THE GENESIS OF PERSONALITY.
[To TEE EDIT= OP THE "SPECTAT011."] Srn,—I have been reading the letter on "Personality" in your issue of May 10th, and am much interested by the story recording the sudden consciousness of personality flashing in upon the child-mind. I have a distinct recollection of such a flash in my own mind's history. I was older than the child in your correspondent's story, and must have reached the age of nine or ten years. I was looking out of the night-nursery window, which gave upon a crowded London thoroughfare, when I suddenly experienced what I can only call the genesis of personality. It seemed to me that I was the only real person in the world, and that the many people in the street were merely dressed-up figures. I remember feeling the window-frame and wondering if it was real too, or if I only imagined it was there. I do not recollect thinking much upon such subjects when I was actually with other people, but that particular window was always the spot chosen for my meditations upon the wonderful "I" that had been, as it were, born there. Later on I remember the feeling of kin- ship with all those unknown passers-by suddenly springing up in the same flash-light way. They no longer seemed mere automatons, but each was invested with a halo of romance and an interest of a religious nature. The phrase "for whom Christ died," which still rises unbidden in my mind whenever I see a particularly wretched or evil-looking specimen of humanity, then first flashed into my mind, and a feeling of kinship and fellowship with all mankind resting on this spiritual basis has ever since been more especially roused in me when I have come into contact with the very miserable or repulsive. Needless to say that, child-like. I never breathed a word of either of these new-births to any of my home-folk or
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