I found myself in a quiet twilit room where a man with something like a large chessboard in front of him sat in Eastern fashion on the floor. At the first glance I thought it was friend Pablo. He wore at any rate a similar gorgeous silk jacket and had the same dark and shining eyes.

“Are you Pablo?” I asked.

“I am not anybody,” he replied amiably. “We have no names here and we are not anybody. I am a chess-player. Do you wish for instruction in the building up of the personality?”

“Yes, please.”

“Then be so kind as to place a few dozen of your pieces at my disposal.”

“My pieces⁠—?”

“Of the pieces into which you saw your so-called personality broken up. I can’t play without pieces.”

He held a glass up to me and again I saw the unity of my personality broken up into many selves whose number seemed even to have increased. The pieces were now, however, very small, about the size of chessmen. The player took a dozen or so of them in his sure and quiet fingers and placed them on the ground near the board. As he did so he began to speak in the monotonous way of one who goes through a recitation or reading that he has often gone through before.

“The mistaken and unhappy notion that a man is an enduring unity is known to you. It is also known to you that man consists of