but the conditions then laid down were nothing better, so to speak, than minimum requirements, not in the least a complete description. But let us return to these necessary conditions. A person, we saw, must be (1) self-conscious, (2) and thus aware of an alien world. against which he stands, (3) but in which he can direct his life in response to the suggestions of past experience and the canons of conduct that reflective thinking may discover. All this of itself would not suffice to make us call any one of whom it was true a personality, and at the outset it was suggested that the term conveyed an ideal which need not necessarily be realized in every, not perhaps in any, actual person. In this connexion it is instructive to notice the use of the word in eulogy. A man has to possess some marked force of character which impresses his contemporaries before they would think of applying such a title to him. Logical acuteness, scientific penetration, or artistic excellence do not of themselves seem to constitute a sufficient claim for this distinction. We talk sometimes of artistic 'personalities', but in a different sense, with reference merely to their artistic achievements. Strength of will, pertinacity in the defence of a cause, in the quest of an ideal, on the other hand, are very frequent grounds for this use of the term. Or again the presence of some remarkable sympathy or affection, the capacity for deep and intense emotion might justify its employment though perhaps more rarely. Lastly, some remarkable combination of qualities, some unusual breadth of mind and width of interest may produce the same dominating or fascinating power on the strength of which we call men 'personalities'.

If these peculiarities of language be examined, they seem to indicate in the main two ways in which the

mere person develops into a personality. The one is by some isolated trait of character, or some remarkable gift that distinguishes him from his fellow men.

The other

is by an unusual continuity and concentration through which again his life becomes something distinctive. Now these two things are alike in one important respect. They both distinguish the individual from the mass of his fellows from the outsider's point of view. To be thus distinguished it is necessary that a character as a whole should give a simple and striking impression. This is possible when some one trait overshadows the rest to such an extent that the whole man seems to consist of it, or when a number of different qualities are to so rare a degree united together that once again the man seems to be all one piece.

So far we have admittedly kept closely to popular uses of the word. But in so doing we have also gained some valuable insight into the further development of the term person. The personality conveys an impression of unity. If this is produced by the presence of one remarkable quality, it may at times depend on the caprice of things or on an accident of our vision; it may be the result of an eccentricity which is the only thing we observe in the man, because we know and see little of him. If on further acquaintance the man still remains a personality, something more than mere eccentricity in one respect is necessary: either this eccentricity must flood the whole character, or in some other way the unity of impression must be maintained-there must be some noteworthy and individual balance of activities and qualities. In either way what distinguishes him is unity of character as contrasted with ordinary men in whom no over-mastering passion, no artistic balance of versatile

powers can colour and pervade the whole life in them there is only an aggregation, an unformed collection of undistinguished qualities. Now to attempt a statement of this distinction is at once to make it clear that no absolute distinction exists at all. Unity of personality, however achieved, is a matter of degree. In the greatest men we do not find it complete. A natural curiosity makes us welcome gossip about genius. But so far from throwing light on their greatness it usually makes us forget it: it is the surest defence of mediocrity against the lights which dazzle it. We do not see why Napoleon should have disliked onions: the eccentricity throws no light on the rest of his career. So far as we study such details we put ourselves on the level of the valet to whom no man is a hero because he is only there to be valeted.1

If we choose to see a supreme importance in such trivialities, if we essay for example to derive the career of Julius Caesar from the keenly felt misfortune of his baldness, we slip down further into the still less instructive standpoint of the pathologist. Conversely in the life of the most ordinary man there is a degree of unity very distinctive as compared with an animal or even a child: a disciplining of interests and activities to some kind of formal harmony, a persistence of aims and dispositions strong enough to make the life a connected whole for a more or less prolonged period of time. Thus the behaviour of the person at any moment tends to be the expression of a complex force intelligible only if all its manifestations are studied-the concentration on the moment of a spiritual life that cannot be exhausted by it. So far as the life of the moment requires for its 1 See the eloquent expansion of this familiar Hegelian thought in pp. 255 and 256 of the Logic (Wallace's translation).

interpretation the rest of the personality in this way, some unity must be present, however undistinguished as compared with the great men of history or fiction. In hysterical and half-hysterical conditions the most striking fact is the splitting up of personal lives into disconnected moments and what is produced by hysteria within the man, may be produced also by the capricious influence of outside agencies-the disease that saps the thought of genius, the paralysis which ends a statesman's career at the most anxious moment of his policies.

§2. The Idea of Infinite Personality

THE further application of such ideas I will postpone for the moment. I wish here to consider a conclusion often drawn by those who reflect in this way on personal unity. When it is suggested that the highest goodness cannot be found in finite personalities, it is meant that in the nature of things no very high degree of coherence can be established in them. If there is no internal failure, then the cruelty of the environment will ruin the life. Complete determination by the self cannot be attained and even if the self could be free its behaviour as a finite self must be always imperfect.

Let us examine the first point. It is contended that since a finite person could not be completely selfdetermined it must be imperfect. If there is anything really external to it, this thing will possess a nature of its own not created by the person in question and therefore alien to his desires and ambitions. He must turn from the free expression of his own will to adapt himself to this thwarting influence: it is within his power, no doubt, to withdraw from the struggle, but even in this refusal he is bound by the environment which he is

trying to escape. Now the highest degree of personality cannot exist where there are such external necessities. Only the Absolute would be perfectly free from such determination ab extra: therefore if the Absolute is a Person, in Him will be full personality, but not in any part or member of His single and supreme being. So Lotze writes: 'Personality can be complete only in an infinite Being which as it surveys all its actions and states finds nowhere any content of its passive experience or any law of its active energy whose meaning and origin is not transparently plain to it and explicable by reference to its own nature.' Finite persons, he continues, are subject to the external spatial influence of nature on the one hand, and on the other to the temporal conditions which make it impossible for us even at any one moment wholly to possess ourselves. In fact we have little ground to speak of the personality of finite beings: personality is an ideal which like every ideal belongs in its unconditional form only to the infinite: we may share in it only as we share in all other good things, in some conditioned and incomplete form only.'

2

In such positions there might appear to be two distinguishable conceptions: the one of a mind which found in the world only what was satisfactory to its judgement and explicable from it own nature: the other of a mind that summed up in itself all other realities including all lesser minds. Lotze would probably not admit the distinction. On metaphysical grounds he finds it necessary to think of the universe as one system, an Absolute Whole. This Absolute he identifies with God; 3 and his main task is then to show that the Absolute may be regarded as a Person. To this end he controverts 2 Ibid., p. 579. 3 Ibid., p. 549.

1 Mikrokosmos, iii. 578.