Idealism in this vague form has neither first, second, nor third person. It is simply an impression of the desirable in personality, and is impulsively applied to your conduct, my conduct, or his conduct, as the case may be. The sentiment occurs to us, and the connection in which it occurs determines its moral application. We sometimes speak as if it required an unusual effort of virtue to apply the same standards to ourselves as to others; and so it does, in one sense; but in another it is easier and more common to do this than not to do it. The simplest thing, as regards the mental process concerned, is to take ideas of conduct as they come, without thinking specially where they come from, and judge them by the standard that conscience presents to us. Injustice and personal wrong of all sorts, as between one’s self and others, commonly consist, not in imagining the other man’s point of view and refusing to give it weight; but in not imagining it, not admitting him to the tribunal at all. It is in exerting the imagination that the effort of virtue comes in. One who entertains the thought and feeling of others can hardly refuse them justice; he has made them a part of himself. There is, as we have seen, no first or second person about a sentiment; if it is alive in the mind that is all there is to the matter.
It is perhaps the case, however, that almost every person of imagination has at times a special and somewhat definite ideal self, concerning which he has the “my” feeling, and which he would not use in judging others. It is, like all ideals, a product of constructive imagination working upon experience. It represents what we should like to see ourselves, and has an especially vigorous and varied life in early youth, when the imagination projects models to match each new aspiration that gains power over it. In a study of the “Continued Stories” of children, by Mabel W. Learoyd, many interesting facts are given illustrating sustained self-idealization. These continued stories are somewhat consecutive series of imaginations on the part of the young, recalled and described at a later period. Two-thirds are said to embody an ideal, and the author, in an idealized form, is the hero of many of them.[[103]] An instance of this same process continued into old age is the fact mentioned by Mr. E. W. Emerson in his “Emerson in Concord,”[[104]] that the poet’s diary contains frequent allusion to one Osman, who stands for an ideal self, a more perfect Emerson of his aspiration.
It would always be found, I think, that our ideal self is constructed chiefly out of ideas about us attributed to other people. We can hardly get any distinct view of ourselves except in this way, that is by placing ourselves at the standpoint of someone else. The impressions thus gained are worked over and over, like other mental material, and, according to the imaginative vigor of the mind, more or less reorganized, and projected as an ideal.
With some this ideal is quite definite and visible before the eye of the mind. I have heard the expression “seeing yourself” applied to it. Thus one woman says of another “She always sees herself in evening dress,” meaning that her ideal of herself is one of social propriety or distinction, and that it takes the form of an image of her visible person as it appears to others in a shape expressing these traits. This is, of course, a phase of the reflected self, discussed in the fifth chapter. Some people “see themselves” so constantly, and strive so obviously to live up to the image, that they give a curious impression of always acting a part, as if one should compose a drama with himself as chief personage, and then spend his life playing it. Perhaps something of this sort is inevitable with persons of vivid imagination.
Once formed and familiarized the ideal self serves, like any ideal only more directly, as an incitement to growth in its direction, and a punishment to retrogression. A man who has become used to imagining himself as noble, beneficent and respected has a real picture in his mind, a fair product of aspiring thought, a work of art. If his conduct violates this imagination he has a sense of ugliness and shame; there is a rent in the picture, a rude, shapeless hole, shattering its beauty, and calling for painful and tedious repairs before it can be even tolerable to look upon. Repentance is the pain of this spectacle; and the clearer and more firmly conceived the ideal, the greater the pain.
The ideal person or persons of an ethical religion are the highest expression of this creative outreaching of the mind after the admirable in personality. It can hardly be supposed, by anyone who is willing to go into the psychology of the matter at all, that they are radically different from other ideal persons, or in any way sharply divided from the mass of personal thought. Any comparative study of idealism, among nations in various stages of civilization, among persons of different intellectual power, among the various periods of development in one individual, can hardly fail, I should say, to leave a conviction that all hangs together, that there is no chasm anywhere, that the most rudimentary idealizing impulse of the savage or the child is of a piece with the highest religious conceptions. The tendency of such a view, of course, is not to drag down the exalted, but to show all as part of a common life.
All ideals of personality are derived from intercourse, and all that attain any general acceptance have a social organization and history. Each historical epoch or nation has its somewhat distinctive personal ideals, which are instilled into the individual from the general store of thought. It is especially true that the persons of religion have this character. They are communal and cumulative, are gradually built up and become in some degree an institution. In this way they may acquire richness, clearness, sanctity, and authority, and may finally be inculcated as something above and outside of the human mind. The latter is certain to happen if they are made the basis of a discipline to be applied to all sorts of people. The dogma that they are extra-human serves, like the forms and ceremonies of a court, to secure to them the prestige of distance and inaccessibility.
It is a chief function of religious organization to make the moral synthesis more readily attainable, by establishing a spiritual discipline, or system of influences and principles, which shall constantly stimulate one’s higher sentiments, and furnish a sort of outline or scaffolding of suggestions to aid him in organizing his thought. In doing this its main agent is the inculcation of personal ideals, although the teaching of creeds is also, perhaps, important to the same purpose. It is apparently part of the legitimate function of organized moral thought to enter the vaguer fields of speculation about conduct and inculcate provisional ideas, relating for instance to the origin and meaning of life—matters which the mind must and will explore, with or without a guide. To have suggested to them definite ways of thinking regarding such matters helps to make mental unity possible, and to save men from the aimless and distracting wanderings that often end in despair. Of course these ideas must be in harmony with the general state of thought, consistent, for example, with the established results of science. Otherwise they only increase the distraction. But a credible creed is an excellent thing, and the lack of it is a real moral deficiency.
Now in times of intellectual unsettlement, like the present, the ideal may become disorganized and scattered, the face of God blurred to the view, like the reflection of the sun in troubled waters. And at the same time the creeds become incredible, so that, until new ones can be worked out and diffused, each man must either make one for himself—a task to which few are equal—or undergo distraction, or cease to think about such matters, if he can. This state of things involves some measure of demoralization, although it may be part of a movement generally beneficent. Mankind needs the highest vision of personality, and needs it clear and vivid, and in the lack of it will suffer a lack in the clearness and cogency of moral thought. It is the natural apex to the pyramid of personal imagination, and when it is wanting there will be an unremitting and eventually more or less successful striving to replace it. When it reappears it will, of course, express in all its lineaments a new era of thought; but the opinion that it is gone to stay, which is entertained by some, seems very ill grounded.