I replied, "With all your intelligence, you haven't the remotest idea of what constitutes personality. You are not aware that by personality we mean a certain type of experience, and not a substance. Personality is realized only as the experience of self-knowledge is achieved. You are not as yet much of a personality, you are hardly more than a candidate for the office, but by making a good campaign you may get elected. You are not very personal because you are not very self-knowing, and if you should drop the plummet into the depths of your experience to sound yourself, by that very act you would acquire new depth, and would need to try again to fathom yourself. So at best, you are only becoming personal. None but the Infinite Experience can know itself perfectly, and therefore, God alone is completely personal."
My friend had no idea either of God's personality or his own, and his philosophical conception of nature was only a little less crude.
It was a long step in the right direction when I came to realize that I had never seen my mother, with whom I lived for so many happy years. Yet there was one thing that I felt sure I knew--absolutely, as I knew nothing else--and that was my mother. Not her face, not her voice, not her attitudes nor her actions, though all these I knew too and loved. But back of all these there was a real mother, of whom these were only manifestations. And this real mother, that I knew as I knew nothing else, was silent, and invisible. And then I found that I knew myself too--hardly as well as I knew my mother, but in the same way, and I knew myself also to be invisible and silent. My spirit, or personality, is as invisible and silent as God. I have no more seen myself than I have seen Him. Neither has my naked soul ever made a sound. All the words that my soul desires expressed are produced by a sort of animated phonograph which we call the mouth. At the wish of my invisible self the physical organs of speech set the air vibrating, but my self-conscious Will is eternally silent. There is much to be said about the relation of Personalities to their instruments, but this must be left until a little later. It will avoid confusion if we try to take but one step at a time.