any terror of madness. The invisible entity within us which says "I
am I" can easily be conceived as suddenly awakening out of sleep
and discovering, to its astonishment, that its visible body has
suffered a bewildering transformation.

Such a transformation can be conceived as almost unlimited in
its humorous and disconcerting possibilities. But no such
transformation of the external envelope of the soul, whether into
the form of an animal or a plant or a god, need be conceived of as
necessarily driving us into insanity. The "I am I" would remain the
same in regard to its imagination, instinct, intuition, emotion,
self-consciousness and the rest. It would be only "changed" in regard
to sensation, which is a thing immediately dependent upon the
particular and special senses of the human body.

This is a truth to the reality of which the wandering fancies of
every human child bear ample witness; not to speak of the dreams
of those childlike tribes of the race, who in our progressive
insolence we are pleased to name "uncivilized." The deeper we dig
into the tissue of convoluted impressions that make up our
universe the more vividly do we become aware that our only
redemption from sheer insanity lies in "knowing ourselves"; in
other words, in keeping a drastic and desperate hold upon what, in
the midst of ambiguity and treachery, we are definitely assured of.

And the only thing we are definitely assured of, the only thing
which we really know "on the inner side," and with the kind of
knowledge which is unassailable, is the reality of our soul. We
know this with a vividness completely different from the vividness
of any other knowledge because this is not what we feel or see or
imagine or think but what we _are_. And all feeling, all seeing, all
imagining and all thinking are only attributes of this mysterious
"something" which is our integral self.

To the superficial judgment there is always something weird and
arbitrary about this belief in our own soul. And this apparent
weirdness arises from the fact that our superficial judgments are
the work of reason and sensation arrogating to themselves the
whole field of consciousness.

But directly we bring to bear upon this mass of impressions which
is our "universe" the full rhythmic play of our complete identity
this weirdness and arbitrariness disappear and we realize that we
_are_, not this thought or this sensation or even this stream of
thoughts and sensations, bu