of an hour screwing up my courage to find fault with
some subordinate whom my duty compelled me to reprove, and how often
have I jeered 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 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. 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 {167} 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 fo