"
This seems to me an unusually clear example of two different
levels of personality, inconsistent in their dictates, yet so
well balanced against each other as for a long time to fill the
life with discord and dissatisfaction. At last, not gradually,
but in a sudden crisis, the unstable equilibrium is resolved, and
this happens so unexpectedly that it is as if, to use the
writer's words, "some outside power laid hold."
Professor Starbuck gives an analogous case, and a converse case
of hatred suddenly turning into love, in his Psychology of
Religion, p. 141. Compare the other highly curious instances
which he gives on pp. 137-144, of sudden non-religious
alterations of habit or character. He seems right in conceiving
all such sudden changes as results of special cerebral functions
unconsciously developing until they are ready to play a
controlling part when they make irruption into the conscious
life. When we treat of sudden 'conversion,' I shall make as much
use as I can of this hypothesis of subconscious incubation.
<175> In John Foster's Essay on Decision of Character, there is
an account of a case of sudden conversion to avarice, which is
illustrative enough to quote:--
A young man, it appears, "wasted, in two or three years, a large
patrimony in profligate revels with a number of worthless
associates who called themselves his friends, and who, when his
last means were exhausted, treated him of course with neglect or
contempt.
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