326 Science Religion and Reality 



to suppress his mere individuality in order that he may get a wider 

 personality of the group or nation to which he belongs. The 

 great statesman speaks for an entire nation, because he is able to 

 understand the various needs of the individuals in it. He does not 

 lose his personality thereby, he does not efface it, he makes it all the 

 more real. On the other hand, the self-centred paranoiac who 

 has to be shut up in an asylum is convinced of his own greatness, 

 believes himself to be a reincarnation of Napoleon or of the Messiah, 

 or even God himself, and, corresponding to his intense feeling of 

 individuality and difference from others, we find a depressing 

 bankruptcy in his mental make-up. The great scientist is he who 

 keeps clear of fanaticism and crankiness by continuous moral effort, 

 by effacing his own peculiarities, wishes, desires, and interests in 

 the matter, in order to get as unbiased a view as possible of the facts. 

 He has the greater task of effacing, not only the individuality of 

 nationality, but of humanity itself, and yet in that process we cannot 

 say that he is losing personality in the true sense of the word. 

 Personality, then, ought to be distinguished from individuality. 

 Individuality is a mere difference from others. Personality is a 

 process of development, in which we have parallel processes of 

 individuation and assimilation. The man of personality gives out 

 to the world around him and also absorbs it in himself, identifying 

 himself as far as possible with others and sympathising with their 

 aims. Yet, in the end, even personality must go, because in the 

 universe there is no room for merely separate persons. Ultimately 

 there can only be one complete person, he who is completely self- 

 sufficing, and he can only be completely self-sufficing if he has 

 complete knowledge and power over his environment, and there- 

 fore he must extend throughout that environment, and must be 

 the totality of Reality itself. The only complete person is the 

 Absolute or God, and progress towards personality in individuals 

 seems to be intellectual, along the path of reason. One can see 

 it as a union, ever closer and deeper, with the spirit of the universe, 

 as identification to a greater and greater extent with all that is 

 highest in the universe, and that is the intellectual counterpart of 

 what we mean by the mystical experience. 



One might perhaps do more justice to this problem of the 

 mystical by admitting that there is a lower and a higher form of 

 mysticism. The lower form is on the plane of immediate feeling, 

 unmediated by thought. Such is the experience of the athlete. 



