e fact of a disharmony
between the simple but inexorable longings and instincts of the
buried spirit, now beginning to assert themselves in your hours of
meditation--pushing out, as it were, towards the light--and the
various changeful, but insistent longings and instincts of the
surface-self. Between these two no peace is possible: they
conflict at every turn. It becomes apparent to you that the
declaration of Plotinus, accepted or repeated by all the mystics,
concerning a "higher" and a "lower" life, and the cleavage that
exists between them, has a certain justification even in the
experience of the ordinary man.

That great thinker and ecstatic said, that all human personality
was thus two-fold: thus capable of correspondence with two
orders of existence. The "higher life" was always tending toward?
union with Reality; towards the gathering of it self up into One.
The "lower life," framed for correspondence with the outward
world of multiplicity, was always tending to fall downwards, and
fritter the powers of the self among external things. This is but a
restatement, in terms of practical existence, of the fact which
Recollection brought home to us: that the human self is
transitional, neither angel nor animal, capable of living towards
either Eternity or Time. But it is one thing to frame beautiful
theories on these subjects: another when the unresolved dualism
of your own personality (though you may not give it this
high-sounding name) becomes the main fact of consciousness,
perpetually reasserts itself as a vital problem, and refuses to take
academic rank.

This state of things means the acute discomfort which ensues on
being pulled two ways at once. The uneasy swaying of attention
between two incompatible ideals, the alternating conviction that
there is something wrong, perverse, poisonous, about life as you
have always lived it, and something hopelessly ethereal about the
life which your innermost inhabitant wants to live--these
disagreeable sensations grow stronger and stronger. First one and
then the other asserts itself. You fluctuate miserably between
their attractions and their claims; and will have no peace until
these claims have been met, and the apparent opposition between
them resolved. You are sure now that there is another, more
durable and more "reasonable," life possible to the human
consciousness than that on which it usually spends itself. But it is
also clear to you that you must yourself b