Through psychoanalysis we are enabled to understand the "split" personality and its cause. We discover that almost everyone has more or less rudimentary forms of multiple personality hidden within him; made out of desires and traits which he does not like, or which the world forces him to drive into the deeps of his being. These may be evil impulses, of sex or violence; they may be the most noble altruisms, or artistic yearnings, ridiculous things in a world of "hustle." A quite normal man or woman may keep a separate self, apart from the world, living a Jekyll life of business propriety and a Hyde life of religious or musical ecstasy. Or again, the repressed impulses may integrate themselves in the unconscious, and you may have genius or lunacy or both--"great wits to madness near allied." The modern knowledge on such dark mysteries you may find in Hart's "The Psychology of Insanity." CHAPTER XIV THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY (Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point of view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling us to live forever?) As we explore the deeps of the subconsciousness, our own and other people's, we find ourselves confronting the strange question: Is it all our own mind, and that of other living people, or are we by any chance dealing with the minds of those who are dead? A great many earnest people, and some very learned people, are fully convinced that the latter is the case, and we have now to consider their arguments. When I was a little boy I used to read and hear ghost stories, and would shudder over them; but I was given to understand that all this was just imagination, I must not take ghosts seriously, any more than fairies or dragons or nymphs or satyrs. For an educated person to take ghosts seriously--well, such a person would be almost as comical as that supremely comical person, the flying-machine man. Would you believe it, in those days there actually were people who believed they could learn to fly in the air, and spent their time manufacturing machines for this purpose! There was a scientist in Washington who had this "bug," and built himself a machine and started to fly, and fell into the Potomac river. We all laughed at him--we laughed so long and so loud that we killed the poor man; and then, a few years later, somebody took that machine of Professor Langley's and actually did fly with it! But that was after I had grown up a bit more, and was not quite so ready to laugh at an idea because it was new.