ascertaining the existence of discarnate spirits will be apparent from the following considerations:

 1. I have direct knowledge of ray own existence both bodily and mental. I reach knowledge of my body by sensation and of my mental states by introspection. In fact, introspection is at the basis of my consciousness of bodily as well as mental existence. In both cases my knowledge of my own existence is direct and is not a matter of inference from facts which are capable of various interpretations.

 2. I have no direct knowledge of any other consciousness in the world than my own. I have knowledge of other bodies only through my interpretation of sensations, and I have no direct knowledge that consciousness inhabits those bodies. I have to ascertain that fact by inference from certain phenomena occurring in conjunction with those bodies; for instance, behavior that seems to indicate in others the same kind of mental states as those behind my own acts. I observe certain motor or muscular phenomena precisely like my own, and I infer the same cause for them.

 3. Death is only slightly different from paralysis or catalepsy. It involves the permanent lapse of consciousness, so far as our normal observation is concerned. In time the body also ceases to function and is dissolved. The materialist assumes that personality or consciousness disappears with it and can never reappear. Believing, as he does, that personality is a function of the organism, he consistently assumes that it does not exist after the death of the body. But he does not know directly that this is a fact. He never saw personality, nor have any of us seen it, as we see our own bodies or the bodies of others; and the materialist assumes that the only way to know anything directly is through sense-perception. In catalepsy and paralysis personality or consciousness seems to have disappeared. The recovery of normal consciousness in such cases shows that there it suffered only a lapse; followed by the resumption of organic functions. But there is no such resumption of functions after death, and the materialist therefore concludes that consciousness has become non-existent, like digestion, circulation, secretion and other functions of the organism. These undoubtedly disappear never to reappear: and, if personality is a similar function of the body, it too must disappear. Since we have no direct knowledge of this personality in others, even in life, and since we cannot from normal experience infer its continued existence after death, we have to fall back upon facts derived from abnormal conditions or processes different from sensory experience, if we are to infer its survival.

 Now psychic research is occupied with the effort to find facts from which we can infer the survival of personality. So we have seen in the previous chapter, fraud, subconscious' actions, chance coincidence, guessing, and, telepathy must be excluded as explanations before we can accept this evidence for survival. Assuming that this exclusion has been effected in any case, as in veridical apparitions and test mediumistic phenomena, we can only infer that personality has continued to exist after death, as it existed in paralysis and catalepsy when we had supposed it destroyed. Death has interrupted its causal action in the world; therefore, unless at some point it can resume that causal action on or through the living, we should have to remain without scientific evidence for its continuance after death.

 To summarize the argument: (1) We know personality or consciousness directly or introspectively only in ourselves. (2) We know the existence of personality or consciousness in others only indirectly or by inference from behavior manifested in some form of action. (3) Catalepsy and paralysis in some cases involve a disappearance of personality similar to that of death, but its reappearance shows that it was still present when it was supposed to be non-existent. (4) Death offers a situation only slightly different from that of catalepsy and paralysis. Consciousness ceases to function, and we should remain in total ignorance of its continued existence, unless we ascertain facts which necessitate the inference of its persistence.

 It is the stream of consciousness that is of primary importance in the question of survival. There might be "spiritual bodies," it astral bodies," or "ethereal organisms" without personality; it only defers the real problem to assume or prove their existence. Ultimately we are driven to the discovery of facts which will prove the continuance of personality as a stream of consciousness, by the method here used—namely, the isolation of consciousness from the body or the production of facts from which an inference can be drawn that this personality has persisted beyond death and is not a function of the physical body.