The loss of personality! In that dread thought there lies, to most of us, all the sting of death and the victory of the grave. It seems, with such a fate in store, that immortality were futile, and life itself a mockery. Yet the idea, when dwelt upon, assumes an aspect of strange familiarity; it is an old friend, after all. Can we deny that all our sweetest hours are those of self-forgetfulness? The language of emotion, religious, aesthetic, intellectually creative, testifies clearly to the fading of the consciousness of self as feeling nears the white heat. Not only in the speechless, stark immobility of the pathological "case," but in all the stages of religious ecstasy, aesthetic pleasure, and creative inspiration, is to be traced what we know as the loss of the feeling of self. Bernard of Clairvaux dwells on "that ecstasy of deification in which the individual disappears in the eternal essence as the drop of water in a cask of wine." Says Meister Eckhart, "Thou shalt sink away from they selfhood, though shalt flow into His self- possession, the very thought of Thine shall melt into His Mine;" and St. Teresa, "The soul, in thus searching for its God, feels with a very lively and very sweet pleasure that is is fainting almost quiet away." Still more striking is the language of aesthetic emotion. Philosopher and poet have but one expression for the universal experience. Says Keats in the "Ode to a Nightingale:"-- "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethewards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thy happiness." And in Schopenhauer we read that he who contemplates the beautiful "forgets even his individuality, his will, and only continues to exist as the pure subject, the clear mirror of the object." But not only the religious enthusiast and the worshiper of beauty "lose themselves" in ecstasy. The "fine frenzy" of the thinker is typical. From Archimedes, whose life paid the forfeit of his impersonal absorption; from Socrates, musing in one spot from dawn to dawn, to Newton and Goethe, there is but one form of the highest effort to penetrate and to create. Emerson is right in saying of the genius, "His greatness consists in the fullness in which an ecstatic state is realized in him."