But it is possible to save personality without regarding the human spirit as a monad, independent and sharply separated from other spirits.  Distinction, not separation, is the mark of personality; but it is separation, not distinction, that forbids union.  The error, according to the mystic’s psychology, is in regarding consciousness of self as the measure of personality.  The depths of personality are unfathomable, as Heraclitus already knew;[48] the light of consciousness only plays on the surface of the waters.  Jean Paul Richter is a true exponent of this characteristic doctrine when he says, “We attribute far too small dimensions to the rich empire of ourself, if we omit from it the unconscious region which resembles a great dark continent.  The world which our memory peoples only reveals, in its revolution, a few luminous points at a time, while its immense and teeming mass remains in shade....  We daily see the conscious passing into unconsciousness; and take no notice of the bass accompaniment which our fingers continue to play, while our attention is directed to fresh musical effects.[49]” So far is it from being true that the self of our immediate consciousness is our true personality, that we can only attain personality, as spiritual and rational beings, by passing beyond the limits which mark us off as separate individuals.  Separate individuality, we may say, is the bar which prevents us from realising our true privileges as persons.[50] And so the mystic interprets very literally that maxim of our Lord, in which many have found the fundamental secret of Christianity:  “He that will save his life—­his soul, his personality—­shall lose it; and he that will lose his life for My sake shall find it.”  The false self must die—­nay, must “die daily,” for the process is gradual, and there is no limit to it.  It is a process of infinite expansion—­of realising new correspondences, new sympathies and affinities with the not-ourselves, which affinities condition, and in conditioning constitute, our true life as persons.  The paradox is offensive only to formal logic.  As a matter of experience, no one, I imagine, would maintain that the man who has practically realised, to the fullest possible extent, the common life which he draws from his Creator, and shares with all other created beings,—­so realised it, I mean, as to draw from that consciousness all the influences which can play upon him from outside,—­has thereby dissipated and lost his personality, and become less of a person than another who has built a wall round his individuality, and lived, as Plato says, the life of a shell-fish.[51]