am James has suggested that on account of this,
theology may be obstinately working away from the truth, that the truth
may be that there are several or many in compatible and incommensurable
gods; science, in the same search for unity, may follow divergent
methods of inquiry into ultimately uninterchangeable generalizations;
and there may be not only not one universal moral law, but no effective
reconciliation of the various rights and duties of a single individual.
At any rate I find myself doubtful to this day about my own personal
systems of right and wrong. I can never get all my life into one focus.
It is exactly like examining a rather thick section with a microscope of
small penetration; sometimes one level is clear and the rest foggy and
monstrous, and sometimes another.

"Now the ruling ME, I do not doubt, is the man who has set his face
to this research after aristocracy, and from the standpoint of this
research it is my duty to subordinate all other considerations to
this work of clearing up the conception of rule and nobility in human
affairs. This is my aristocratic self. What I did not grasp for a long
time, and which now grows clearer and clearer to me, is firstly that
this aristocratic self is not the whole of me, it has absolutely nothing
to do with a pain in my ear or in my heart, with a scar on my hand or my
memory, and secondly that it is not altogether mine. Whatever knowledge
I have of the quality of science, whatever will I have towards right,
is of it; but if from without, from the reasoning or demonstration or
reproof of some one else, there comes to me clear knowledge, clarified
will, that also is as it were a part of my aristocratic self coming
home to me from the outside. 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'