Introduction to the Science of SociologyPark, Robert Ezra
General
Introduction to the Science of Sociology
Park, Robert Ezra
Sociology
Whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the
extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament. All writers
about that temperament make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their
descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to
ascribe that temperament to a man at all. A _dégénéré supérieur_ is
simply a man of sensibility in many directions, who finds more
difficulty than is common in keeping his spiritual house in order and
running his furrow straight, because his feelings and impulses are too
keen and too discrepant mutually. In the haunting and insistent ideas,
in the irrational impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitions
which beset the psychopathic temperament when it is thoroughly
pronounced, we have exquisite examples of heterogeneous personality.
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 breath with retorting, "I
will not, I will not," he impulsively said, "Let him go if he will," and
this loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a year. The lives
of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions, ascribed
invariably to the direct agency of Satan.
St. Augustine's case is a classic example of discordant personality. You
all remember his half-pagan, half-Christian bringing up at Carthage, his
emigration to Rome and Milan, his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent
skepticism, and his restless search for truth and purity of life; and
finally how, distracted by the struggle between the two souls in his
breast, and ashamed of his own weakness of will when so many others whom
he knew and knew of had thrown off the shackles of sensuality and
dedicated themselves to chastity and the higher life, he heard a voice
in the garden say, "Sume, lege" (take and read), and opening the Bible
at random, saw the text, "not in chambering and wantonness," etc., which
seemed directly sent to his address, and laid the inner storm to rest
forever. Augustine's psychological genius has given an account of the
trouble of having a divided self which has never been surpassed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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