THE NOT-SELF HT

Self is accompanied by, and to a laige extent mediated through, the sensé of an extenial world which is apparently quite différent and separate from Me. Thought anses in this opposition and interplay between Subject and Object. It is the fundamental datiun of our ordinary life : we divide the universe into two parts,— on the one hand there is Me, and on the other there is — ^all the rest. This distinction, which does not always exist — infants, for example, and animais do not make it — tends to intensify and harden. The ultimate restdt is that we come to regard the external world as something very set, fixed, in* tractable, threatening, pitiless ; something placed over against us, lavish at times with its delights, but containing always the possibility of bruise and breakage to us. It is something we can arraign, and hâve a grudge against.

Similarly, and under the dominance of the same type of consdousness, men hâve come to regard God as an external Being whose favour seems to need continuaUy to be sought, and held precari* ously enough by means of gifts and worship. There is a terrible figure Ijâng behind a passage in the Book of Job ; it is God with a Magnifying Glass.

What is man, that Thou shouldest magnify him ? And that Thou shouldest visit him every moming, and try him every moment ? How long wilt Thou not départ from me, nor let me alone till I âwallow down my spittle ? ^

1 Job vii. 17.