It is true, also, that in sensitive persons self-feeling often reaches a pitch of irritability that impedes production, or vulgarizes it through too great deference to opinion. But this is a matter of the control and discipline of particular aspects of the self rather than of its general tendency. When undisciplined this sort of feeling may be futile or harmful, just as fear, whose function is to cause us to avoid danger, may defeat its own aim through excessive and untimely operation, and anger may so excite us that we lose the power of inflicting injury.
If the people of our time and country are peculiarly selfish, as is sometimes alleged, it is certainly not because a too rigid or clearly differentiated type of self-consciousness is general among us. On the contrary, our most characteristic fault is perhaps a certain superficiality and vagueness of character and aims; and this seems to spring from a lack of collectedness and self-definition, which in turn is connected with the too eager mode of life common among us. I doubt, however, whether egotism, which is essentially a falling short of moral standards, can be said to be more prevalent in one age than another.
In Mr. Roget’s “Thesaurus” may be found about six pages devoted to words denoting “Extrinsic personal affections, or personal affections derived from the opinions or feelings of others,” an expression which seems to mean nearly the same as is here meant by social self-feeling of the reflected or looking-glass sort. Although the compiler fishes with a wide net and brings in much that seems hardly to belong here, the number of words in common use indicating different varieties of this sort of feeling is surprising and suggestive. One cannot but think, What insight and what happy boldness of invention went to the devising of all these terms! What a psychologist is language, that thus labels and treasures up so many subtle aspects of the human mind!
We may profitably distinguish, as others have done, two general attitudes—the aggressive or self-assertive and the shrinking or humble. The first indicates that one thinks favorably of himself and tries to impose that favorable thought on others; the second, that he accepts and yields to a depreciating reflection of himself, and feels accordingly diminished and abased. Pride would, of course, be an example of the first way of feeling and acting, humility of the second.
But there are many phases of the aggressive self, and these, again, might be classified something as follows: first, in response to imagined approval we have pride, vanity, or self-respect; second, in response to imagined censure we have various sorts of resentment; and the humble self might be treated in a similar manner.
Pride and vanity are names which are commonly applied only to forms of self-approval that strike us as disagreeable or egotistical; but they may be used in a somewhat larger sense to indicate simply a more or less stable attitude of the social self toward the world in which it is reflected; the distinction being of the same sort as that between unstable and rigid egotism already suggested.
These differences in stability, which are of great importance in the study of social personality, are perhaps connected with the contrast between the more receptive and the more constructive types of mind. Although in the best minds reception and construction are harmoniously united, and although it may be shown that they are in a measure mutually dependent, so that neither can be perfect without the other, yet as a rule they are not symmetrically developed, and this lack of symmetry corresponds to divergences of personal character. Minds of one sort are, so to speak, endogenous or ingrowing in their natural bent, while those of another are exogenous or outgrowing; that is to say, those of the former kind have a relatively strong turn for working up old material, as compared with that for taking in new; cogitation is more pleasant to them than observation; they prefer the sweeping and garnishing of their house to the confusion of entertaining visitors; while of the other sort the opposite of this may be said. Now, the tendency of the endogenous or inward activities is to secure unity and stability of thought and character at the possible expense of openness and adaptability; because the energy goes chiefly into systematization, and in attaining this the mind is pretty sure to limit its new impressions to those that do not disturb too much that unity and system it loves so well. These traits are, of course, manifested in the person’s relation to others. The friends he has “and their acceptance tried” he grapples to his soul with hooks of steel, but is likely to be unsympathetic and hard toward influences of a novel character. On the other hand, the exogenous or outgrowing mind, more active near the periphery than toward the centre, is open to all sorts of impressions, eagerly taking in new material, which is likely never to get much arrangement; caring less for the order of the house than that it should be full of guests, quickly responsive to personal influences, but lacking that depth and tenacity of sympathy that the other sort of mind shows with people congenial with itself.
Pride,[[55]] then, is the form social self-approval takes in the more rigid or self-sufficient sort of minds; the person who feels it is assured that he stands well with others whose opinion he cares for, and does not imagine any humiliating image of himself, but carries his mental and social stability to such a degree that it is likely to narrow his soul by warding off the enlivening pricks of doubt and shame. By no means independent of the world, it is, after all, distinctly a social sentiment, and gets its standards ultimately from social custom and opinion. But the proud man is not immediately dependent upon what others think; he has worked over his reflected self in his mind until it is a steadfast portion of his thought, an idea and conviction apart, in some measure, from its external origin. Hence this sentiment requires time for its development and flourishes in mature age rather than in the open and growing period of youth. A man who is proud of his rank, his social position, his professional eminence, his benevolence, or his integrity, is in the habit of contemplating daily an agreeable and little changing image of himself as he believes he appears in the eyes of the world. This image is probably distorted, since pride deceives by a narrowing of the imagination, but it is stable, and because it is so, because he feels sure of it, he is not disturbed by any passing breath of blame. If he is aware of such a thing at all he dismisses it as a vagary of no importance, feeling the best judgment of the world to be securely in his favor. If he should ever lose this conviction, if some catastrophe should shatter the image, he would be a broken man, and, if far gone in years, would perhaps not raise his head again.
In a sense pride is strength; that is, it implies a stable and consistent character which can be counted on; it will do its work without watching, and be honorable in its dealings, according to its cherished standards; it has always a vigorous, though narrow, conscience. On the other hand, it stunts a man’s growth by closing his mind to progressive influences, and so in the long run may be a source of weakness. Burke said, I believe, that no man ever had a point of pride that was not injurious to him; and perhaps this was what he meant. Pride also causes, as a rule, a deeper animosity on the part of others than vanity; it may be hated but hardly despised; yet many would rather live with it than with vanity, because, after all, one knows where to find it, and so can adapt himself to it. The other is so whimsical that it is impossible to foresee what turn it will take next.
Language seldom distinguishes clearly between a way of feeling and its visible expression; and so the word vanity, which means primarily emptiness, indicates either a weak or hollow appearance of worth put on in the endeavor to impress others, or the state of feeling that goes with it. It is the form social self-approval naturally takes in a somewhat unstable mind, not sure of its image. The vain man, in his more confident moments, sees a delightful reflection of himself, but knowing that it is transient, he is afraid it will change. He has not fixed it, as the proud man has, by incorporation with a stable habit of thought, but, being immediately dependent for it upon others, is at their mercy and very vulnerable, living in the frailest of glass houses which may be shattered at any moment; and, in fact, this catastrophe happens so often that he gets somewhat used to it and soon recovers from it. While the image which the proud person contemplates is fairly consistent, and, though distorted, has a solid basis in his character, so that he will not accept praise for qualities he does not believe himself to possess; vanity has no stable idea of itself and will swallow any shining bait. The person will gloat now on one pleasing reflection of himself, now on another, trying to mimic each in its turn, and becoming, so far as he can, what any flatterer says he is, or what any approving person seems to think he is. It is characteristic of him to be so taken up with his own image in the other’s mind that he is hypnotized by it, as it were, and sees it magnified, distorted, and out of its true relation to the other contents of that mind. He does not see, as so often happens, that he is being managed and made a fool of; he “gives himself away”—fatuity being of the essence of vanity. On the other hand, and for the same reason, a vain person is frequently tortured by groundless imaginings that someone has misunderstood him, slighted him, insulted him, or otherwise mistreated his social effigy.