there is the visible unity of the eternal and the temporal. He rules as the natural king, the great ruler whose judgment and authority are better than the complex code of common laws: he guides as the artistic genius who sees truth steadily in a single intuition and in that single picture sees it whole[3]. But when we ask if such a personality is found in the field of actual experience and history, there arises a divergence of opinions. It is at any rate matter of common experience that there is a good deal of unjustified identification of the self with the universal--identification in which the universal suffers violence and is taken by force. There are only too often cases where the personal interest is allowed to disguise itself under a semblance of zeal for the common good, and that even without conscious intent or act of deception. No good and noble deed, Hegel has said, can ever be done without faith in its goodness, and zeal for its attainment: without a holy passion and fervour of devotion, which exceeds the cold service of duty rendered for duty's sake[4]. But it is equally true and equally to be remembered that this interference of personal passion and disinterested interest has defaced the noblest causes and made flow endless torrents of fanaticism and persecution. A personality in which the universal was perfectly incarnated in the individual would be in truth a God amongst men. And it is probably a more likely occurrence that where the individual as such arrogates to himself the privilege of the universal, there should be seen not the deeds of the god, but the ebullitions of the beast that is in man. A personality, then, in popular language, and perhaps also in popular philosophy, is the living and conscious individual in whom general forces, truths, or ideas become real, active, efficient forces, truths, and ideas. And the importance of the conception resides in the safeguard thus supposed to arise, which will prevent the realities of the world from being dissipated away into the endless and restless flux of the terms of thought, 'La bufera infernal che mai non resta.'