rational beings, by passing beyond the limits which mark us off as
separate individuals. Separate individuality, we may say, is the bar
which prevents us from realising our true privileges as persons.[50]
And so the mystic interprets very literally that maxim of our Lord, in
which many have found the fundamental secret of Christianity: "He that
will save his life--his soul, his personality--shall lose it; and he
that will lose his life for My sake shall find it." The false self
must die--nay, must "die daily," for the process is gradual, and there
is no limit to it. It is a process of infinite _expansion_--of
realising new correspondences, new sympathies and affinities with the
not-ourselves, which affinities condition, and in conditioning
constitute, our true life as persons. The paradox is offensive only
to formal logic. As a matter of experience, no one, I imagine, would
maintain that the man who has practically realised, to the fullest
possible extent, the common life which he draws from his Creator, and
shares with all other created beings,--so realised it, I mean, as to
draw from that consciousness all the influences which can play upon
him from outside,--has thereby dissipated and lost his personality,
and become less of a person than another who has built a wall round
his individuality, and lived, as Plato says, the life of a
shell-fish.[51]

We may arrive at the same conclusion by analysing that unconditioned
sense of duty which we call _conscience_. This moral sense cannot be a
fixed code implanted in our consciousness, for then we could not
explain either the variations of moral opinion, or the feeling of
_obligation_ (as distinguished from necessity) which impels us to obey
it. It cannot be the product of the existing moral code of society,
for then we could not explain either the genesis of that public
opinion or the persistent revolt against its limitations which we