Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/250

234 it is not yet understood. The self of habit, no less than the self of accommodation, is thrust aside, as he sees his mother's sorrow when she refuses him the biscuit; and there must needs be some other type of personal behavior, some other thought of a self, or character must after all remain to him a chaotic, capricious thing.

We may ask, before we attempt to find a way for the child to extricate himself from this confusion in his thought of personality, whether he has in his own experience any analogies which will help him to assimilate the new suggestive elements. And our observation is very superficial if we do not light upon a very evident thing in his life; the thing he has come to under- stand something about every time he obeys. This is so evidently a thing of value that psychologists long ago struck upon it. The 'word of command' is to Bain the schoolmaster to morality. By it the child gets the habit of personal subjection which, when he illustrates it reflectively, shows itself as morality. This, I think, is true as far as the function of the 'schoolmaster' is concerned; but much more than this schoolmaster is needed to school the agent boy to morality. How it works, however, another appeal to the growing sense of self will serve to show.

Whenever he obeys, the boy has forced in upon him a situation which his thoughts of himself are not adequate to interpret. He is responding neither to his habitual self nor to his accommodating self. Not to the former, for if the thing he is told to do is something he does not want to do, his habits, his private preferences are directly violated. And he is not acting out his accommodating self simply, just in proportion as it comes hard to do what he is told to do. If this self held all the room in his consciousness, then obedience would be companionship, and command would be no more than approval. No, it is really his private habitual self that is mainly present; the other being a forced product, if, by dint of schooling in submission, his obedience becomes so free and unconstrained as to be there at all.

Besides these elements, his two selves, then, what more is there to the child? Why, a dominating other self, a new alter, is there; that is the important thing. And what does it mean?