THE popular interest in scientific truth has always had its
hidden spring in a desire for the marvelous. The search for
the philosopher's stone has done as much for chemistry as the
legend of the elixir of life for exploration and geographical
discovery. From the excitements of these suggestions of the
occult, the world settled down into a reasonable understanding
of the facts of which they were but the enlarged and grotesque
shadows.

So it has been with physics and physiology, and so also,
preeminently, with the science of mental life. Mesmerism,
hypnotism, the facts of the alteration, the multiplicity, and
the annihilation of personality have each brought us their
moments of pleasurable terror, and passed thus into the field
of general interest. But science can accept no broken chains.
For all the thrill of mystery, we may not forget that the
hypnotic state is but highly strung attention,--at the last
turn of the screw,--and that the alternation of personality is
after all no more than the highest power of variability of
mood. In regard to the annihilation of the sense of personality,
it may be said that no connection with daily experience is at
first apparent. Scientists, as well as the world at large,
have been inclined to look on the loss of the sense of personality
as pathological; and yet it may be maintained that it is
nevertheless the typical form of those experiences we ourselves
regard as the most valuable.

The loss of personality! In that dread thought there lies, to
most of us, all the sting of death and the victory of the grave.
It seems, with such a fate in store, that immortality were