The diseases of personality / by Th. Ribot ; tr. from the French by J. Fitzgerald.
- Théodule-Armand Ribot
- Date:
- 1887
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The diseases of personality / by Th. Ribot ; tr. from the French by J. Fitzgerald. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![by itself alone makes known to us the degree of contraction or relaxation of the muscles, the position of our members, etc. I purposely omit the organic sensa- tions of the genital apparatus : to that subject we will return in treating of the affective bases of personality. Let the reader for a moment consider the - multitude and the diversity of the vital actions just now summarily classed under their most general heads, and he will form, some conception of what is meant by the' phrase physical bases of personality. Being ever in action, they make up by their continuousness for their weakness as psychic elements. And then too, when the higher forms of the mental life disappear, -these organic sen- sations come forward in the first rank. A very clear instance of this is found in dreams, whether pleasurable or other- wise, prompted by the organic sensations -—erotic dreams, nightmare, etc. We are even able to assign with some degree of precision to each organ its special part in dreams: the sensation of weight seems specially attached to digestive and respi- ratory affections ; dreams of struggling and fighting accompany affections of the heart. Sometimes pathological sensa- tions, unnoticed in wakefulness, make their impression during sleep, and thus become premonitory symptoms. Armand de Villeneuve dreams that he is bitten on the leg by a dog ; a few days after, the leg is attacked by a cancerous ulcer. Gessner imagines during sleep that he is bitten on the left side by a serpent: shortly afterward, an anthrax appeared at the same spot, from which he died. Macario dreams that he has a violent pain in the throat, but awakes entirely well; a few hours later he was suffering from a severe amygdalitis. A man sees in his dream an epileptic: a little while later he has an attack of epilepsy. A woman dreams of speaking to a man who cannot make her any reply, being dumb: on awaking she could not speak a word. In all these cases we recognize as facts the obscure beckonings from the depths of the organism to the nerve centers ; but the conscious life, with its hubbub and its constant bustle, suppresses instead of de- veloping them. It is plain that psychology, by giving exclusive credit for so long a time to the data of consciousness, must needs have cast into the shade the organic elements of personality : physicians, on the other hand, were under a professional obliga- tion to give weight to the latter. The doctrine of temperaments, as ancient as medicine itself, a doctrine that is ever criticised, ever worked over again,* is the vague, fluctuating expression of the prin- cipal types of the physical personality, as given by experience, with the chief psychic traits that result from it. Hence the few psychologists who have studied the sev- eral types of character have looked here for their basis. Thus did Kant more than a century ago. If the determination of the temperaments could be made on a scientific basis, the question of personality would be greatly simplified. In the mean time, the first thing to do is to rid ourselves of the preconceived opinion that personality is something mv'sterious, heaven-descended, without antecedents in nature. If we simply consider the animals around us, we shall have no difficulty in seeing that the difference between the horse and the mule, the goose and the duck, their principle of in- dividuation, can come only out of a dif- ference of organization and of adaptation to environment, with the psychic conse- quences thence resulting, and that, with- in the same species, the differences be- tween one individual and another must have come about originally in the same way. There is no reason in the nature of things for classing man separately : the simple fact is that in man the very great development of the intellectual and affec- tive faculties produces an illusion and conceals the fact of origination. Taking physical personality to mean simply a sense of the state of the organ- ismi—a mode of existence in which, on the hypothesis, all consciousness, clear or ob- scure, original or recalled, of any outer fact is absent, we ask. Does such a thing exist in nature ? Clearly not in the higher animals ; and it can be posited only as a highly artificial abstraction. But it is pro- bable that this form of psychic individual- ity, which is simply the consciousness the animal has of its own body, exists in the lower species, though not in the lowest. In the lowest species—instance any * Quite recently Henle {Anthropologisclic \'or- triige [1887], pp. 103,130) has endeavored to refer the temperaments to the different degrees of activitj', or tonus, of the sensorial and motor nerves. When this degree is a low one, we have the phlegmatic temperament. In a higher degree, with rapid ex- haustion of the nerves, we have the sanguineous temperament. The choleric temperament also pre- supposes a high ionits^ but with persistence of ner- vous action. The melancholic temperament can only be defined by the quantity of the nervous action: it presupposes a high tonusv^\\y\ a tendency to emotions rather than to will activity.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21074409_0015.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
