All power ultimately comes from God; he alone has absolute sovereignty. The American Constitution is more nearly perfect than others because it recognizes the existence of the Creator and of God-given rights of individuals, which the government is bound to respect and protect. Society is based on communication, which is itself a form of mathematical action. Why have we the power of speech, but to communicate our thoughts? What is ordinarily called communicating one’s thoughts actually amounts to influencing the actions of another, although sometimes a deeper communication of souls is approached. What is expressed is a judgment about certain human experiences, certain sensations or emotions or desires. That is a moral feeling; and a judgment is made that ascribes a property where people consider what is fitting to approve or conducive to social stability. If nobody was suffered to speak till one had something to say, what pains everybody would take to know something independent of the speaker’s opinions, desires, or feelings. 

Our desire for anything is always in proportion to the difficulty which attends the attainment of it. intellect life begins with temporal perception, in which the self-separates experiences from each other and distinguishes itself from them. The falling apart of a life moment into two qualitatively different things, of which the one withdraws before the other and nonetheless is held onto memory. By assuming that a part of our psychic function is unexplainable through purposive ideas, we ignore the realms of determinism in our mental life.  Do not forget one thing concerning your conduct in life. It is impossible to compose nonsense intentionally and arbitrarily. Mathematical consideration makes possible the use of means: one produces a phenomenon which will be followed in a certain repeatable series by a desired phenomenon which cannot be directly reproduced. This makes the pursuit of instinctual satisfaction more efficient. To suppose that a cause is something more than the antecedent of an invariable consequent is to suppose that we might know all the unfailing regularities of nature and yet have no conception of a causal connection.  

The omnipotence of God resides simply in the fact that whenever he wills anything, his will is immediately and invariably followed by the existence of its object. Experience (coupled with a kind of negative insight) enables us to see that the causal relation is merely one of sequence; but on what authority do we import the notion of invariableness into this sequence? Perhaps some people suffer from a form of epilepsy which does not manifest itself in fits, as the general cases do, but rather in peculiar psychic actions which may last for a few minutes, hours, or perhaps for weeks, months or years. There was once a patient he had shot at someone’s car, burned a railroad station, a church, and several barns. He would run away from home, his wife, and children, and wander off, scot-free, when one of these fits of psychic epilepsy afflicted him. He was an editor of a journal and newspaper, a man of considerable intelligence and refinement. During one of his fits, he ran away from his country, and when he came to himself, he was quite surprised to find himself in American and did not have the least idea how he got here.  

Previous experience told him, however, what his condition meant and upon reporting it to the physicians, he sent a cable to his wife and returned him. He gave us various details about himself, the hospital where he found himself last, his former doctor, all of which we were soon able to corroborate. He had what he called a fugue or poriomania. Causes like this have been reported where the person disappeared for as many as three years. Indeed, they are not as rare as you may suppose. Mystery vanished from the will: will is an amalgam of desire and the belief that one has it in one’s power to realize the desire; there is no further, indefinable operator in their voluntary actions. Denials of the identity of will and desire is what causes a psychic epilepsy. I went to bed disheartened and thoroughly disgusted with the whole affair. At about four o’clock in the morning, I awoke and made a supreme effort to dismiss it from my mind, but in vain. When people suffer from psychic epilepsy, they may desire what they do not will, and will what they do not desire. Everyone congratulated diagnosis me on my cleaver diagnosis, and I was greatly elated. 

The superintendent assured me that I had all good reason to be proud of myself.  I was simply there to see that there was no confusion, that things were carried out properly. There were often forest fires near the hospital and on many occasions, we had to go out and check them lest they reached our buildings. The particular scene was on a Friday; there was a big fire near the hospital and we had to send out as many doctors and nurses as we could possibly spare to help control it. I was chatting with a physician who was with me in the same capacity. The fire was consuming a good deal of scrub pine; and now and then, an attendant would succeed in shooting one of the rabbits that were fleeing from the brush wood. This may seem strange to you, but that is exactly the way the mind works unconsciously. When the types of situations are looked at more carefully, the opposition is seen to lie between desire and desire, and to be terminated by the desire upon which action immediately depends. 

Unlawful desires are punished after the effect of enjoying; but impossible desires are punished in the desire itself. The examination of consciousness, which provides data for the philosophy of mind is not conducted by consciousness. Entities are having being multiplied beyond necessity and, in this case, beyond possibility. Consciousness is not a surveyor of the mind’s various states as they occur; rather, it is constituted by them. To suppose that the same individual mind could exist at the same time in two different states, one of them an object to the other is what produces this psychic epilepsy. Basically, a person is born with fully matured powers and a completely blank mind. Let that individual be allowed a single sensation. This will be one’s total consciousness. Let a second sensation be added and let one be made to recall the first, one will then come to a recognition of something different from either—of oneself as their common subject. The conviction that humans exist with an absolute identity through time is intuitive and irresistible; only the circumstances in which it arises afford matter for inquiry. 

This identity is the prerogative of our mind; some sort of identity of the body is associated with it in our ordinary ideas about the sameness of person. We need to determine what drew this offender to the area, was it the victim or the building?  His general problems were to explain how he came to know of the existence of an external, physical World and to specify the precise content of this knowledge. He was very conscious of the danger of question-begging assumptions; he maintained that at every turn he took externality for granted, and that all of his language implies it. He needed to be reminded that he had long ago passed the years of youth, he is no longer a young man no matter how much he spends on a plastic surgery face mask, and hair plugs, and that stealing the identity of a young man and trying to kill him will not allow him to recapture his youth. What the motive was that lead this man to this memory failure is strange and puzzling, but he surely suffers from psychic epilepsy. His youth has come and gone and he cannot keep harassing this young man and trying to rob him of his life and identity. Despair will drive to anything an individual whose sense of shame is stronger than that of guilt. This man expects to be sneered at and he thinks it is the fault of his elevated situation, and not of himself.