If we once grasp the fact that the self is primarily a social, ideal, or imaginative fact, and not a sensual fact, all this appears quite natural and not in need of special explanation.

In relation to the highest phases of individuality self-respect becomes self-reverence, in the sense of Tennyson, when he says:

or of Goethe when, in the first chapter of the second book of “Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre,” he names self-reverence—Ehrfurcht vor sick selbst—as the highest of the four reverences taught to youth in his ideal system of education.^[59] Emerson uses self-reliance in a similar sense, in that memorable essay the note of which is “Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string,” and throughout his works.

Self-reverence, as I understand the matter, means reverence for a higher or ideal self; a real “I,” because it is based on what the individual actually is, as only he himself can know and appropriate it, but a better “I” of aspiration rather than attainment; it is simply the best he can make out of life. Reverence for it implies, as Emerson urges, resistance to friends and counsellors and to any influence that the mind honestly rejects as inconsistent with itself; a man must feel that the final arbiter is within him and not outside of him in some master, living or dead, as conventional religion, for instance, necessarily teaches. Nevertheless this highest self is a social self, in that it is a product of constructive imagination working with the materials which social experience supplies. Our ideals of personal character are built up out of thoughts and sentiments developed by intercourse, and very largely by imagining how our selves would appear in the minds of persons we look up to. These are not necessarily living persons; anyone that is at all real, that is imaginable, to us, becomes a possible occasion of social self-feeling; and idealizing and aspiring persons live largely in the imagined presence of masters and heroes to whom they refer their own life for comment and improvement. This is particularly true of youth, when ideals are forming; later the personal element in these ideals, having performed its function of suggesting and vivifying them, is likely to fade out of consciousness and leave only habits and principles whose social origin is forgotten.

Resentment, the attitude which an aggressive self takes in response to imagined depreciation, may be regarded as self-feeling with a coloring of anger; indeed, the relation between self-feeling and particular emotions like anger and fear is so close that the latter might be looked upon as simply specialized kinds of the former; it makes little difference whether we take this view or think of them as distinct, since such divisions must always be arbitrary. I shall say more of this sentiment in the next chapter.

If a person conceives his image as depreciated in the mind of another; and if, instead of maintaining an aggressive attitude and resenting that depreciation, he yields to it and accepts the image and the judgment upon it; then he feels and shows something in the way of humility. Here again we have a great variety of nomenclature, indicating different shades of humble feeling and behavior, such as shame, confusion, abasement, humiliation, mortification, meekness, bashfulness, diffidence, shyness, being out of countenance, abashed or crestfallen, contrition, compunction, remorse, and so on.

Humility, like self-approval, has forms that consist with a high type of character and are felt to be praiseworthy, and others that are felt to be base. There is a sort that goes with vanity and indicates instability, an excessive and indiscriminate yielding to another’s view of one’s self. We wish a man to be humble only before what, from his own characteristic point of view, is truly superior. His humility should imply self-respect; it should be that attitude of deference which a stable but growing character takes in the presence of whatever embodies its ideals. Every outreaching person has masters in whose imagined presence he drops resistance and becomes like clay in the hands of the potter, that they may make something better of him. He does this from a feeling that the master is more himself than he is; there is a receptive enthusiasm, a sense of new life that swallows up the old self and makes his ordinary personality appear tedious, base and despicable. Humility of this sort goes with self-reverence, because a sense of the higher or ideal self plunges the present and commonplace self into humility. The man aims at “so high an ideal that he always feels his unworthiness in his own sight and that of others, though aware of his own desert by the ordinary standards of his community, country, or generation.”^[60] But a humility that is self-abandonment, a cringing before opinion alien to one’s self, is felt to be mere cowardice and servility.

