No sincere student of the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, can fail to perceive the great importance she attaches to the fact of man's individuality, and the necessity of a realization of that individuality through unity with the divine Mind, which is its source. Neither can the student fail to see the definite distinction which Mrs. Eddy makes between true individuality and the human sense of personality.
Personality is, of course, based on the false premise of life as existent in matter—a mind in a physical body, which is called a person. This person believes he has a life of his own, separated from the Life divine, which is the source of all life. He believes he has a selfhood or ego separated from God, the one infinite Ego. This selfhood he endeavors to govern and direct according to the bias of heredity, education, environment, et cetera. And the task is made difficult, in fact impossible, because of the belief that this mind, or ego, is imprisoned in a physical body, and so is subject to the limitations, restrictions, and conditions of that body. A person is thus placed in the contradictory position of endeavoring to govern that which he believes governs him. Having no fixed, immutable, and divine Principle outside of his own senses by which to be governed, he becomes more or less the slave of those senses, the victim of time and chance. Since he believes in both good and evil, his highest sense of good may at any time be overcome by the belief in evil. As a consequence, he walks in uncertainty, lest circumstances over which he has no control rob him of his health and happiness, his wealth and position, yea, of life itself.
Persons are deceived into believing that individuality can be achieved by cultivating and exaggerating personal idiosyncrasies, inherited tendencies or weaknesses, artistic temperament or unusual habits—anything to be different. There is a tendency to believe that by being somehow, anyhow, different, one becomes individual. Pursuing this lure of personality, so called, one finds oneself enclosed in habits and false traits of character that bring bondage to thought and action, and often end in suffering, sometimes in chronic illness and invalidism. On page 223 of the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy writes, "Sooner or later we shall learn that the fetters of man's finite capacity are forged by the illusion that he lives in body instead of in Soul, in matter instead of in Spirit." But the truth is that one can no more have personal faculties of his own, a personal life of his own, separated from divine Principle, Life, than he can have a multiplication table of his own separated from the principle of mathematics. Human birth, growth, and maturity, with all their dream experiences, do not constitute man's individuality.
