Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/696

680 new orders made progress possible, and enabled Catholicism to retain within the fold those earnest and devout spirits most apt to chafe under the rigidity of a single ecclesiastical institution. Catholic unity was made permanently impossible when Luther condemned the monastic vow itself as unchristian. From the beginning, one of the extraordinary things about Christianity has been its great variety. Philosophers and fanatics, rationalists and reformers have all added to our present mass of beliefs. Much is truly Christian which in its origin had nothing to do with Christ. The unity in Christianity belongs to the sphere of life rather than to that of logic, and it comes to its highest expression not in formulae but in enthusiasms. The motto "Back to Christ" should be changed to "Forward with Christ."

Introspection and analysis show that the self as object, the 'I,' is the memory image of the self who acted toward himself and is the same self who acts toward other selves, and that the self as subject, the 'me,' is the object of the social conduct of others. The observer who accompanies all our self-conscious and social conduct is the response the 'I' makes to his own conduct. This frequently may be in the rôle of another assuming the attitude of another. And until this process has been developed into the abstract process of thought, the self is loosely organized and very clearly social. In the reconstruction, that is, in the organization of habit or formation of character, the self arises out of a partial disintegration, the appearance of the different interests in the forum of reflection, the reconstruction of the social world, and the consequent appearance of the new self that answers to the new object.

Consciousness is a process of forming an idea of an object. Social consciousness implies a personal interrelationship of human-beings with a mutual consciousness of this relationship. This kinship is not explained by imitation, nor by the expression of common interests, but by an expression of mutual interests through an exchange of ideas. In the conscious process, even in the realm of morality, the idea formed must be an individual interpretation of the object or other. Consciousness is an affair of making things over and in so doing we have the power to realize our own freedom and the obligation to respect the other's freedom. The very consciousness which creates any obligation, also creates the power of realizing individual ends. In all social consciousness, the object, or other, is one with whom we are in direct communication; when it is an other in whom we are interested we have in consciousness all that is implied in a true sympathy and compelling loyalty. The social unity thus becomes a unity appropriate to the nature of conscious and