SECONDARY AND NORMAL " SELVES. 



283 



and lively Leontlne of the hypnotic condition, who 

 knows all that Leonle does, but speaks of her in the 

 third person ? Or is it not rather the Leonore of 

 a still deeper stage, with her higher intellect and 

 perfect memory of all that she, Leontlne and Leonle 

 have done ? 



By the theory suggested all these difficulties may be 

 solved. They merely illustrate the contention that 

 our ordinary selves are neither our whole selves nor 

 our true selves. They are, as Mr. Myers phrases it, 

 merely that portion of our self which has happened 

 to come to the surface, or which it has paid to 

 [develop into actual consciousness In the course of 

 Evolution. They are our habitual or normal selves, 

 more or less on a par with the secondary selves, and 

 like them, phenomenal. But the Ego includes them 

 all, and this inclusion justifies us in reckoning these 

 phenomena part of ourselves. In it the phenomenal 

 selves unite and combine, and as a beginning of this 

 fusion It is interesting to find traces of coalescence 

 in the higher stages of personalities which at lower 

 stages had seemed exclusive and antagonistic.^ 



§ 24. The way in which the world arises may 

 now be represented as follows. If there are two 

 beings, God and an Ego, capable of interacting, and 

 if thereupon interaction takes place, there will be a 

 reflexion of that interaction presented to or con- 

 ceived by the Ego. And If, for reasons to be sub- 

 sequently elucidated (ch. x. §§ 25, 26), there is an 

 element of non-adaptation and imperfection In this 

 interaction, both factors will appear to the Ego in a 

 distorted shape. Its image of the interaction will 

 not correspond to the reality. And such a distorted 

 image our universe Is, and hence the divine half of 

 ^ Compare Proceedings of the Psychical Society^ vol. iv. p. 529 s.f. 



