An urge to self-transcendence is almost as widespread and, at times, quite as powerful as the urge to self-assertion. Men desire to intensify their consciousness of being what they have come to regard as “themselves”; but they also desire—and desire very often with irresistible violence—the consciousness of being someone else. In a word, they long to get out of themselves, to pass beyond the limits of that island universe, within which every individual finds himself confined.
