Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/255

239 impulsion while the alter brings compulsion; and as the alter aspect of the new self becomes more and more adequately assimilated, this difference grows more emphatic. The developed ethical sense needs less and less to appeal to an alter self, an authority, a holy oracle, to execute the ought of conscience; it gets itself more and more promptly executed by its own inner impulsion. A history of the great world-religions, or of the inner form of their deities, might be written on the basis of this movement in the form of the ethical self, which also implicates the social Zeitgeist.

And a second point to be borne in mind: that as the socius in the mind of the child expands, there is the constant tendency to make it real—to eject it—in some concrete form in the social group. The father, mother, nurse are apt to be the first embodiment of social law, and their conduct, interpreted through obedience and imitation, the first ethical standard. And as the child finds one man or woman inadequate to the growing complications of the case, other concrete selves are erected in the same way. The church, the state, the popular vote, the king, the literature of a period,—all these are choice repositories of the ejected ethical self. Public opinion is our modern expression for the most pervasive form of this spirit, or for the purely social form of it.

Then a third point: we may ask what the law is which we find this self embodying. And we get a twofold answer. Most comprehensively it may be said that the law is in one sense always the realized self of somebody. Apart from a self it can be nothing. It must come out of somebody's apprehension of the social situation and the requirements of the case. The parents themselves over against the rest of the family are usually the source of family law. But that they are held to the actual socius—to the relationships existing between them and the others—is seen in any attempts they may make to transcend these relationships. Suppose that the father commands each of the family to dance the highland fling and then to write a book. Whether the first of these commands be obeyed, depends on whether he has had a right to include in his sense of the