By spiritual personality, inasmuch as it is related to empirical personality, we do not mean this or that particular transitory state of consciousness. Rather, we mean by spiritual personality the complete unification of individual states of consciousness, specifically taken spiritual abilities and properties. This unification can, at any given moment, become the object of our thought and evoke emotions similar to those produced in us by other parts of our personality. When we think of ourselves as thinking beings, all other aspects of our personality appear to us, as it were, as external objects. Even within the boundaries of our spiritual personality, some elements seem more external than others. For example, our faculties of sensation seem to be, so to speak, less intimately connected with our «I» than our emotions and desires. The very center, the very core of our self, as we know it, the holiest of holies of our being, is the feeling of activity found in some of our inner states of mind. This feeling of inner activity has often been pointed out as a direct manifestation of the life substance of our soul. Whether this is so or not, we will not analyze, but note here only the peculiar internal character of mental states that have the property of appearing active, whatever these mental states may be in themselves. They seem to go towards all the other experiential elements of our consciousness. This feeling is probably common to all people.
William James
2022-05-30