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,
To such a common frame of mind ideas, truths, forces are vacant, ghostly forms, devoid of true life and reality: to get such they need blood and flesh to clothe them, to give them substance and power. Now Hegel, no less than those who offer this criticism, regards ideas (in the ordinary sense of that term), truths and forces, also as abstractions which need something to make them powers in the real world of nature and the ideal world of mind. Hegel, like Schelling, has a sublime contempt for mere universals. But as to the something else, there is a divergence of view. Two well-known answers are given by the popular philosophy known as materialism or spiritualism: two systems which are probably not so wide apart as the contrast of their names might imply. According to the former, thinking, ideas, truths, goodness and beauty are special functions (the grosser materialists say secretions) of a special kind of matter--of something which is accessible to ordinary mechanical and chemical tests, but which exhibits also, in certain cases, the exceptional phenomena of consciousness. Here the essential reality is a something, permanent and essentially indestructible,--something which no man has seen, nor indeed can see,--but which is called Matter. The spiritualistic philosopher (as distinguished from the _idealist_) regards as the essential realities in the universe what he calls spirits. What these are, also, nobody has as yet (any more than in Kant's time[5]) given any very authoritative account, but so far as the quasi-scientific expositions in regard to them throw any general light on the subject, we may say that they suggest only a differently-constituted matter, a matter e. g. of less or more dimensions than that we are most familiar with.