Books of the inner life praise and enjoin lowliness, contrition, repentance, self-abnegation; but it is apparent to all thoughtful readers that the sort of humility inculcated is quite consistent with the self-reverence of Goethe or the self-reliance of Emerson—comes, indeed, to much the same thing. The “Imitatio Christi” is the type of such teaching, yet it is a manly book, and the earlier part especially contains exhortations to self-trust worthy of Emerson. “Certa viriliter,” the writer says, “consuetudo consuetudine vincitur. Si tu scis homines dimittere, ipsi bene te dimittent tua facta facere.”^[61] The yielding constantly enjoined is either to God—that is, to an ideal personality developed in one’s own mind—or, if to men, it is a submission to external rule which is designed to leave the will free for what are regarded as its higher functions. The whole teaching tends to the aggrandizement of an ideal but intensely private self, worked out in solitary meditation—to insure which worldly ambition is to be renounced—and symbolized as God, conscience, or grace. The just criticism of the doctrine that Thomas stands for is not that it depreciates manhood and self-reliance, but that it calls these away from the worldly activities where they are so much needed, and exercises them in a region of abstract imagination. No healthy mind can cast out self-assertion and the idea of personal freedom, however the form of expression may seem to deny these things, and accordingly the Imitation, and still more the New Testament, are full of them. Where there is no self-feeling, no ambition of any sort, there is no efficacy or significance. To lose the sense of a separate, productive, resisting self, would be to melt and merge and cease to be.

Healthy, balanced minds, of only medium sensibility, in a congenial environment and occupied with wholesome activity, keep the middle road of self-respect and reasonable ambition. They may require no special effort, no conscious struggle with recalcitrant egotism, to avoid heart-burning, jealousy, arrogance, anxious running after approval, and other maladies of the social self. With enough self-feeling to stimulate and not enough to torment him, with a social circle appreciative but not flattering, with good health and moderate success, a man may go through life with very little use for the moral and religious weapons that have been wrought for the repression of a contumacious self. There are many, particularly in an active, hopeful, and materially prosperous time like this, who have little experience of inner conflict and no interest in the literature and doctrine that relate to it.

But nearly all persons of the finer, more sensitive sort find the social self at times a source of passion and pain. In so far as a man amounts to anything, stands for anything, is truly an individual, he has an ego about which his passions cluster, and to aggrandize which must be a principal aim with him. But the very fact that the self is the object of our schemes and endeavors makes it a centre of mental disturbance: its suggestions are of effort, responsibility, doubt, hope, and fear. Just as a man cannot enjoy the grass and trees in his own grounds with quite the peace and freedom that he can those abroad, because they remind him of improvements that he ought to make and the like; so any part of the self is, in its nature, likely to be suggestive of exertion rather than rest. Moreover, it would seem that self-feeling, though pleasant in normal duration and intensity, is disagreeable in excess, like any other sort of feeling. One reason why we get tired of ourselves is simply that we have exhausted our capacity for experiencing with pleasure a certain kind of emotion.

As we have seen, the self that is most importunate is a reflection, largely, from the minds of others. This phase of self is related to character very much as credit is related to the gold and other securities upon which it rests. It easily and willingly expands, in most of us, and is liable to sudden, irrational, and grievous collapses. We live on, cheerful, self-confident, conscious of helping make the world go round, until in some rude hour we learn that we do not stand so well as we thought we did, that the image of us is tarnished. Perhaps we do something, quite naturally, that we find the social order is set against, or perhaps it is the ordinary course of our life that is not so well regarded as we supposed. At any rate, we find with a chill of terror that the world is cold and strange, and that our self-esteem, self-confidence, and hope, being chiefly founded upon opinions, attributed to others, go down in the crash. Our reason may tell us that we are no less worthy than we were before, but dread and doubt do not permit us to believe it. The sensitive mind will certainly suffer, because of the instability of opinion. Cadit cum labili. As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it. In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the private self and its social reflection. They seem separate but are darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.

If a person of energetic and fine-strung temperament is neither vain nor proud, and lives equably without suffering seriously from mortification, jealousy, and the like; it is because he has in some way learned to discipline and control his self-feeling, and thus to escape the pains to which it makes him liable. To effect some such escape has always been a present and urgent problem with sensitive minds, and the literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self. To the commoner and somewhat sluggish sorts of people these passions are, on the whole, agreeable and beneficent. Emulation, ambition, honor, even pride and vanity in moderation, belong to the higher and more imaginative parts of our thought; they awaken us from sensuality and inspire us with ideal and socially determined purposes. The doctrine that they are evil could have originated only with those who felt them so; that is, I take it, with unusually sensitive spirits, or those whom circumstances denied a normal and wholesome self-expression. To such the thought of self becomes painful, not because of any lack of self-feeling; but, quite the reverse, because, being too sensitive and tender, it becomes overwrought, so that this thought sets in vibration an emotional chord already strained and in need of rest. To such minds self-abnegation becomes an ideal, an ideal of rest, peace and freedom, like green pastures and still waters. The prophets of the inner life, like Marcus Aurelius, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, and Pascal, were men distinguished not by the lack of an aggressive self, but by a success in controlling and elevating it which makes them the examples of all who undergo a like struggle with it. If their ego had not been naturally importunate they would not have been forced to contend with it, and to develop the tactics of that contention for the edification of times to come.

