Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/254

238 We do not need to develop in this place a complete theory of the adult conscience: that would be outside our topic. But no account of the development of the sense of self, or of the social conditions under which the sense of self arises and grows, would be adequate which left out this highest reach of the child's constructiveness. We are wont to think that we can draw lines in the attainments of mind, interpret so far and leave the rest over; but the surging activities of stimulation and response pass right over our boundary lines, and we find the germs of the higher impregnating the lower stages. The child, when once this sense of a self which is not but ought to be, comes to him, does everything under its law—whether his action conform to what he understands of it or whether he disobey and offend it. He is henceforth never innocent with the innocence of neutrality. He must think of the better with sorrow if he choose the worse, and of the worse with joy if he choose the better; and when he makes his act only in response to the measure of good which he sees, taking a step in the dark, still there is with him the necessary conviction of a self that he groped for, but did not find,—a law behind the chaos of his struggle.

It is enough, in this connection, that one or two truths regarding the nature of this ethical self should remain in mind. It is, first of all, a slow attainment of the child. He gets it only by getting certain other thoughts of self first. Then it takes on various forms, each held to only to be superseded in turn by something higher and richer. The obligation to obey it is also slow in its rise. It is a function of the self—this self, the socius—just as the tendency to yield to the behests of habit or of sympathy are simply functions, the motor side of their respective contents. The 'ought' comes right up out of the 'must.' Transfer the self to be obeyed from the environment to the inner throne, make it an ego instead of an alter, and its authority is not a whit changed in nature; it is exactly the same thing in the one case as in the other. Something of its executive compulsion is gone; it is one of the very intimate differences between an ego and an alter, that the ego is its own