An extraordinary shock suffices to destroy the artificial structure, and to place woman in the arena to undertake a fight between her unconscious, oppressed nature, and her certainly conscious but unnatural mind. The see-sawing which now begins between the two explains the unusual psychic discontinuity during the hysterical phase, the continual changes of mood, none of which are subject to the control of a dominant, central, controlling nucleus of individuality. It is extraordinary how many contradictions can co-exist in the hysterical. Sometimes they are highly intelligent and able to judge correctly and keenly oppose hypnotism and so forth. Then, again, they are excited by most trivial causes, and are most subject to hypnotic trances. Sometimes they are abnormally chaste, at other times extremely sensual.
All this is no longer difficult to explain. The absolute sincerity, the painful love of truth, the avoidance of everything sexual, the careful judgment, and the strength of will—all these form part of that spurious personality which woman in her passivity has taken upon herself to exhibit to herself and to the world at large. Everything that belongs to her original temperament and her real sense form that "other self" that "unconscious mind" which can delight in obscurities and which is so open to suggestion.
It has been endeavoured to show that in what is known as the "duplex" and "multiplex personality," the "double conscience," the "dual ego," lies one of the strongest arguments against the belief in the soul. As a matter of fact, these phenomena are the very reasons why we ought to believe in a soul. The "dividing up of the personality" is only possible when there never has been a personality, as with woman. All the celebrated cases which Janet has described in his book, "L'Automatisme Psychologique," concern women, not in a single instance man. It is only woman who, minus soul or an intelligible ego, has not the power to become conscious of what is in her; who cannot throw the light of truth on her inmost self; who can by her completely passive inundation by a
