He appears to me to be nearer the truth than Janet is: I do not know if we shall ever arrive at that complete consciousness which Myers hopes for, but it seems to me probable, that our personal consciousness is only one element of our general consciousness. This latter becomes concrete and definite, but also grows less by becoming personal. The apparent supremacy of the personal consciousness may be only an effect of the circumstances in which we are evolving; if Darwin’s ideas are true, we can understand that the necessities of life may have favoured the development of the active, voluntary, personal consciousness; we can imagine other conditions—which the monastic life sometimes realises—where the active and voluntary phases of the general consciousness may be less evolved than its receptive and passive phases. Therefore, the psychologist finds the study of hagiography teeming with information. Janet’s disaggregation is but the weakening of the sentiment of the conscious and voluntary personal activity, of what I called the sentiment of the personal participation in intercurrent psychological phenomena. It is no veritable disaggregation; it is a disappearance of one modality of the consciousness, of one of its _limited expressions_, so to speak. However, I recognise, with Janet, that this mode of expression of the consciousness is the necessary basis of our activity in _ordinary life_, and that it is legitimate to consider as invalids, those persons in whom it is normally wanting. But the fact itself of its disappearance has more the features of an _integration_ than of a _disintegration_, since upon an attentive examination, the personal consciousness is revealed as a limitation and a special determination of the general consciousness of which it is, in a way, a dismemberment. If I dared to use metaphysical language, I would say that rational and voluntary activity is in reality a disaggregation; personality is only a contingent and limited manifestation of the being, or rather of individuality. This latter, to use the expression of an eminent philosopher, would be superior to reason itself, and of irrational essence, an idea which contains the first principles of a new philosophy. I make this incursion into metaphysics merely to show how narrow Janet’s theories are, and what different consequences result from such a professional manner of thinking as his is, and from a more general conception of that, of which his manner of thinking only concerns one particular case.