which
appear so often in the papers. Nevertheless I did love her
passionately, and in some ways she did deserve it.

"The queer thing was the sudden and unexpected way in which it all
stopped. I was going to my work after breakfast one morning, thinking
as usual of her and of my misery, when, just as if some outside power
laid hold of me, I found myself turning round and almost running to my
room, where I immediately got out all the relics of her which I
possessed, including some hair, all her notes and letters and
ambrotypes on glass. The former I made a fire of, the latter I
actually crushed beneath my heel, in a sort of fierce joy of revenge
and punishment. I now loathed and despised her altogether, and as for
myself I felt as if a load of disease had suddenly been removed from
me. That was the end. I never spoke to her or wrote to her again in
all the subsequent years, and I have never had a single moment of
loving thought towards one for so many months entirely filled my heart.
In fact, I have always rather hated her memory, though now I can see
that I had gone unnecessarily far in that direction. At any rate, from
that happy morning onward I regained possession of my own proper soul,
and have never since fallen into any similar trap."

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