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PERSONALITY, LOCATION OF
A writer in The Atlantic Monthly says:
The spinal cord runs along the back, with all its ganglia; the weight of the brain is well behind; yet we are not there. In other words, the curious thing is that we feel ourselves to be, not in the region where impressions are received and answered in the brain, and spinal cord, but where they first meet the nerve-extremities. We seem to inhabit not the citadel, but the outer walls. At the point of peripheral expansion of the nerves of sense, where the outer forces begin to be apprehended by us as inner—“in front,” where the fingers feel, and the nose smells and the eyes see—there, if anywhere, we find ourselves to be.
I have often been interested to notice whereabouts on our bodily surface another animal looks to find us. The man or even the little child, looks at the face. Is it because the voice issues thence? Yet it is the eyes, rather than the mouth that is watched. Is it because the expression, the signal-station for the changing moods, is there more than elsewhere? A dog, also, invariably looks up into the face. So does a bird, notwithstanding the fact that the food comes from the hand. Why does he not consider the “I,” so far as his needs are concerned, to lie in the part that feeds him? But no; he cocks his head to one side, and directs his lustrous little eye straight to our own, in order to establish what communion he can with the very “him” of his master and friend.
It is hardly less pathetic than our own human efforts to pierce, by the searching penetration of eyes, to the real personality of each other. We never succeed.
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Personality, Multiplex—See [Multiple Consciousness].
Personality Superior to Misfortune—See [Misfortune, Superiority to].
Perspective—See [Point of View].