A Mind That Found Itself

I


This story is derived from as human a document as ever existed; and,
because of its uncommon nature, perhaps no one thing contributes so
much to its value as its authenticity. It is an autobiography, and
more: in part it is a biography; for, in telling the story of my life,
I must relate the history of another self--a self which was dominant
from my twenty-fourth to my twenty-sixth year. During that period I was
unlike what I had been, or what I have been since. The biographical
part of my autobiography might be called the history of a mental civil
war, which I fought single-handed on a battlefield that lay within the
compass of my skull. An Army of Unreason, composed of the cunning and
treacherous thoughts of an unfair foe, attacked my bewildered
consciousness with cruel persistency, and would have destroyed me, had
not a triumphant Reason finally interposed a superior strategy that
saved me from my unnatural self.

I am not telling the story of my life just to write a book. I tell it
because it seems my plain duty to do so. A narrow escape from death and
a seemingly miraculous return to health after an apparently fatal
illness are enough to make a man ask himself: For what purpose was my
life spared? That question I have asked myself, and this book is, in
part, an answer.