It has often been noted that people who suffer from apoplexy may have peculiar affections of their memory. This may include such striking peculiarities as the forgetting of the uses of things, though their names are retained, or more commonly, the forgetting of names while the knowledge of uses remains. The one form of memory disturbance is called "Word Amnesia;" the other is called "Apraxia." It is on { 264} record that a person suffering from a hemorrhage in the brain has lost completely the use of a language acquired later in life, though the memory of the native language, long since fallen into disuse, was perfectly retained. One apoplectic woman patient who had left Germany before she was ten years of age, and who had lived in America until she was fifty, forgot absolutely the English she knew so well and had to set herself to work to learn it over again, though her German came back to her very naturally. These are wonderful peculiarities of memory-pathology that show how much this faculty is dependent on the physical basis of mind and upon the cellular constituents of the brain.
It is not surprising, then, to find that lapses of memory may occur and that, as a consequence, so many of the facts that ordinarily enable us to identify ourselves as particular persons may be in abeyance. That apparently a secondary personality asserts itself,--though not in the sense that there is ever another ego present, another mind or another will,--practically all experts in psychology and nervous diseases are now ready to concede. There are, however, involved in this question a number of important problems of responsibility that have not as yet been entirely worked out, and with regard to which prudent persons are withholding their judgment. Each case must be studied entirely on its own merits, with a leaning in favour of the criminal or patient, in case there are evidences in past life of serious disturbances of mentality, though only of very temporary nature, or if there is a strong nervous or mental heredity.
The notion of the possibility of a secondary personality asserting itself is a much older idea than it is usually thought to be. When Stevenson wrote _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, the immediate widespread popularity of the book was not due to recent psychological studies on dual personality and popular interest in a rare but striking mental phenomenon, but rather to the traditional feeling, long existent, of the possibility of two personalities in almost any individual. The other law in his members, of which St. Paul speaks, is an expression of this feeling, and its recognition was not original with him since it is after all a phenomenon at least as old { 265} as the existence of conscience. It is one of the basic ideas in religious feeling. Nearly everyone has something of the consciousness that there is in him possibilities for evil that somehow he escapes, and yet the escape is not entirely due to his own will power. There is here the mystery of temptation, of free will and of grace as the drama of conscience works itself out in every human being. At times the evil inclination seems to get beyond the power of the will and a period of irresponsibility sets in. Needless to say, the adjudication of how much may be due to the habitual neglect of repression of lower instincts is extremely difficult, and this constitutes the problem which the alienist must try to solve. In the meantime there is need in many mysterious cases where secondary personality may play a rôle, of the exercise of a larger Christian charity than that hitherto practised. Pretenders may succeed in deceiving only too often, but in the past not a few innocent individuals have been held to a responsibility for actions for which they were not quite accountable.