“Mine honor is my life: both grow in one;
Take honor from me and my life is done.”
If we once grasp the fact that the self is primarily a social, ideal, or imaginative fact, and not a sensual fact, all this appears quite natural and not in need of special explanation.
In relation to the highest phases of individuality self-respect becomes self-reverence, in the sense of Tennyson, when he says:
“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.”[[58]]
or of Goethe when, in the first chapter of the second book of “Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre,” he names self-reverence—Ehrfurcht vor sick selbst—as the highest of the four reverences taught to youth in his ideal system of education.[[59]] Emerson uses self-reliance in a similar sense, in that memorable essay the note of which is “Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string,” and throughout his works.
Self-reverence, as I understand the matter, means reverence for a higher or ideal self; a real “I,” because it is based on what the individual actually is, as only he himself can know and appropriate it, but a better “I” of aspiration rather than attainment; it is simply the best he can make out of life. Reverence for it implies, as Emerson urges, resistance to friends and counsellors and to any influence that the mind honestly rejects as inconsistent with itself; a man must feel that the final arbiter is within him and not outside of him in some master, living or dead, as conventional religion, for instance, necessarily teaches. Nevertheless this highest self is a social self, in that it is a product of constructive imagination working with the materials which social experience supplies. Our ideals of personal character are built up out of thoughts and sentiments developed by intercourse, and very largely by imagining how our selves would appear in the minds of persons we look up to. These are not necessarily living persons; anyone that is at all real, that is imaginable, to us, becomes a possible occasion of social self-feeling; and idealizing and aspiring persons live largely in the imagined presence of masters and heroes to whom they refer their own life for comment and improvement. This is particularly true of youth, when ideals are forming; later the personal element in these ideals, having performed its function of suggesting and vivifying them, is likely to fade out of consciousness and leave only habits and principles whose social origin is forgotten.
Resentment, the attitude which an aggressive self takes in response to imagined depreciation, may be regarded as self-feeling with a coloring of anger; indeed, the relation between self-feeling and particular emotions like anger and fear is so close that the latter might be looked upon as simply specialized kinds of the former; it makes little difference whether we take this view or think of them as distinct, since such divisions must always be arbitrary. I shall say more of this sentiment in the next chapter.
If a person conceives his image as depreciated in the mind of another; and if, instead of maintaining an aggressive attitude and resenting that depreciation, he yields to it and accepts the image and the judgment upon it; then he feels and shows something in the way of humility. Here again we have a great variety of nomenclature, indicating different shades of humble feeling and behavior, such as shame, confusion, abasement, humiliation, mortification, meekness, bashfulness, diffidence, shyness, being out of countenance, abashed or crestfallen, contrition, compunction, remorse, and so on.