— though this is not equally easy to discern.

Nevertheless, tat tvam asi.

The preponderance of either mode of viewing life not only determines single acts; it shapes a man's whole nature and temperament. Hence the radical difference of mental habit between the good character and the bad. The latter feels everywhere that a thick wall of partition hedges him off from all others. For him the world is an absolute non-ego, and his relation to it an essentially hostile one; consequently, the key-note of his disposition is hatred, suspicion, envy, and pleasure in seeing distress. The good character, on the other hand, lives in an external world homogeneous with his own being; the rest of mankind is not in his eyes a non-ego; he thinks of it rather as “myself once more.