Individuality, personality, and the sense of self are only three different aspects of one and the same thing. They are so many various views of the soul according as we regard it from an intrinsic, an altruistic, or an egoistic standpoint. For by individuality is not meant simply the isolation in a corporeal casing of a small portion of the universal soul of mankind. So far as mind goes, this would not be individuality at all, but the reverse. By individuality we mean that bundle of ideas, thoughts, and daydreams which constitute our separate identity, and by virtue of which we feel each one of us at home within himself. Now man in his mind-development is bound to become more and more distinct from his neighbor. We can hardly conceive a progress so uniform as not to necessitate this. It would be contrary to all we know of natural law, besides contradicting daily experience. For each successive generation bears unmistakable testimony to the fact. Children of the same parents are never exactly like either their parents or one another, and they often differ amazingly from both. In such instances they revert to type, as we say; but inasmuch as the race is steadily advancing in development, such reversion must resemble that of an estate which has been greatly improved since its previous possession. The appearance of the quality is really the sprouting of a seed whose original germ was in some sense coeval with the beginning of things. This mind-seed takes root in some cases and not in others, according to the soil it finds. And as certain traits develop and others do not, one man turns out very differently from his neighbor. Such inevitable distinction implies furthermore that the man shall be sensible of it. Consciousness is the necessary attribute of mental action. Not only is it the sole way we have of knowing mind; without it there would be no mind to know.
Not to be conscious of one's self is, mentally speaking, not to be.
This complex entity, this little cosmos of a world, the "I," has for its very law of existence self-consciousness, while personality is the effect it produces upon the consciousness of others.
But we may push our inquiry a step further, and find in imagination the cause of this strange force. For imagination, or the image-making faculty, may in a certain sense be said to be the creator of the world within. The separate senses furnish it with material, but to it alone is due the building of our castles, on premises of fact or in the air. For there is no impassable gulf between the two. Coleridge's distinction that imagination drew possible pictures and fancy impossible ones, is itself, except as a classification, an impossible distinction to draw; for it is only the inconceivable that can never be. All else is purely a matter of relation. We may instance dreams which are usually considered to rank among the most fanciful creations of the mind. Who has not in his dreams fallen repeatedly from giddy heights and invariably escaped unhurt? If he had attempted the feat in his waking moments he would assuredly have been dashed to pieces at the bottom. And so we say the thing is impossible. But is it? Only under the relative conditions of his mass and the earth's. If the world he happens to inhabit were not its present size, but the size of one of the tinier asteroids, no such disastrous results would follow a chance misstep.
He could there walk off precipices when too closely pursued by bears --if I remember rightly the usual childish cause of the same-- with perfect impunity. The bear could do likewise, unfortunately.
We should have arrived at our conclusion even quicker had we decreased the size both of the man and his world. He would not then have had to tumble actually so far, and would therefore have arrived yet more gently at the foot. This turns out, then, to be a mere question of size. Decrease the scale of the picture, and the impossible becomes possible at once. All fancies are not so easily reducible to actual facts as the one we have taken, but all, perhaps, eventually may be explicable in the same general way. At present we certainly cannot affirm that anything may not be thus explained. For the actual is widening its field every day. Even in this little world of our own we are daily discovering to be fact what we should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the tale of the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more.
Gulliver's travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we traverse the inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually find in Jupiter the land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time country of the Brobdignagians. For men constituted muscularly like ourselves would have to be proportionately small in the big planet and big in the small one. Still stranger things may exist around other suns. In those bright particular stars--which the little girl thought pinholes in the dark canopy of the sky to let the glory beyond shine through--we are finding conditions of existence like yet unlike those we already know. To our groping speculations of the night they almost seem, as we gaze on them in their twinkling, to be winking us a sort of comprehension. Conditions may exist there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplace facts.
There may be "Some Xanadu where Kublai can a stately pleasure dome decree," and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps.
For if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work.