The social self may be protected either in the negative way, by some sort of withdrawal from the suggestions that agitate and harass it, or in the positive way, by contending with them and learning to control and transform them, so that they are no longer painful; most teachers inculcating some sort of a combination of these two kinds of tactics.

Physical withdrawal from the presence of men has always been much in favor with those in search of a calmer, surer life. The passions to be regulated are sympathetic in origin, awakened by imagination of the minds of other persons with whom we come in contact. As Contarini Fleming remarks in Disraeli’s novel, “So soon as I was among men I desired to influence them.” To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition; and even to change from the associates and competitors of our active life into the company of strangers, or at least of those whose aims and ambitions are different from ours, has much the same effect. To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change. I can hardly agree with those who imagine that a special instinct of withdrawal is necessary to explain the prominence of retirement in the ordinances of religion. People wish to retire from the world because they are weary, harassed, driven by it, so that they feel that they cannot recover their equanimity without getting away from it. To the impressible mind life is a theatre of alarms and contentions, even when a phlegmatic person can see no cause for agitation—and to such a mind peace often seems the one thing fair and desirable, so that the cloister or the forest, or the vessel on the lonesome sea, is the most grateful object of imagination. The imaginative self, which is, for most purposes, the real self, may be more battered, wounded and strained by a striving, ambitious life than the material body could be in a more visible battle, and its wounds are usually more lasting and draw more deeply upon the vitality. Mortification, resentment, jealousy, the fear of disgrace and failure, sometimes even hope and elation, are exhausting passions; and it is after a severe experience of them that retirement seems most healing and desirable.

A subtler kind of withdrawal takes place in the imagination alone by curtailing ambition, by trimming down one’s idea of himself to a measure that need not fear further diminution. How secure and restful it would be if one could be consistently and sincerely humble! There is no sweeter feeling than contrition, self-abnegation, after a course of alternate conceit and mortification. This also is an established part of the religious discipline of the mind. Thus we find the following in Thomas: “Son, now I will teach thee the way of peace and of true liberty.... Study to do another’s will rather than thine own. Choose ever to have less rather than more. Seek ever the lower place and to be subject to all; ever wish and pray that the will of God may be perfectly done in thee and in all. Behold such a man enters the bounds of peace and calm.”^[62] In other words, lop off the aggressive social self altogether, renounce the ordinary objects of ambition, accustom yourself to an humble place in others’ thoughts, and you will be at peace; because you will have nothing to lose, nothing to fear. No one at all acquainted with the moralists, pagan or Christian, will need to be more than reminded that this imaginative withdrawal of the self from strife and uncertainty has ever been inculcated as a means to happiness and edification. Many persons who are sensitive to the good opinion of others, and, by impulse, take great pleasure in it, shrink from indulging this pleasure because they know by experience that it puts them into others’ power and introduces an element of weakness, unrest, and probable mortification. By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension. One learns in time the wisdom of entering into such relations only with persons of whose sincerity, stability, and justice one is as sure as possible; and also of having nothing to do with approval of himself which he does not feel to have a secure basis in his character. And so regarding self-aggrandizement in the various forms implicitly condemned by Thomas’s four rules of peace; if a man is of so eager a temperament that he does not need these motives to awaken him and call his faculties into normal action, he will be happier and possibly more useful to the world if he is able to subdue them by some sort of discipline. In this way, it seems to me, we may chiefly account for and justify the stringent self-suppression of Pascal and of many other fine spirits. “So jealous was he of any surprise of pleasure, of any thought of vanity or complacency in himself and his work, that he wore a girdle of iron next his skin, the sharp points of which he pressed closely when he thought himself in any danger....”^[63]

