Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/327

Rh act of discrimination, for example. The Irishman who said he could tell two brothers apart when he saw them together, unwittingly hit the psychologic bull's-eye. For the only conceivable way of telling two things apart is by thinking them together. But the momentary me is more complex than this. There are, in the first place, a host of fainter ideas or suggestions of them, which the main idea drags up, attached to it, and secondly, there are the fading forms of previous ideas and the brightening forms of coming ones, side by side with the culminating thought of the moment. For it is no less a palpable fact that ideas take time to develop into distinctness, and even more time to fade again into oblivion. Dissolving views upon our cortical screen, the last grows ghostly as the next takes shape, and lingers some seconds ere it vanishes quite. It is this corona of past, present, and nascent thought, limning the central idea of the moment that gives that idea its setting, and us our sense of self.

As a proof of this, an idea of our own which came to us unhaloed, however brilliant it may have been, is often subsequently