 “We do, and must, upon our entrance into the world, begin with idolatry to external things, and, as we advance in it, proceed to the idolatry of ourselves” (OM 2, prop. 4). Some thus remain, anxiously pouring their sacrifices over these concretions. In others the inevitable, painful counter-associations act as solvents, and cause the stony idols to disintegrate. Sympathy and theopathy replace imagination and ambition as “primary pursuits,” the fundamental modes of experience and interaction. Hartley calls this reorienting transformation the “annihilation of self.”