Of course the objection to withdrawal, physical or imaginative, is that it seems to be a refusal of social functions, a rejection of life, leading logically to other-worldism, to the idea that it is better to die than to live. According to this teaching, in its extreme form, the best thing that can happen to a man is to die and go to heaven; but if that is not permitted, then let the private, ambitious self, set to play the tunes of this world, die in him, and be replaced by humble and secluded meditation in preparation for the life to come. When this doctrine was taught and believed to such an extent that a great part of the finer spirits were led, during centuries, to isolate themselves in deserts and cloisters, or at least to renounce and depreciate the affections and duties of the family, the effect was no doubt bad; but in our time there is little tendency to this extreme, and there is perhaps danger that the usefulness of partial or occasional withdrawal may be overlooked. Mr. Lecky thinks, for instance, that the complete suppression of the conventual system by Protestantism has been far from a benefit to women or the world, and that it is impossible to conceive of any institution more needed than one which should furnish a shelter for unprotected women and convert them into agents of charity.^[64] The amount and kind of social stimulation that a man can bear without harm to his character and working power depends, roughly speaking, upon his sensitiveness, which determines the emotional disturbance, and upon the vigor of the controlling or co-ordinating functions, which measures his power to guide or quell emotion and make it subsidiary to healthy life. There has always been a class of persons, including a large proportion of those capable of the higher sorts of intellectual production, for whom the competitive struggles of ordinary life are overstimulating and destructive, and who therefore cannot serve the world well without apparently secluding themselves from it. It would seem, then, that withdrawal and asceticism are often too sweepingly condemned. A sound practical morality will consider these things in relation to various types of character and circumstance, and find, I believe, important functions for both.

But the most radical remedy for the mortifications and uncertainties of the social self is not the negative one of merely secluding or diminishing the I, but the positive one of transforming it. The two are not easily distinguishable, and are usually phases of the same process. The self-instinct, though it cannot be suppressed while mental vigor remains, can be taught to associate itself more and more with ideas and aims of general and permanent worth, which can be thought of as higher than the more sensual, narrow, or temporary interests, and independent of them. It must always be borne in mind that the self is any idea or system of ideas with which is associated the peculiar appropriative attitude we call self-feeling. Anything whose depreciation makes me feel resentful is myself, whether it is my coat, my face, my brother, the book I have published, the scientific theory I accept, the philanthropic work to which I am devoted, my religious creed, or my country. The only question is, Am I identified with it in my thought, so that to touch it is to touch me? Thus in “Middlemarch” the true self of Mr. Casaubon, his most aggressive, persistent, and sensitive part, is his system of ideas relating to the unpublished “Key to All Mythologies.” It is about this that he is proud, jealous, sore, and apprehensive. What he imagines that the Brasenose men will think of it is a large part of his social self, and he suffers hidden joy and torture according as he is hopeful or despondent of its triumphant publication. When he finds that his body must die his chief thought is how to keep this alive, and he attempts to impose its completion upon poor Dorothea, who is a pale shadow in his life compared with the Key, a mere instrument to minister to this fantastic ego. So if one, turning the leaves of history, could evoke the real selves of all the men of thought, what a strange procession they would be!—outlandish theories, unintelligible and forgotten creeds, hypotheses once despised but now long established, or vice versa—all conceived eagerly, jealously, devotedly, as the very heart of the self. There is no class more sensitive and none, not even the insane, in whom self-feeling attaches to such singular and remote conceptions. An astronomer may be indifferent when you depreciate his personal appearance, abuse his relatives, or question his pecuniary honesty; but if you doubt that there are artificial canals on Mars you cut him to the quick. And poets and artists of every sort have always and with good reason been regarded as a genus irritabile.

The ideas of self most commonly cherished, and the ambitions corresponding to these ideas, fail to appease the imagination of the idealist, for various reasons; chiefly, perhaps, for the following: first because they seem more or less at variance with the good of other persons, and so, to the imaginative and sympathetic mind, bring elements of inconsistency and wrong, which it cannot accept as consonant with its own needs; and second because their objects are at best temporary, so that even if thought of as achieved they fail to meet the need of the mind for a resting-place in some conception of permanent good or right. The transformation of narrow and temporary ambitions or ideals into something more fitted to satisfy the imagination in these respects, is an urgent need, a condition precedent to peace of mind, in many persons. The unquiet and discordant state of the unregenerate is a commonplace, a thousand times repeated, of writings on the inner life. “Superbus et avarus numquam quiescunt,” they tell us, and to enable us to escape from such unrest is a chief aim of the discipline of self-feeling enjoined by ethical and religious teachers. “Self,” “the natural man,” and similar expressions indicate an aspect of the self thought of as lower—in part at least because of the insecure, inconsistent, and temporary character just indicated—which is to be so far as possible subjected and forgotten, while the feelings once attached to it find a less precarious object in ideas of justice and right, or in the conception of a personal deity, in whom all that is best of personality is to have secure existence and eternal success.

