to cheat Omniscience by an “aside,” is hardly more ludicrous than the many ladies and gentlemen who have more belief, and expect others to have it, in their own statement about their habitual doings than in the contradictory fact which is patent in the daylight.  One reason of the absurdity is that we are led by a tradition about ourselves, so that long after a man has practically departed from a rule or principle, he continues innocently to state it as a true description of his practice—­just as he has a long tradition that he is not an old gentleman, and is startled when he is seventy at overhearing himself called by an epithet which he has only applied to others.

[Footnote 1:  Inferno, xxxii. 150.]

“A person with your tendency of constitution should take as little sugar as possible,” said Pilulus to Bovis somewhere in the darker decades of this century.  “It has made a great difference to Avis since he took my advice in that matter:  he used to consume half a pound a-day.”

“God bless me!” cries Bovis.  “I take very little sugar myself.”

“Twenty-six large lumps every day of your life, Mr Bovis,” says his wife.

“No such thing!” exclaims Bovis.

“You drop them into your tea, coffee, and whisky yourself, my dear, and I count them.”

“Nonsense!” laughs Bovis, turning to Pilulus, that they may exchange a glance of mutual amusement at a woman’s inaccuracy.

But she happened to be right.  Bovis had never said inwardly that he would take a large allowance of sugar, and he had the tradition about himself that he was a man of the most moderate habits; hence, with this conviction, he was naturally disgusted at the saccharine excesses of Avis.

I have sometimes thought that this facility of men in believing that they are still what they once meant to be—­this undisturbed appropriation of a traditional character which is often but a melancholy relic of early resolutions, like the worn and soiled testimonial to soberness and honesty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the need of a dram has driven into peculation—­may sometimes diminish the turpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood.  It is notorious that a man may go on uttering false assertions about his own acts till he at last believes in them:  is it not possible that sometimes in the very first utterance there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, a reproduction of a traditional self which is clung to against all evidence?  There is no knowing all the disguises of the lying serpent.

When we come to examine in detail what is the sane mind in the sane body, the final test of completeness seems to be a security of distinction between what we have professed and what we have done; what we have aimed at and what we have achieved; what we have invented and what we have witnessed or had evidenced to us; what we think and feel in the present and what we thought and felt in the past.