But if we may give weight to the suggestions of the two previous chapters, the assumptions which we work with are transformed. The difference of principle is that the average individual, such as each of us takes himself to be in his ordinary [1] trivial moods, when he sees, or thinks he sees, nothing in life but his own private interest and amusement,--this average individual is no longer accepted as the real self or individuality. The centre of gravity of existence is thrown outside him. Even his personality, his unique and personal being, the innermost shrine of what he is and likes to be, is not admitted to lie where a careless scrutiny, backed by theoretical prejudice, is apt to locate it. It is not in the nooks and recesses of the sensitive self, when the man is most withdrawn from things and persons and wrapped up in the intimacies of his feeling, that he enjoys and asserts his individual self to the full. This idea is a caricature of the genuine experience of individuality. It is true that to feel your individuality is to feel something distinctive, which gives you a hold and substance in yourself and a definite position among others, and, it may be, against them. But on a careful consideration, it will be found that this substance and position are always sustained by some kind {126} of determinate achievement or expansion on the part of the self. It always comes from taking hold of the world in some definite way; which, just because it is definite and affirmative, is at once a distinct assertion of the self, and a transition from the private self into the great communion of reality. The simplest machine will show us that it is the differences of the parts which enable them to make a whole. And so, we are now suggesting, it is in the difference which contributes to the whole that the self feels itself at home and possesses its individuality. [1] There is a difficulty in stating this point without confusion, just because the “ordinary” individual, being at the bottom different from what he seems, is actually determined in all sorts of ways, consciously and unconsciously, by demands and ideas which go far beyond what he would admit to determine him. Following up such thoughts as these, we see that there is a meaning in the suggestion that our real self or individuality may be something which in one sense we are not, but which we recognise as imperative upon us. As Rousseau has said of the social self, we say more generally of the self or life which extends beyond our average private existence, that it is more real than we are, and we only feel ourselves real in proportion as we identify ourselves with it.