PERSONALITY

MARY BAKER EDDY

THE IMMORTAL MAN being spiritual, individual, and eternal, his mortal opposite must be material, corporeal, and temporal. Physical personality is finite; but God is infinite. He is without materiality, without finiteness of form or Mind.

Limitations are put off in proportion as the fleshly nature disappears and man is found in the reflection of Spirit.

This great fact leads into profound depths. The material human concept grew beautifully less as I floated into more spiritual latitudes and purer realms of thought.

From that hour personal corporeality became less to me than it is to people who fail to appreciate individual character. I endeavored to lift thought above physical personality, or selfhood in matter, to man's spiritual individuality in God,—in the true Mind, where sensible evil is lost in supersensible good. This is the only way whereby the false personality is laid off.

He who clings to personality, or perpetually warns you of "personality," wrongs it, or terrifies people over it, and is the sure victim of his own corporeality. Constantly to scrutinize physical personality, or accuse people of being unduly personal, is like the sick talking sickness. Such errancy betrays a violent and egotistical personality, increases one's sense of corporeality, and begets a fear of the senses and a perpetually egotistical sensibility.

He who does this is ignorant of the meaning of the word personality, and defines it by his own corpus sine pectore (soulless body), and fails to distinguish the individual, or real man from the false sense of corporeality, or egotistic self.

My own corporeal personality afflicteth me not wittingly; for I desire never to think of it, and it cannot think of me.

MARY BAKER EDDY

Courtesy of The Mary Baker Eddy Collection. This selection is included in the book Retrospection and Introspection, Mary Baker Eddy's autobiographical work published in 1891.

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