When we judge a contradictory character, whether our own or another person’s, we are apt to proceed objectively; we ascertain in the individual the simultaneous existence of two governing ideas, one of which negatives the other; we rationally declare this to be illogical, because the principle of contradiction is the pith of all our affirmations, and the logic of the intellect rests on it.
The logic of the feelings is subjective; it is ruled by the principle of finality or adaptation. The individual, as a purely emotional being, aims at one end only, the satisfaction of his desires; and in him every special tendency makes for its own special end, its own special good. If, therefore, the scholar, moved by the love of truth, strives after strict truth, and moved by a strong religious sentiment, satisfies himself with childish beliefs, there is not and cannot be any contradiction between these two desires; the discrepancy exists only objectively, in the region of ideas.
The logic of the feelings also has its illogicalities, but of another sort, and I can only find two: (1) when an isolated tendency, in attaining its end, is the cause of injury or ruin to the whole individual; and (2) when the individual is quite content with his own destruction, as in the case of the “luxury of grief,” which we have studied elsewhere, and whose highest term is the fascination of suicide.
III.
Unstable or polymorphic characters cannot be called “characters” except by an abuse of that word, for there is neither unity, stability, nor possibility of prevision. How will they act? Every fresh moment brings us face to face with another enigma. In fact, we have here to do with the decay of character, and all the specimens given in this group are pathological.
It is needless to describe them, for they are self-evident. Their principal types are to be met with in the hysterical, whose Protean psychology has so often and so thoroughly been studied that we need not dwell on it; in the adventurer, whose history, with its numberless variations, is, in the main, always the same, and may be summarised thus: precocity, insubordination at home or at school, frequent flights, inaptitude for all sustained work; he passes suddenly from enthusiasm to disgust, tries everything in turn and drops it, drifting at the caprice of impulse or circumstance, till some final catastrophe lands him in the prisoner’s dock or the lunatic asylum.
The causes of this instability are either congenital or acquired.
The spasmodic diathesis, as Maudsley calls it, is most usually innate. It is characterised by the various symptoms comprised under the name of degeneration, grouped as physical and psychical stigmata; they are too well known to need enumeration.
The instability acquired in the course of life is left behind by certain maladies, especially injuries or shocks to the brain, and above all, lesions of the frontal lobe. Such is the conclusion resulting from the observations of David Ferrier, Boyer, Lépine, and others. More recently, Allen Starr,[[253]] out of forty-six cases, has ascertained that, in twenty-three, the only symptoms were mental obtuseness, impossibility of attention, irritability, un-coordinated and impulsive acts, absence of voluntary control and the loss of inhibitory power, phenomena specially coinciding with lesions on the left side of the frontal region.
M. Paulhan, in his book on Characters, when studying those whom he calls the unquiet, the nervous, and the contradictory (contrariants), gives several instances; among others, Alfred de Musset, from his own portrait, confirmed by that given by G. Sand. Let us listen to each of them in turn.