Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/320

 contrasts between ego and non-ego into sight. If I really know what on the whole I mean to be, the chaotic succession of empirical states of my ego which varying experience brings to me will not break up my deeper unity. This knowledge of what I mean to be is in part an expression of the habits of my calling, of the mere routine of my business, as these habits and this routine gradually get established for me by fortune and by training, in the family and in the world. And so far, indeed, one can have merely the self-consciousness of one’s little hoard of maxims, — the indispensable but relatively Philistine selfhood of the man who gradually becomes, settled into his way and place in life. Such self-consciousness, which we all, in our imperfection, must more or less depend upon, is so far only a sort of abstract, or composite image, of the common elements of our actual states of self-consciousness as fortune moulds them. Our social habits get formed: we have our range, our private life, our round of friends, our daily tasks. These involve relatively constant repetitions of similar states of self-consciousness. From repetition springs inner constancy. And, so far, we in the end find our level, and take ourselves to be whatever the world has made of us.

But there is another and a much higher aspect of self-consciousness. My plan of life is not merely my way, but my ideal as such. I do not mean to be merely what by worldly chance I am. And here the very chaos of social accidents to which, particularly in youth, we are subject, proves serviceable in bringing to pass a most important contrast within the