The doctor had no doubt. He lay back in his chair, with his hands behind his head and his smoke ascending vertically to heaven. With the greatest contentment he began quoting himself. “This getting out of one’s individuality--this conscious getting out of one’s individuality--is one of the most important and interesting aspects of the psychology of the new age that is now dawning. As compared with any previous age. Unconsciously, of course, every true artist, every philosopher, every scientific investigator, so far as his art or thought went, has always got out of himself,--has forgotten his personal interests and become Man thinking for the whole race. And intimations of the same thing have been at the heart of most religions. But now people are beginning to get this detachment without any distinctively religious feeling or any distinctive aesthetic or intellectual impulse, as if it were a plain matter of fact. Plain matter of fact, that we are only incidentally ourselves. That really each one of us is also the whole species, is really indeed all life.” “A part of it.” “An integral part-as sight is part of a man... with no absolute separation from all the rest--no more than a separation of the imagination. The whole so far as his distinctive quality goes. I do not know how this takes shape in your mind, Sir Richmond, but to me this idea of actually being life itself upon the world, a special phase of it dependent upon and connected with all other phases, and of being one of a small but growing number of people who apprehend that, and want to live in the spirit of that, is quite central. It is my fundamental idea. We,--this small but growing minority--constitute that part of life which knows and wills and tries to rule its destiny. This new realization, the new psychology arising out of it is a fact of supreme importance in the history of life. It is like the appearance of self-consciousness in some creature that has not hitherto had self-consciousness. And so far as we are concerned, we are the true kingship of the world. Necessarily. We who know, are the true king....I wonder how this appeals to you. It is stuff I have thought out very slowly and carefully and written and approved. It is the very core of my life.... And yet when one comes to say these things to someone else, face to face.... It is much more difficult to say than to write.” Sir Richmond noted how the doctor’s chair creaked as he rolled to and fro with the uneasiness of these intimate utterances. “I agree,” said Sir Richmond presently. “One DOES think in this fashion. Something in this fashion. What one calls one’s work does belong to something much bigger than ourselves. “Something much bigger,” he expanded. “Which something we become,” the doctor urged, “in so far as our work takes hold of us.” Sir Richmond made no answer to this for a little while. “Of course we trail a certain egotism into our work,” he said.