activities. The
"self" of which we are conscious ceases to be our merely physical
person, and comes to include our possessions. The house
we live in and the garden we tend, our children, our friends,
our opinions, creations, or inventions, these become extensions
and more or less inalienable parts of our personalities.
Our "selfhood" includes not simply us, but ours.

Our possessions, and especially such as are the fruits of our
own actions, are indications of what we are. We judge, and
within limits correctly, of a man by the company he keeps,
the clothes he wears, by the books he reads, the pictures with
which he decorates his home, the kind of home he builds or
has built. And a man may feel as provoked by insult or injury
to the person or things which have become an intimate
part of his life as if he were being attacked in his physical
person. Strip a man one by one of his physical acquisitions,
of his associates, of the indications and mementos of the
things he has thought and done, and there would be no "self"
left. To speak of a man as a nonentity is to imply that he is
no "self" worth speaking of; that he can be blown about
hither and thither; that neither his opinions nor desires, nor
possessions, nor associates make an iota of difference in the
world. A man who is a "somebody," a "person to be reckoned
with," is one who is a "self." He is one whose physical
possessions or personal abilities or standing in the community
make him one of the "powers that be." And it is the desire
to be a factor in the world, to increase the scope and
consequence of one's self that is the leading ingredient in what we
call ambition, and the desire for fame, and at least one ingredient
in the desire for wealth. Men may want wealth
merely for the sake of possession, or for bodily comfort, but
part of the desire consists in the ability thereby to spread one's
influence, to be "one of the happy sons of earth, who lord it
over land and sea, in the full-blown lustihood that wealth
and power can give, and before whom, stiffen ourselves as
we will ... we cannot escape an emotion, sneaking or open,
of dread."[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. I, p. 293.]

THE ENHANCEMENT OF THE SELF. The building-up of a more or
less permanent self is natively satisfactory to most men, and
every means will be taken to increase its scope and influence.
Biologically we are so constituted as to perform many acts
making for our self-preservati