38 SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 



imagines in liis own mind that everybody else is 

 thinking in his soul, "This is Tittlebat Titmouse's 

 deliberate opinion." But everybody else in that 

 little group of talkers is thinking not in the least 

 about Tittlebat Titmouse and his private lucubra- 

 tions ; they are all thinking about Lord Wolseley 

 and the Egyptian expedition — or about them- 

 selves. We each unconsciously exaggerate to 

 ourselves our own relative importance as parts of 

 this great complex whole which we call the world; 

 we consider ourselves the centre of the universe 

 to ever3'body else, whereas we are really only the 

 centre for our o" i little restricted individuality. 

 Oddly enough, truly great men and women are 

 generally quite devoid of tiie faintest shadow of 

 such self-consciousness ; they are so filled with the 

 subject which holds them for the moment that 

 they forget themselves in the passing interest of 

 the conversation. To be sure, there have been a 

 few great self-conscious geniuses — Byron, Lord 

 Lytton, Victor Hugo, and half a dozen more of 

 the same kidney ; but it is always noticeable that 

 their influence is greatest with their own contem- 

 poraries, and fades away slowly into nothing as 

 subsequent generations gradually" forget them. It 

 is the great self-forgetting and self-suppressing 

 geniuses of the world — the Homers, the Aris- 

 totles, the Virgils, the Dantes, the Shakspeares, 

 and the Michael Angelos — whose fame lives on 



