outline
which we are accustomed to take for granted when thinking of ourselves.
To ordinary common sense nothing seems more obvious than that we know
most that is to be known about our friend John Smith, with whom we used
to go to school and who has since developed into a stolid British man
of business with few ideas and a tendency toward conservatism. John is
a stalwart, honest, commonplace kind of person, of whom brilliant
things were never prophesied and who has never been guilty of any. His
wife and children go to church on Sundays. John seldom goes himself
because it bores him, but he likes to know that religion is being
attended to, and he does not want to hear that his clergyman is
attempting any daring flights. He has a good-natured contempt for
clergymen in general because he feels somehow that, like women, they
have to be treated with half-fictitious reverence, but that they do not
count for much in the ordinary affairs of life; they are a sort of
third sex. But, according to the newer psychology, this matter-of-fact
Englishman is not what he seems even to himself. His true being is
vastly greater than he knows, and vastly greater than the world will
ever know. It belongs not to the material plane of existence but to
the plane of eternal reality. This larger self is in all probability a
perfect and eternal spiritual being integral to the being of God. His
surface self, his Philistine self, is the incarnation of some portion
of that true eternal self which is one with God. The dividing line
between the surface self and the other self is not the definite
demarcation it appears to be. To the higher self it does not exist.
To us it must seem that to all intents and purposes the two selves in a
man are two separate beings, but that is not so; they are one, although
the lower, owing to its limitations, cannot realise the fact. If my
readers want to know whether I think that the higher self is conscious
of the lower, I can only answer, Yes, I do, but I cannot prove it;
probabilities point that way. What I want to insist upon here is that
we are greater than we seem, that we have a higher self, and that our
limited consciousness does not involve a separate individuality.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds