Real Ghost Stories | Page 5

latest word of advanced science has thus
landed us back to the apostolic assertion that man is composed of body,
soul and spirit; and there are some who see in the scientific doctrine of
the Unconscious Personality a welcome confirmation from an
unexpected quarter of the existence of the soul.
The fairy tales of science are innumerable, and, like the fairy tales of
old romance, they are not lacking in the grim, the tragic, and even the
horrible. Of recent years nothing has so fascinated the imagination even
of the least imaginative of men as the theory of disease which
transforms every drop of blood in our bodies into the lists in which
phagocyte and microbe wage the mortal strife on which our health
depends. Every white corpuscle that swims in our veins is now declared
to be the armed Knight of Life for ever on the look-out for the microbe
Fiend of Death. Day and night, sleeping and waking, the white knights
of life are constantly on the alert, for on their vigilance hangs our
existence. Sometimes, however, the invading microbes come in, not in
companies but in platoons, innumerable as Xerxes' Persians, and then
"e'en Roderick's best are backward borne," and we die. For our life is
the prize of the combat in these novel lists which science has revealed
to our view through the microscope, and health is but the token of the
triumphant victory of the phagocyte over the microbe.
But far more enthralling is the suggestion which psychical science has
made as to the existence of a combat not less grave in the very inmost
centre of our own mental or spiritual existence. The strife between the
infinitely minute bacilli that swarm in our blood has only the interest
which attaches to the conflict of inarticulate and apparently
unconscious animalculæ. The strife to which researches into the nature
and constitution of our mental processes call attention concerns our
conscious selves. It suggests almost inconceivable possibilities as to
our own nature, and leaves us appalled on the brink of a new world of
being of which until recently most of us were unaware.
There are no papers of such absorbing interest in the whole of the
"Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research" as those which

deal with the question of the Personality of Man. "I," what am I? What
is our Ego? Is this Conscious Personality which receives impressions
through the five senses, and through them alone, is it the only dweller
in this mortal tabernacle? May there not be other personalities, or at
least one other that is not conscious, when we are awake, and alert, and
about, but which comes into semi-consciousness when we sleep, and
can be developed into complete consciousness when the other
personality is thrown into a state of hypnotic trance? In other words,
am I one personality or two? Is my nature dual? As I have two
hemispheres in my brain, have I two minds or two souls?
The question will, no doubt, appear fantastic in its absurdity to those
who hear it asked for the first time; but those who are at all familiar
with the mysterious but undisputed phenomena of hypnotism will
realize how naturally this question arises, and how difficult it is to
answer it otherwise than in the affirmative. Every one knows Mr. Louis
Stevenson's wonderful story of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." The dual
nature of man, the warfare between this body of sin and death, and the
spiritual aspirations of the soul, forms part of the common stock of our
orthodox belief. But the facts which recent researches have brought to
light seem to point not to the old theological doctrine of the conflict
between good and evil in one soul, but to the existence in each of us of
at least two distinct selfs, two personalities, standing to each other
somewhat in the relation of man and wife, according to the old ideal
when the man is everything and the woman is almost entirely
suppressed.
Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of occasional loss of
memory. Men are constantly losing consciousness, from disease,
violence, or violent emotion, and emerging again into active life with a
gap in their memory. Nay, every night we become unconscious in sleep,
and rarely, if ever, remember anything that we think of during slumber.
Sometimes in rare cases there is a distinct memory of all that passes in
the sleeping and the waking states, and we have read of one young man
whose sleeping consciousness was so continuous that he led, to all
intents and purposes, two lives. When he slept he resumed his dream
existence at the point when he waked, just as we resume our

consciousness at the point when we fall asleep. It was just