My general psychology, as far as I can tell from memory, was plain and straightforward when a child. I have no recollection of feeling any general depression or disappointment, of thinking that I was misunderstood, i.e. of entertaining what is now called "an inferiority complex." I never gave way to any form of childish melancholy. I did not even have alarming, or mysterious, or metaphysical dreams! What makes this more curious is the fact that I very much outgrew my strength, about the age of nine or ten. I was not allowed to play active games, or run about, or do any of the things in which I delighted.
Though without great physical strength, I was all my life exceedingly fond of the joys of bodily exercise, whether swimming, rowing, riding, walking, mountaineering, skating, playing tennis or racquets or whatever game was going.
In none of these pastimes did I reach anything approaching excellence, but from all of them I got intense enjoyment. I tasted, indeed, almost every form of athleticism and genuinely smacked my lips at the flavour of each in turn, yet never bothered about the super-pleasure which comes from doing such things as well as they can be done.
Though my bodily health did not give me an unhappy or depressed childhood, or make me suffer from any sort of morbid reaction, I had occasionally a very curious and somewhat rare experience—one which, though it has been noted and discussed, has never, as far as I know, been fully explained by physicians either of the body or of the soul.
The condition to which I refer is that which the musician Berlioz called "isolement"—the sense of spiritual isolation, which seizes on those who experience it with a poignancy amounting to awe. Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality affords the locus classicus in the way of description:
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised.
I once amused myself by getting together a large number of descriptions of "isolement" and found that, though they may differ considerably, they have in common the characteristics enumerated by the Ode.
The first thing to be noted about the sense of isolement is that it comes, not in sleeping, but in waking hours, and that, whether truly or not, it brings with it the feeling that it is the result of some external impulse. The best form of explanation, however, is to describe as exactly as I can my own sensations. Though the sense of isolement has been experienced by me as a little child, as a lad, as a young man, and even up to the age of forty or forty-five, the recollections of my first visitation, which occurred when I could not have been more, at the very most, than six years of age, are very much more vivid and keener-edged than those of the later occasions.
Outside the two doors of the nurseries at Sutton Court there is a long passage, and in this is something unusual—a little fire-place and grate. I was one day standing in that passage, quite close to the grate, and expecting nothing in particular. Then suddenly there came over me a feeling so strange and so different from anything I had ever felt before as to be almost terrifying. It was overwhelming in the true meaning of the word. Incredible as it seems in the case of so small a child, I had the clearest and most poignant feeling of being left completely, utterly alone, not merely in the world, but in something far, far bigger—in the universe, in a vastness infinite and unutterable.
As with Wordsworth, everything seemed to vanish and fall away from me, even my own body. I was literally "beside myself." I stood a naked soul in the sight of what I must now, though of course did not then, call for want of better explanatory expressions, the All, the Only, the Whole, the Everlasting. It was no annihilation, no temporary absorption into the Universal Consciousness, no ingression into the Divine Shadow, that the child experienced. Rather it was the amplest exaltation and magnification of the Ego which it is possible to conceive. I gained, not lost, by discarding the "lendings" of life. Something that was from one point of view a void, and from another a rounded completeness, hemmed me in.