James G. Ward was forty years of age, a successful business man, and
very unhappy. For forty years he had vainly tried to solve a problem
that was really himself and that with increasing years became more and
more a woeful affliction. In himself he was two men, and,
chronologically speaking, these men were several thousand years or so
apart. He had studied the question of dual personality probably more
profoundly than any half dozen of the leading specialists in that
intricate and mysterious psychological field. In himself he was a
different case from any that had been recorded. Even the most fanciful
flights of the fiction-writers had not quite hit upon him. He was not a
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, nor was he like the unfortunate young man in
Kipling's _Greatest Story in the World_. His two personalities were so
mixed that they were practically aware of themselves and of each other
all the time.
His one self was that of a man whose rearing and education were modern
and who had lived through the latter part of the nineteenth century and
well into the first decade of the twentieth. His other self he had
located as a savage and a barbarian living under the primitive
conditions of several thousand years before. But which self was he, and
which was the other, he could never tell. For he was both selves, and
both selves all the time. Very rarely indeed did it happen that one self
did not know what the other was doing. Another thing was that he had no
visions nor memories of the past in which that early self had lived.
That early self lived in the present; but while it lived in the present,
it was under the compulsion to live the way of life that must have been
in that distant past.
In his childhood he had been a problem to his father and mother, and to
the family doctors, though never had they come within a thousand miles
of hitting upon the clue to his erratic conduct. Thus, they could not
understand his excessive somnolence in the forenoon, nor his excessive
activity at night. When they found him wandering along the hallways at
night, or climbing over giddy roofs, or running in the hills, they
decided he was a somnambulist. In reality he was wide-eyed awake and
merely under the night-roaming compulsion of his early life. Questioned
by an obtuse medico, he once told the truth and suffered the ignominy of
having the revelation contemptuously labeled and dismissed as "dreams."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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