This looking backward and forward which is the ground of man's grandeur, is also, Burns thinks, the ground of his misery; for in it is rooted his self-consciousness, something widely unlike the itemized consciousness of the brute. Shakespeare, too, found in us the same distinctive trait. Hamlet reflects how God has made us "with such discourse, looking before and after." We possess discourse, can move about intellectually, and are not shut up to the moment. But ages before Shakespeare the fact had been observed. Homer knew all about it, and in the last book of the Odyssey extols Halitherses, the son of Mastor, as one "able to look before and after." [Greek text omitted.] This is the mark of the wise man, not merely marking off person from brute, but person from person according to the degree of personality attained. It is characteristic of the child to show little foresight, little hindsight. He takes the present as it comes, and lives in it. We who are more mature and rational contemplate him with the same envy we feel for the skylark and the mouse, and often say, "Would I too could so suck the joys of the present, without reflecting that something else is coming and something else is gone." VI Yet after becoming possessed of self-consciousness, we do not steadily retain it. States of mind occur where the self slips out, though vivid consciousness remains. As I sit in my chair and fix my eye on the distance, a daydream or reverie comes over me. I see a picture, another, another. Somebody speaks and I am recalled. "Why, here I am! This is I." I find myself once more. I had lost myself--paradoxical yet accurate expression. We have many such to indicate the disappearance of self-consciousness at moments of elation. "I was absorbed in thought," we say; the I was sucked out by strenuous attention elsewhere. "I was swept away with grief," i.e., I vanished, while grief held sway. "I was transported with delight," "I was overwhelmed with shame," and--perhaps most beautiful of all these fragments of poetic psychology,--"I was beside myself with terror," I felt myself, to be near, but was still parted; through the fear I could merely catch glimpses of the one who was terrified.