al Psychology_, p. 240.]

Each human being as he goes through life acquires a number of moral
ideals and sentiments which he adopts as his own. They become linked
with the instinct of self-assertion, which henceforth acts as the
motive power behind them, and attempts to drive from the field any
emotion which happens to conflict.

Men, like the lower animals, are ruled by desire, but, as G.A. Coe
says, "Men mold themselves. They form desires not merely to have this
or that object, but to be this or that kind of a man."[66]

[Footnote 66: Coe: _Psychology of Religion_.]

If a man be worthy of the name, he is not swayed by the emotion which
happens for the moment to be strongest. He has the power to reinforce
and make dominant those impulses which fit into the ideal he has built
for himself. In other words, he has the power to choose between his
desires, and this power depends largely upon the ideals which he has
incorporated into his life by the complexes and sentiments which
compose his personality.

_Ideas and Ideals_. If emotion is the heart of humanity, ideas are its
head. In our emphasis on emotion, we must not forget that as emotion
controls action, so ideas control emotion. But ideas, of themselves,
are not enough. Everybody has seen weaklings who were full of pious
platitudes. Ideas do control life, but only when linked up with some
strong emotion. No moral sentiment is strong enough to withstand an
intense instinctive desire. If ideas are to be dynamic factors in a
life, they must become ideals and be really desired. They must be
backed up by the impulse of self-assertion, incorporated with the
sentiment of self-regard, and so made a permanent part of the central
personality.

Parents and teachers who try to "break a child's will" and to punish
every evidence of independence and self-assertion little know that
they are undermining the foundations of morality itself, and doing
their utmost to leave the child at the mercy of his chance whims and
emotions. There can be no strength of character without self-regard,
and self-regard is built on the instinctive desire of self-assertion.

=Education and Religion.= It is easy to see how important education is
in this process of giving the right content to the self-regarding
sentiment. The child trained to regard "temper" as a disgrace,
self-pity as a vice, over-sensitiveness as a sign of selfishness, and
all forms of exaggerated emotionalism as a token of weakness