hose
origin is remote in time, space, and intention from those operative
in the predominant public opinion of his day. He may
come to act habitually on the basis of ideal standards which
he has himself set up through reflection, or which he has
acquired from some moral system or tradition, far in advance of
those which are the staple determinants of character for most
of his contemporaries. He may be one of those rare moral
geniuses, singularly unsusceptible to praise and blame, who
create a new ideal of character by the dominant individuality
of their own. Or, as more frequently happens, he may follow
the ideals set up by such a one, instead of accepting the orthodoxies
which are generally observed. He may follow Christ
instead of the Pharisees, Socrates instead of the habit-crusted
citizens of Athens. We are, indeed, inclined to think of a
man as a peculiarly distinctive personality, when his sense of
selfhood, and the overt actions in which that selfhood finds
expression, are not determined by the current dogmas of his
day, but by ideal standards to which he has reflectively given
allegiance. But so much is the self, both in its consciousness
and expression, socially produced that men acting on purely
imagined ideal standards, current nowhere in their day and
generation, have imagined a group, no matter how small or
how remote, who would praise them or a God who noted and
approved their ways.

CHARACTER AND WILL. From the foregoing it would appear
that the self is an organization of habitual tendencies, developed
primarily through contact with other people and more
specifically through their praise and blame. And consciousness
of self is the awareness of the unique or specific character
of the habit-organization one has acquired. Individuals differ
natively in given capacities, and differences in fully developed
personalities depend, certainly in part, on innate
initial differences. But differences in the kinds of selfhood
displayed and experienced by different men are due to something
more than differences in native capacities and native
desires. The self that a man exhibits and of which he is conscious,
at any given period of his life, depends on the complex
system of habits he has in the course of his experience developed.
One individual may, as we have seen, develop a number
of sets of organized dispositions, a multiple character, as
it were, as a consequence of the multiplicity of groups with
which he has