and sense of sin

and sense of sin

This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness; but a stronger degree ofheterogeneity may make havoc of the subject's life. There are persons whose existence is littlemore than a series of zig-zags, as now one tendency and now another gets the upper hand. Theirspirit wars with their flesh, they wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their mostdeliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repairmisdemeanors and mistakes with her, he would sanction everything at oncehe answered. .

Heterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of inheritance--the traits of characterof incompatible and antagonistic ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of each other.

[90] This explanation may pass for what it is worth--it certainly needs corroboration. But whateverthe cause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the extreme examples of it in thepsychopathic temperament, of which I spoke in my first lecture. All writers about thattemperament make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it isonly this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to a man at all. A "degenere superieur" is simply a man of sensibility in many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common inkeeping <167> his spiritual house in order and running his furrow straight, because his feelingsand impulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the haunting and insistent ideas, in theirrational impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitions which beset the psychopathictemperament when it is thoroughly pronounced, we have exquisite examples of heterogeneouspersonality. Bunyan had an obsession of the words, "Sell Christ for this, sell him for that, sell him,sell him!" which would run through his mind a hundred times together, until one day out of breathwith retorting, "I will not, I will not," he impulsively said, "Let him go if he will," and this loss ofthe battle kept him in despair for over a year. The lives of the saints are full of such blasphemousobsessions, ascribed invariably to the direct agency of Satan. The phenomenon connects itself withthe life of the subconscious self, so-called, of which we must erelong speak more directly.

[90] Smith Baker, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September, 1893.

Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intenseand sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we aredecidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straighteningout and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erringimpulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us--they must end by forming a stable systemof functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-makingand struggle. If the individual be of tender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappinesswill take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and ofstanding in false relations to the author of one's being and appointer of one's spiritual fate. This isthe religious melancholy and "conviction of sin" that have played so large a part in the history ofProtestant Christianity. The man's interior is a battle-ground for what he feels to be two deadlyhostile selves, one actual, the other ideal. As Victor Hugo makes his Mahomet say:-"Je suis le champ vil des sublimes combats: Tantot l'homme d'en haut, et tantot l'homme d'enbas; Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne, Comme dans le desert le sable et la citerne."Wrong living, impotent aspirations; "What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I," asSaint Paul says; self-loathing, self-despair; an unintelligible and intolerable burden to which one ismysteriously the heir.

Let me quote from some typical cases of discordant personality, with melancholy in the form ofself-condemnation . Saint Augustine's case is a classic example. You all rememberhis half-pagan, half-Christian bringing up at Carthage, his emigration to Rome and Milan, hisadoption of Manicheism and subsequent skepticism, and his restless search for truth and purity oflife; and finally how, distracted by the struggle between the two souls in his breast and ashamed ofhis own weakness of will, when so many others whom he knew and knew of had thrown off theshackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and the higher life, he heard a voice inthe garden say, "Sume, lege" (take and read), and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, "notin chambering and wantonness," etc., which seemed directly sent to his address, and laid the innerstorm to rest forever.[91] Augustine's psychological genius has given an account of the trouble ofhaving a divided self which has never been surpassed.

[91] Louis Gourdon (Essai sur la Conversion de Saint Augustine, Paris, Fischbacher, 1900) hasshown by an analysis of Augustine's writings immediately after the date of his conversion (A. D.

386) that the account he gives in the Confessions is premature. The crisis in the garden marked adefinitive conversion from his former life, but it was to the neo-platonic spiritualism and only ahalfway stage toward Christianity. The latter he appears not fully and radically to have embraceduntil four years more had passed.

"The new will which I began to have was not yet strong enough to overcome that other will,strengthened by long indulgence.