and the consciousness has about it a touch of the uncanny. Hitherto
he has been aware only of matter; he now first realizes mind.
Unwarned, unprepared, he is suddenly ushered before being, and
stands awe-struck in the presence of--himself.

If the introduction to his own identity was startling, there is
nothing reassuring in the feeling that this strange acquaintanceship
must last. For continue it does. It becomes an unsought intimacy he
cannot shake off. Like to his own shadow he cannot escape it.
To himself a man cannot but be at home. For years this alter ego
haunts him, for he imagines it an idiosyncrasy of his own, a morbid
peculiarity he dare not confide to any one, for fear of being
thought a fool. Not till long afterwards, when he has learned to
live as a matter of course with his ever-present ghost, does he
discover that others have had like familiars themselves.

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,