Vol 3 Section 0044

Inborn nature is Character, by itself, in the brutes—the tiger, the dove, the fox, etc; inborn nature and the modifying Conscience, working together, make Character in Man.

Jekyll & Hyde are correct, insofar as each had a separate & distinct nature-&-conscience character.

But the Baltimore & other cases show that the two persons in a man have no command over each other (as falsely pretended in Jekyll & H.; the two persons in a man do not even know each other, are not aware of each other’s existence, never heard of each other, have never even suspected each other’s existence.

And so, I was wrong in the beginning; that other person is not one’s conscience; and Stevenson was wrong, for the two persons in a man are wholly unknown to each other, & can never in this world communicate with each other in any way.

Now I come to my new notion.

The French have lately shown (apparently) that the other person is in command during the somnambulic sleep; that it has a memory of its own & can recal its acts when hypnotised & thrown again into that sleep; but that you have no memory of its acts. You were not present at all.

Very good. That is distinct duality. To this arrangement I wish to add this detail—that we have a spiritualized self which can detach itself & go wandering off upon affairs of its own—for recreation, perhaps. I am not acquainted with my double, my partner in duality, the other & wholly independent personage who resides in me—& whom I will call Watson, for I do not know his name although he most certainly has one, & signs it in a hand which has no resemblance to mine when he takes possession of our partnership body & goes off on mysterious trips—but I am acquainted (dimly) with my spiritualized self; & I know that it & I are one, because we have a common memory: when I wake, mornings, I remember what it (that is, I) have been doing, & whither it (that is, I) have been wandering in the course of what I took to be unrealities, and called Dreams, for want of a truthfuller name.

Now, as I take it, my finer self, my dream self is merely my ordinary body & mind freed from clogging flesh & become a spiritualized body & mind, & with the ordinary powers of both enlarged in all particulars a little, & in some particulars prodigiously.

For instance, to the ordinary vision the vision of the X-ray is added,—the invisible ray—& I am able to use it, & see through opaque bodies. You have an instance of this in the biography of Agassiz. In a dream he saw through the stone that contained a fossil shell, & woke up & drew a picture of that shell; & when he broke open the stone, his picture was correct.

Waking, I move slowly; but in my dreams my unhampered spiritualized body flies to the ends of the earth in the millionth of a second. Seems to—& I believe, does.

Waking, I cannot form in my mind the minutely-detailed & living features of a face & form & a costume which I have never seen, but my dream-self can do all this with the accuracy & vividness of a camera.

Waking, I cannot create in my mind a picture of a room & furniture which I have not recently seen or have never seen; but my dream self can do this, to the minutest detail.

My dream self meets friends, strangers, the dead, the living—all sorts & kinds of dream-people—& holds both rational & irrational conversations with them upon subjects which (often) have not been in my waking mind, & which (in some cases) could never have been in it. And these people say things to me which affect me in all ways: pleasurably, sadly, offensively, humiliatingly. They make me cry, they make me laugh, they make me rage, they make me fight, they make me run, they make me insult the weak, they make me cringe to the strong & swallow the insults of the insolent. And I am always myself, not that other person who is in me— Watson.

I do not actually make immense excursions in my spiritualized person. I go into awful dangers; I am in battles & trying to hide from bullets; I fall over cliffs (& my unspiritualized body starts); I get lost in caves & in the corridors of monstrous hotels; I appear before company in my shirt; I come on the platform with no subject to talk about, & not a note; I go to unnamable places, I do unprintable things; & every vision is vivid, every sensation—physical as well as moral—is real.

When my physical body dies, my dream-body will doubtless continue its excursions & activities without change, forever.

In my dream last night [Jan 6] I was suddenly in the presence of a negro wench who sitting in a grassy open country under a shed, with her left arm resting on the arm of one of those long park-sofas that are made of broad slats with cracks between & a curve-over back. She was very vivid to me—round black face, shiny black eyes, thick lips, very white & regular teeth showing through her smile. She was about 22, & plump—not fleshy, not fat, merely rounded & plump; & good-natured & not at all bad looking. She had but one garment on—a coarse tow-linen shirt that reached from her neck to her ancles without break. She sold me a pie; a

SLC used mourning border for most letters from Susy’s death on, then from Livy’s death on.