mations, because each of them is so rapidly
succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim
grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the
individual's life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to
wonder at it, as a "transformation."

These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may
be divided. A less complete way is the simultaneous coexistence of two
or more different groups of aims, of which one practically holds the
right of way and instigates activity, whilst the others are only pious
wishes, and never practically come to anything. Saint Augustine's
aspirations to a purer life, in our last lecture, were for a while an
example. Another would be the President in his full pride of office,
wondering whether it were not all vanity, and whether the life of a
wood-chopper were not the wholesomer destiny. Such fleeting
aspirations are mere velleitates, whimsies. They exist on the remoter
outskirts of the mind, and the real self of the man, the centre of his
energies, is occupied with an entirely different system. As life goes
on, there is a constant change of our interests, and a consequent
change of place in our systems of ideas, from more central to more
peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central parts of
consciousness. I remember, for instance, that one evening when I was a
youth, my father read aloud from a Boston newspaper that part of Lord
Gifford's will which founded these four lectureships. At that time I
did not think of being a teacher of philosophy, and what I listened to
was as remote from my own life as if it related to the planet Mars.
Yet here I am, with the Gifford system part and parcel of my very self,
and all my energies, for the time being, devoted to successfully
identifying myself with it. My soul stands now planted in what once
was for it a practically unreal object, and speaks from it as from its
proper habitat and centre.

When I say "Soul," you need not take me in the ontological sense unless
you prefer to; for although ontological language is instinctive in such
matters, yet Buddhists or Humians can perfectly well describe the facts
in the phenomenal terms which are their favorites. For them the soul
is only a succession of fields of consciousness: yet there is found in
each field a part, or sub-field, which figures as focal and contains
the excitement, and from which, as from a centre, the aim seems