Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/328

306 so little for our own that at times we feel conscientious scruples about claiming it. Such self-abnegation fortunately, perhaps, is rare. For an assumption of probability induces us instantly to appropriate whatever has not upon it the stamp of another. Nor is there a more poignant chagrin than to awake suddenly to the knowledge, through some casually resurrected detail, that our yesterday's self-imputed epigram had been previously told us by Jones. Another's seal consists in those, often almost indescribable, concomitant details in which the foreign idea comes to us fringed, its setting in short. This differs entirely from the setting that surrounds our own self-suggested thoughts. At the time we heard the epigram, which we subsequently so sadly mistook, we were conscious not only of hearing it, but of hearing it; afterwards this acoustic aura faded out, and therefore when the idea reappeared it bore no identifying tag, and we insensibly took it for one of our own. For though our own thoughts come to us as a rule quite differently fringed by a halo of their own, they sometimes have little or none, and the