In this way I have been, turn by turn, mathematician, musician,
_savant_, monk, child, or mother. In these states of universal sympathy
I have even seemed to myself sometimes to enter into the condition of
the animal or the plant, and even of an individual animal, of a given
plant. This faculty of ascending and descending metamorphosis, this
power of simplifying or of adding to one's individuality, has sometimes
astounded my friends, even the most subtle of them. It has to do no
doubt with the extreme facility which I have for impersonal and
objective thought, and this again accounts for the difficulty which I
feel in realizing my own individuality, in being simply one man having
his proper number and ticket. To withdraw within my own individual
limits has always seemed to me a strange, arbitrary, and conventional
process. I seem to myself to be a mere conjuror's apparatus, an
instrument of vision and perception, a person without personality, a
subject without any determined individuality--an instance, to speak
technically, of pure "determinability" and "formability," and therefore
I can only resign myself with difficulty to play the purely arbitrary
part of a private citizen, inscribed upon the roll of a particular town
or a particular country. In action I feel myself out of place; my true
_milieu_ is contemplation.
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