its approach to the objective, the impersonal, the ecstatic
state. Then how explain this anomaly? Why should religious,
aesthetic, and intellectual emotion be accompanied in varying
degrees by the loss of self-consciousness? Why should the
sense of personality play us so strange a trick as to vanish,
at the moment of seemingly greatest power, in the very shadow
of its own glory?

If now we put the most obvious question, and ask, in explanation
of its escapades, what the true nature of this personality is,
we shall find ourselves quite out of our reckoning on the vast
sea of metaphysics. To know what personality IS, "root and all,
and all in all," is to "know what God and man is." Fortunately,
our problem is much more simple. It is not the personality,
its reality, its meaning, that vanishes; no, nor even the
psychological system of dispositions. We remain, in such a
moment of ecstasy, as persons, what we were before. It is the
FEELING of personality that has faded; and to find out in what
this will-o'-the-wisp feeling of personality resides is a task
wholly within the powers of psychological analysis. Let no one
object that the depth and value of experience seem to disintegrate
under the psychologist's microscope. The place of the full-orbed
personality in a world of noble ends is not affected by the
possibility that the centre of its conscious crystallization may
be found in a single sensation.

The explanation, then, of this apparent inconsistency--the fading
away of self in the midst of certain most important experiences--
must lie in the nature of the feeling of personality. What is
that feeling? On what is it based? How can it be described?