Or how equally absurd it would be if we went into long explanations as to how the smooch would not have been there if it had not been for so and so, and so and so, or so and so,--and then with all our excuses and explanations and protestations, we let the smooch stay--and never really wash it off.
And yet this is not an exaggeration of what most of us do when our attention is called to defects of character.

When we excuse and explain and tell how clean the other side of our face is, we are putting ourselves positively on the side of the smooch.

So we are putting ourselves entirely on the side of the illness or the pain or the oppression of difficult circumstances when we give excuses or resist or pretend not to see fault in ourselves, or when we confess faults and are contented about them, or when we give all our attention to what is disagreeable and no attention to the normal way of gaining our health or our freedom.
Then all these expressions of self or of illness are to us positive, and our efforts against them only negative.

In such cases, of course, the self possesses us as surely as the grip possesses us when we succumb entirely to all its horrors and make no positive effort to yield out of it.

And the possession of the self is much worse, much deeper, much more subtle.