led me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at
myself for a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when
shrinking from blaming some lad or lass for doing their work
badly. An unkind look or word has availed to make me shrink
myself as a snail into its shell, while, on the platform,
opposition makes me speak my best.

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
zigzags, 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.

Whatever the cause of heterogeneous personality may be, we find the
extreme examples of it in the psychopathic temperament. All writers
about that temperament make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their
descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to
ascribe that temperament to a man at all. A _degenere superieur_ is
simply a man of sensibility in many directions, who finds more
difficulty than is common in keeping his spiritual house in order and
running his furrow straight, because his feelings and impulses are too
keen and too discrepant mutually. In the haunting and insistent ideas,
in the irrational impulses, the morbid scruples, dreads, and inhibitions
which beset the psychopathic temperament when it is thoroughly
pronounced, we have exquisite examples of heterogeneous personality.
Bunyan had an obsession of the words, "Sell Christ for this, sell him
for that, sell him, sell him!" which would run through his mind a
hundred times together, until one day out of breath with retorting, "I
will not, I will not," he impulsively said, "Let him go if he will," and
this loss of the battle kept him in despair for over a year. The lives
of the saints are full of such blasphemous obsessions, ascribed
invariably to the direct agency of Satan.

St. Augustine's case is a classic example of discordant personality. You
all remember his half-pagan, half-Christian bringing up at Carthage, his
emigration to Rome and Milan, his adoption of Manicheism and subsequent
skepticism, and his restless search for truth and purity of life; and
finally how, distracted by the struggle