How often have I not found my own mind in Prothero
after I have failed to find it in myself? It is, to be paradoxical,
my impersonal personality, this Being that I have in common with all
scientific-spirited and aristocratic-spirited men. This it is that
I am trying to get clear from the great limitations of humanity.
When I assert a truth for the sake of truth to my own discomfort or
injury, there again is this incompatibility of the aristocratic self
and the accepted, confused, conglomerate self of the unanalyzed man.
The two have a separate system of obligations. One's affections,
compounded as they are in the strangest way of physical reactions
and emotional associations, one's implicit pledges to particular
people, one's involuntary reactions, one's pride and jealousy, all
that one might call the dramatic side of one's life, may be in
conflict with the definitely seen rightnesses of one's higher
use. . . ."
The writing changed at this point.
"All this seems to me at once as old as the hills and too new to be
true. This is like the conflict of the Superior Man of Confucius to
control himself, it is like the Christian battle of the spirit with
the flesh, it savours of that eternal wrangle between the general
and the particular which is metaphysics, it was for this
aristocratic self, for righteousness' sake, that men have hungered
and thirsted, and on this point men have left father and mother and
child and wife and followed after salvation.
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