Sometimes this dawn of consciousness is preceded by a long twilight of soul-awakening; but sometimes, upon more sensitive and subtler natures, the light breaks with all the suddenness of a sunrise at the equator, revealing to the mind's eye an unsuspected world of self within. But in whatever way we may awake to it, the sense of personality, when first realized, appears already, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, full grown in the brain. From the moment when we first remember ourselves we seem to be as old as we ever seem to others afterwards to become. We grow, indeed, in knowledge, in wisdom, in experience, as our years increase, but deep down in our heart of hearts we are still essentially the same. To be sure, people pay us more deference than they did, which suggests a doubt at times whether we may not have changed; small boys of a succeeding generation treat us with a respect that causes us inwardly to smile, as we think how little we differ from them, if they but knew it.
For at bottom we are not conscious of change from that morning, long ago, when first we realized ourselves. We feel just as young now as we felt old then. We are but amused at the world's discrimination where we can detect no difference.
Every human being has been thus "twice born": once as matter, once as mind. Nor is this second birth the birthright only of mankind.
All the higher animals probably, possibly even the lower too, have experienced some such realization of individual identity. However that may be, certainly to all races of men has come this revelation; only the degree in which they have felt its force has differed immensely. It is one thing to the apathetic, fatalistic Turk, and quite another matter to an energetic, nervous American. Facts, fancies, faiths, all show how wide is the variance in feelings.
With them no introspective [greek]cnzhi seauton overexcites the consciousness of self. But with us; as with those of old possessed of devils, it comes to startle and stays to distress. Too apt is it to prove an ever-present, undesirable double. Too often does it play the part of uninvited spectre at the feast, whose presence no one save its unfortunate victim suspects. The haunting horror of his own identity is to natures far less eccentric than Kenelm Chillingly's only too common a curse. To this companionship, paradoxical though it sound, is principally due the peculiar loneliness of childhood. For nothing is so isolating as a persistent idea which one dares not confide.
And yet,--stranger paradox still,--was there ever any one willing to exchange his personality for another's? Who can imagine foregoing his own self? Nay, do we not cling even to its outward appearance? Is there a man so poor in all that man holds dear that he does not keenly resent being accidentally mistaken for his neighbor? Surely there must be something more than mirage in this deep-implanted, widespread instinct of human race.
But however strong the conviction now of one's individuality, is there aught to assure him of its continuance beyond the confines of its present life? Will it awake on death's morrow and know itself, or will it, like the body that gave it lodgment, disintegrate again into indistinguishable spirit dust? Close upon the heels of the existing consciousness of self treads the shadow-like doubt of its hereafter. Will analogy help to answer the grewsome riddle of the Sphinx? Are the laws we have learned to be true for matter true also for mind? Matter we now know is indestructible; yet the form of it with which we once were so fondly familiar vanishes never to return.
Is a like fate to be the lot of the soul? That mind should be capable of annihilation is as inconceivable as that matter should cease to be. Surely the spirit we feel existing round about us on every side now has been from ever, and will be for ever to come.
But that portion of it which we each know as self, is it not like to a drop of rain seen in its falling through the air? Indistinguishable the particle was in the cloud whence it came; indistinguishable it will become again in the ocean whither it is bound. Its personality is but its passing phase from a vast impersonal on the one hand to an equally vast impersonal on the other. Thus seers preached in the past; so modem science is hinting to-day. With us the idea seems the bitter fruit of material philosophy; by them it was looked upon as the fairest flower of their faith. What is dreaded now as the impious suggestion of the godless four thousand years ago was reverenced as a sacred tenet of religion.
