If we are to look at this stage for some analogue within our partial experience for the kind of unity of individuals in a single supreme individual which we have demanded for the system of Reality, we shall probably do best to turn to what is after all the most familiar thing in the world,—our own personal experience. If we consider the nature of any coherent purpose or “mental system,” we shall find that, as the coherent embodiment of a purpose, it possesses a degree of individuality of its own. In proportion to the comprehensiveness, and again to the inner harmony or systematic structure of the interest it embodies, it constitutes a genuine self-existing individual whole of the kind which psychologists recognise as a “self.” And again, in so far as my life exhibits determinate character, so far do these systematic purposes or minor “selves” form a larger system, also individual, which may be called my “total self.” And both the many lesser “selves” and the larger “self” are real in the same sense of the word. Neither exists merely in or for the other; the wider or whole “self” is no mere collection or resultant or product of the more special “selves,” nor are they again mere results of a theoretical process of analysis and abstraction. In so far as they are genuine systems at all, they are not mere “parts” of a whole, but each is the expression, in a concrete conscious life, of the nature of a larger whole from a special “point of view.” The whole, if not equally in every part, is yet as a whole present in every part, and precisely for that reason the category of part and whole is inadequate to express their relation. Somewhat after this fashion we must conceive the structure of any individual whole of lesser individuals. Why, in spite of the analogy, it is desirable not to speak of the whole of Reality as a “Self,” will be made clearer as we proceed.[63]