Perhaps the psychologists of the book will find fault with my way of using the phrase, "disassociation of personality." I know their use of it, yet am compelled to use it in my own way in default of a better phrase.
And now we come to disassociation of personality. We never have this sense of falling when we are wide awake.
"What is a personality? Is it another word for ghost?" asked Peter.
"I DO know what personality is, but it's hard to explain," said the Story Girl, relenting.
It is true that, under existing conditions, a few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their personality more or less completely.
Indeed, so completely has man's personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man's property with far more severity than offences against his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship.
Beneath his painful shyness something was growing up within him, and obscurely he realised his
personality. But at times it gave him odd surprises; he did things, he knew not why, and afterwards when he thought of them found himself all at sea.
Suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me.
The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also.
Besides, in the little girl everything was still in the future, while Seryozha was by now almost a
personality, and a
personality dearly loved.
To be all day with them in the open air, to sleep at night under their roof, had seemed the supreme joy of life, and had led to that abandonment of personality that is a possible prelude to love.
In time his slender personality faded, the scene that he had evoked endured.
"But this is hardly the place to enter on a story of that kind," he observed, looking round at the room with a faint smile as attractive as the rest of his rustic but well-bred personality.
As to the Captain, I was struck on closer view by the perfect correctness of his personality. Clothes, slight figure, clear-cut, thin, sun-tanned face, pose, all this was so good that it was saved from the danger of banality only by the mobile black eyes of a keenness that one doesn't meet every day in the south of France and still less in Italy.
He was like those saintly men whose
personality is lost in the contemplation of their faith.