In this sense also we may understand the idea of freedom as it presented itself to Thomas à Kempis and similar minds. To forget “self” and live the larger life is to be free; free, that is, from the racking passions of the lower self, free to go onward into a self that is joyful, boundless, and without remorse. To gain this freedom the principal means is the control or mortification of sensual needs and worldly ambitions.

Thus the passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.

Wherever men find themselves out of joint with their social environment the fact will be reflected in some peculiarity of self-feeling. Thus it was in times when the general state of Europe was decadent and hopeless, or later when ceaseless wars and the common rule of violence prevailed, that finer spirits, for whose ambition the times offered no congenial career, so largely sought refuge in religious seclusion, and there built up among themselves a philosophy which compensated them by the vision of glory in another world for their insignificance in this. An institution so popular and enduring as monasticism and the system of belief that throve in connection with it must have answered to some deep need of human nature, and it would seem that, as regarded the more intellectual class, this need was largely that of creating a social self and system of selves which could thrive in the actual state of things. Their natures craved success, and, following a tendency always at work, though never more fantastic in its operation, they created an ideal or standard of success which they could achieve—very much as a farmer’s boy with a weak body but an active brain sometimes goes into law, seeking and upholding an intellectual type of success. From this point of view—which is, of course, only one of many whence monasticism may be regarded—it appears as a wonderful exhibition of the power of human nature to effectuate itself in a co-operative manner in spite of the most untoward external circumstances.

If we have less flight from the world, corporeal or metaphysical, at the present day, it is doubtless in part because the times are more hospitable to the finer abilities, so that all sorts of men, within wide limits, find careers in which they may hope to gratify a reasonable ambition. But even now, where conditions are deranged and somewhat anarchical, so that many find themselves cut off from the outlook toward a congenial self-development, the wine of life turns bitter, and harrying resentments are generated which more or less disturb the stability of the social order. Each man must have his “I”; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.

Persons of great ambitions, or of peculiar aims of any sort, lie open to disorders of self-feeling, because they necessarily build up in their minds a self-image which no ordinary social environment can understand or corroborate, and which must be maintained by hardening themselves against immediate influences, enduring or repressing the pains of present depreciation, and cultivating in imagination the approval of some higher tribunal. If the man succeeds in becoming indifferent to the opinions of his neighbors he runs into another danger, that of a distorted and extravagant self of the pride sort, since by the very process of gaining independence and immunity from the stings of depreciation and misunderstanding, he has perhaps lost that wholesome deference to some social tribunal that a man cannot dispense with and remain quite sane. The image lacks verification and correction and becomes too much the reflection of an undisciplined self-feeling. It would seem that the megalomania or delusion of greatness which Lombroso, with more or less plausibility, ascribes to Victor Hugo and many other men of genius, is to be explained largely in this way.

Much the same may be said regarding the relation of self-feeling to mental disorder, and to abnormal personality of all sorts. It seems obvious, for instance, that the delusions of greatness and delusions of persecution so common in insanity are expressions of self-feeling escaped from normal limitation and control. The instinct which under proper regulation by reason and sympathy gives rise to just and sane ambition, in the absence of it swells to grotesque proportions; while the delusion of persecution appears to be a like extravagant development of that jealousy regarding what others are thinking of us which often reaches an almost insane point in irritable people whose sanity is not questioned.

The peculiar relations to other persons attending any marked personal deficiency or peculiarity are likely to aggravate, if not to produce, abnormal manifestations of self-feeling. Any such trait sufficiently noticeable to interrupt easy and familiar intercourse with others, and make people talk and think about a person or to him rather than with him, can hardly fail to have this effect. If he is naturally inclined to pride or irritability, these tendencies, which depend for correction upon the flow of sympathy, are likely to be increased. One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore. He finds himself apart, “not in it,” and feels chilled, fearful, and suspicious. Thus “queerness” is no sooner perceived than it is multiplied by reflection from other minds. The same is true in some degree of dwarfs, deformed or disfigured persons, even the deaf and those suffering from the infirmities of old age. The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.