and positively before it can afford to give up its claims. One must have thought and doubted before the view of another can be accepted with spiritual profit. One must have struggled for power, directly and blindly, before the beauty of obedience to a common law can be apprehended.

Teach the young child from the outset to forego his own desires, to yield and never to fight, and you endanger those very characteristics upon which all subsequent mental vigor and self-reliance ultimately depend. Let him at first claim his own and fight for it. While he will inevitably be opposed and limited by other wills, while his place in the fabric of a social world will be impressed upon him in an unforgettable way, he will also find developing in himself those elements of stability-a resolute and unfaltering will, a capacity to take punishment serenely, quickness of observation and resourcefulness in response-upon which so much of his later success depends. The ego must lay the world under tribute before it can itself contribute; it must receive before it can give. Be bold, assert yourself! nature cries aloud. Act as you think and as you feel! See the thing through your own eyes, not through the preconceptions of any other! Let what you do be the embodiment of your own will, and what you seek the object of your own desire! In the perception of these truths lies the beginning of wisdom in all free life as well as rational appreciation.

But the formulation of a positive egoism in terms of the blank immediate assertion of the will is inevitably confronted, at the very outset, by the counter-thesis that the actual world in which the ego exists will not permit the carrying out of any such unconditioned program. Its materials are plastic in part only. They yield to our pressure, yet preserve their own laws, which we are forced to accept and recognize in our treatment. It is only in dreamland that things conform to our thought, and what we will is actualized by very virtue of imagining it. In the world of reality things are otherwise arranged. Facts are stubborn and must not be ignored. We bow to them even when we make use of them. Each class of material must be dealt with in ways determined by its own specific constitution. With wood we build in one way, with stone in another, with iron in a third; and what can

be made with steel beams simply cannot be constructed of wood

or stone.

Whether it be sensible things or human attitudes one must accept the conditions which the character of the material imposes, if any rational use is to be made of it. For the reaction of the will in its social manifestation is likewise determined by the nature of the materials which it seeks to mold. Minds must be acted upon systematically if they are to be effectively modified. The world cannot be reformed by an edict, nor can any human attitude be called into existence by an act of will. The spontaneous, untrammeled development of the self in a series of acts which represent its own proper nature and take no account of external forces and conditions is a vain dream. Mutual limitation, or adaptation, is the general condition of association. In itself the will is impotent; it takes on positive form only through a reaction in which the material, or external, condition is as indispensable as the formal condition or constitution of the mind itself.

Each form of excellence must be won from a hostile world, that is, a world which does not freely supply what the self needs but only permits its attainment by directed and persistent activity. All self-realization is thus grounded upon recognition of external conditions and conformity to their requirements. It is only the madman who persistently ignores them, and in a burlesque of reality imagines himself the dictator of a world which faithfully reflects the shifts in his own subjective attitude. The action of the will, in transcending the realm of subjective organization, instantly meets opposition. It finds itself in a world where standing must be won by fighting for it. Yet the obstacles which the world opposes to free activity are at the same time means by which the self attains to its own ideal development. In subjective and objective realms alike obedience to law is the condition of rational freedom. The soul is born in slavery-slavery to weakness, to ignorance, to a chaotic mind—and must work out its liberation through long and patient service. The system of ideals of which the formal character of any individual ego consists is not originally given but developed as the self comes into possession of a knowledge of the external world and its own relations to it. Mastery is

attained, not by wild dreams of dominion, whether physical or mental, but through disciplinary exercise of the power which exists at each moment. Vain desire for knowledge on the part of a supine will must give way to strenuous and persistent study, for the vision of wisdom grows only with the mind's own endeavors.

The individual self must thus submit to the whole system of conditions logically imposed upon it if its realization, in any intelligible sense of the term, is to take place. Learning and discipline, repression and inhibition, subordination and obedience are all implied in the process. The world must be apprehended by the self not only as a means to the realization of its own purposes but also as the general source of its knowledge and ideals. Submission and faith may be exacted even when the rationality of the command is obscure, not merely because the ego finds itself face to face, in the person of human society, with a will stronger than its own and must submit as the first act of self-preservation, but also because it comes to perceive that this greater social self is wiser than it can ever hope to be as the result of its own experimentation with life, and that the laws imposed upon it are, on the whole, such as tend to the furtherance of its own purposes. Obedience, in other words, results in a course of conduct which the self would both approve and spontaneously adopt were it in possession of all the facts.

