ley, Professor Stanley, all evidently copied from
some books of reference.

I may perhaps claim one advantage in trying to describe what happened
to myself in my passage through life. From the earliest days that I
can recollect, I felt myself as a twofold being--as a subject and an
object, as a spectator and as an actor. I suppose we all talk to
ourselves, and say to our better and worse selves, O thou fool! or,
Well done, my boy! Well this inward conversation began with me at a
very early time, and left the impression that I was the coachman, but
at the same time the horse too which he drove and sometimes whipped
very cruelly. And this phase of thought, or rather this state of
feeling, seems soon to have led me on to another view which likewise
dates from a very early time, though it afterwards vanished. As a
little boy, when I could not have the same toys which other boys
possessed, I could fully enjoy what they enjoyed, as if they had been
my own. There is a German phrase, "Ich freue mich in deiner Seele,"
which exactly expressed what I often felt. It was not the result of
teaching, still less of reasoning--it was a sentiment given me and
which certainty did not leave me till much later in life, when
competition, rivalry, jealousy, and envy seemed to accentuate my own I
as against all other I's or Thou's. I suppose we all remember how the
sight of a wound of a fellow creature, nay even of a dog, gives us a
sharp twitch in the same part of our own body. That bodily sympathy
has never left me, I suffer from it even now as I did seventy years
ago. And is there anybody who has not felt his eyes moisten at the
sudden happiness of his friends? All this seems to me to account, to a
certain extent at least, for that feeling of identity with so-called
strangers, which came to me from my earliest days, and has returned
again with renewed strength in my old age. The "know thyself,"
ascribed to Chilon and other sages of ancient Greece, gains a deeper
meaning with every year, till at last the I which we looked upon as
the most certain and undoubted fact, vanishes from our grasp to become
the Self, free from the various accidents and limitations which make
up the I, and therefore one with the Self that underlies all
individual and therefore vanishing I's. What that common Self may be
is a question to be reserved for later times, though I may say at once
that the only true answer given to it seems to me that of the
Upanishads and