we are, and when we understand others, and what they are, Time and Space and Estrangement will no longer avail against us; they will no longer hinder us from recognition of each other, nor hold us back from the spheres to which we truly belong, and the fulfilment of our real needs and 'desires.

Man is the Magician who whether in dreams or in trance or in actual life can, if he wills it, raise up and give reality to the forms of his desire and his love. It is not necessary for us feverishly to pursue our loved ones through all the fading and dissolving outlines of their future or their past embodiments. They are ours already, in the deepest sense-and one day we shall wake up to know we can call them at any moment to our side; we shall wake up to know that they are ever present and able to manifest themselves to us out of the unseen.

CHAPTER XV

THE MYSTERY OF PERSONALITY

It will have been noticed that throughout this book there has been a tendency to return again and again to the question of what we mean by the Self. As I have said before (see ch. xii., supra), one might very naturally suppose that as the ego underruns all experience, and we cannot make any observation of the world at all except through its activity, the general problem of the nature of the ego would be the first to be attacked, and the very first to be solved; whereas, curiously enough, it seems to be the last! Only towards the conclusion of philosophical speculation does the importance of this problem force itself on men's minds. Nevertheless, I think we may say that in the department of philosophy it is the great main problem which lies before this age for solution; and that one of the greatest services a man can do is-by psychologic study and manifold experience, by poetical expression, especially in lyrical form, and by philosophic thought and investigation-to make clear to himself and the world what he means by the letter 'I,' what he means by his 'self.'

To the unthinking person nothing seems

simpler, more obvious, than his own existenceand hardly needing definition. Yet the least thought shows how complex and elusive this 'self' is. It is one of those cases with which the world teems-a juggle of the open daylight-in which an object appears so perfectly simple, frank, innocent, and without concealment, and yet is really profoundly complex, deliberate, and unfathomable.

1

The most elementary considerations easily illustrate what I mean. When we speak of the ego, do we mean the self of to-day, or of yesterday, or of some years back-or possibly some years in the future when we shall have found the expression now unhappily denied us? Do we mean the self of boyhood, or even of babyhood? or do we mean that of maturity, or of old age? Do we mean the self indicated by the mind alone, or by the spirit, apart from the body? or do we mean that indicated specially by the body, or even (as some folk seem to consider) by the clothes? It would be very puzzling to be asked to place one's finger, so to speak, on any one of these manifestations as really and completely representative. Rather perhaps we should be inclined, if pressed, to say that our real self was something underrunning all these forms-that it required all the expressions, from infancy, through maturity, even to old age, and all the apparatus of body and mind, in order to convey its meaning; and that to pin it down to any particular moment 1See supra, ch. vii. p. 122.

of time, or to any particular phase of the material or spiritual, would be to do it a great injustice.

If so, we seem at once compelled to think of the Self as something greatly larger than any ordinary form of it that we know, as something perhaps on a different plane of being-underrunning, and therefore in a sense beyond, Time; and similarly underrunning, and therefore in a sense beyond, both body and mind. And this all the more, because, as I have said on an earlier page, we all feel that at best much of our real selves remains in life-long defect of expression; and that there are great deeps of the Under-self (as in chapter viii.) which, though organically related to our ordinary consciousness, are still for the most part hidden and unexplored. All, in fact, points to the existence within us of a very profound self, which so far we may justifiably conclude to be much greater than any one known manifestation of it; which requires for its expression the forms of a lifetime; and still stretches on and beyond; which perhaps belongs to another sphere of being-as the ship in the air and the sunlight belongs to another sphere than the hull buried deep in the water.

But we may go further in our exploration of the "abysmal deeps." We have once or twice in the foregoing chapters alluded to the possibility of the self dividing into two personalities, or even more. We have supposed, for instance, that at death the psychic organism may possibly split up some more terrestrial portion remaining

operant and active on the earth-plane, and some other portion removing to a subtler and more ethereal region. Are we we may ask-and those others who propound the same ideas talking nonsense in doing so? Is it anyhow possible for a self to be active in two bodies or in two places at the same time? It may indeed seem impossible and absurd-until we envisage the actual facts; but when we do so, when we study the facts of the alternation of personalities, so much in evidence at the present time, when we find that two or more personalities, or coherent bodies of consciousness, may not only succeed each other in one human organism, but may simultaneously be active in the same,' when we find that there is such a thing as 'bilocation,' and that the apparition of a person may come and deliver a message while the original person is far away and otherwise engaged, when we notice carefully our own internal psychology and find that we not unfrequently "talk to ourselves" and in other ways behave as two persons in one body-we see that the absurdity or unlikelihood of the suggestion may not by any means be so great as supposed, and that we may after all be forced to largely remodel our conception of what Personality is.2

1 See note at end of chapter vi.

2 See, for instance, Homer's Odyssey, bk. xi., lines 601 et seq., where Odysseus speaks with the ghost of Hercules in Hades; but it is explained that Hercules himself is in Heaven:

"Then in his might I beheld huge Hercules, phantom terrific, Phantom I say, for the hero himself is among the immortals."