An unkind look or word has
availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell,
while, on the platform, opposition makes me speak my best."[89]
[89] Annie Besant: an Autobiography, p. 82.
This amount of inconsistency will only count as amiable weakness;
but a stronger degree of heterogeneity may make havoc of the
subject's life. There are persons whose existence is little more
than a series of zig-zags, as now one tendency and now another
gets the upper hand. Their spirit wars with their flesh, they
wish for incompatibles, wayward impulses interrupt their most
deliberate plans, and their lives are one long drama of
repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.
Heterogeneous personality has been explained as the result of
inheritance--the traits of character of incompatible and
antagonistic ancestors are supposed to be preserved alongside of
each other.[90] This explanation may pass for what it is
worth--it certainly needs corroboration. But whatever the cause
of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the extreme examples
of it in the psychopathic temperament, of which I spoke in my
first lecture.
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