Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/251

235 It means, in the first instance, a line of conduct on his part which the obedience represents. But in this line of conduct we now have the real schoolmaster to the boy. It is by it that the boy learns more about character, precisely as, by his spontaneous imitations at the earlier stage, he established lines of conduct which taught him more about character. At this stage also, his intelligence is not so rudimentary as at the earlier one. It does not take him long to learn certain great things. By the actions he does through obedience, he learns the meaning of these actions—how they feel, what good or evil results they lead to. And in all his learning by this agency, he learns above all the great lesson essential to the development of his thought of self: that there is a something always present, an atmosphere, a circle of common interest, a family propriety, a mass of accepted tradition; this is his first view of the socius. For a long time it is embodied as a matter of course in the persons whom he obeys. And the social limitations which these persons represent are not always coextensive or parallel. His father and mother often embody very different family spirits to him. And it is only after many tentative adjustments, mistaken efforts to please, excesses of duty in one direction, and instances of rebellion in other directions, that he learns the essential agreements of the different persons who set law over him.

Now this is a new thought of self. How can it be otherwise when all its origin is from persons, and all its characters are learned only by the efforts of the struggling hero to realize their meaning by his own actions? Apart from the elements of a possible self, there is absolutely nothing. It is his actions felt, added to, and made to illustrate the actions of others, with which he fills his consciousness when he thinks of it. And in each of his straining efforts to obey, to do what he is told to do, his success or failure is a further defining of the limitations of one or the other of his old selves, and in so far the creation of a new self.

Now this new self arises, as we have seen, right out of the competitions, urgencies, inhibitions of the old. Suppose a boy