The logical relation of self to society has its analogue in the determination of purely individual problems, for within the circle of its own inner life as well as in its adaptations to other human wills the self finds it necessary to subdue the impulse of the moment in view of that larger system of ends which its purpose comprehends; it must exercise self-control and prudence. Throughout its life self-limitation is as necessary as self-aggrandizement to the evolution of a rational ego.

III

The psychological study of the empirical self has traditionally suffered from a misconception which vitiates many historical theories in the field of economics and politics as well as morals and education. The ego has been conceived as if it were an isolated

and self-dependent system. Its internal character as an organized whole has been considered, to the practical exclusion of its external relations and development. The fundamental concepts of the historical method have been slow in making their way into the field of mental science in its general theoretical form of psychology as well as in its various special and practical applications in the social relations of men. That archaic point of view in psychology has now been definitively superseded, along with the conceptions of immutability in ethics and the "economic man."

The self of psychology is historically and socially conditioned. From the outset its milieu is a spiritual community. It can neither exist nor be developed apart from the vital protoplasm of human association. Considered in such abstraction it has a merely logical existence, like that of the social mind in isolation from the individual wills which participate in a common action. The result of this perception has been a great and permanent enrichment of psychological science. It has not only added social psychology to the study of the individual mind and developed a class of special problems concerning the forms of modification which occur in the mutual adaptation of wills-the study of suggestion and imitation, of inventiveness and initiative, of docility and leadership, etc.-it has also radically affected our general conception of the nature and genesis of the empirical self.

This modification may be described as the substitution of a socialistic for the prevailing individualistic point of view. It is the conception that the self, in its psychological no less than in its metaphysical relations, must be treated as an element in a spiritual complex. To regard it as did earlier psychology is to abstract one of two logical components which existence implies, and to regard it in isolation from its correlative.

The ego and the alter come into existence together, the product of a common birth. Progressive enrichment in the content of personality affects equally the concept of the self and that of the socius. These two processes of development are reciprocally related; deepening of the self's experience is the basis of enlargement in one's conception of the character and scope of other selves. The maxim of Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things,

holds true of this whole system of conceptions; for the general interpretation which human character receives in the individual mind reflects the latter's own criteria and habitual attitudes. It may be practical illusion but it is psychological fact. The mean soul lives in a shabby world, seeing in the actions of men at large the embodiment of ignoble motives and a shameful purpose; the great soul lifts up the world in which it lives to its own measure, because it construes the activities of other men in terms of its own high nature.

Conversely, the very substance of the self, as it grows, takes on a social form. Its attitudes are expressed in a system of reactions toward other human wills. Two general phases mark its activity: first, the representation of its own states to these other willsin confession, intercourse, and self-expression; and second, adaptation, which appears either in an aggressive modification of their attitudes or in the acceptance and incorporation of conceptions which these attitudes reveal.

In giving and receiving confidences and in learning from or impressing others is the engrossing occupation of man. This sensitive and active response to other human wills has many forms, and draws upon the whole complex of materials which the world affords. It not only appears in the struggle to maintain and extend our social prestige but is intertwined with our most ideal striving. It is the ultimate ground of our endeavor to enrich the general sum of human possessions and the immediate provocative in our utilization of this store to make a more brilliant and effective impression. It is an enduring stimulus to literary and artistic expression, while in every propaganda of self-aggrandizement or renunciation it enters as an appeal—often inarticulate or wholly unconscious-to the verdict of posterity, to abstract justice or the approval of God.

In this activity of persuasion and argument, of acquiescence and domination-in short, of giving and receiving social stimulation-the self is so absorbed that the habit is carried over into solitude and becomes the characteristic of self-consciousness. In critical reflection upon previous action it affords the most general type of mental exercise in those functions which are fundamental to successful adaptation at large; and in sentimentality it provides