One would suppose that men would have learned not only to tolerate and be receptive to novelty in belief after these repeatedly tardy recognitions of greatness. There are dozens of instances in the history of religious, social, and political belief, of men and women who, suppressed with the bitterest cruelty in one generation, have been in effect, and sometimes in fact, canonized by posterity. And a certain degree of tolerance and receptiveness has come to be the result. But while we no longer burn religious and social heretics, condemnation is still meted out in some form of ostracism. Prejudice, custom, and special interest frequently move men to suppress in milder ways extremists, expression of whose opinions seems to them, as unusual opinions have frequently seemed, fraught only with the greatest of harm.
CHAPTER VIII
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE "SELF"
Origin and development of a sense of personal selfhood. The expression of individuality in opinion is only one way men have of expressing their personality, individuality, or self. From the beginnings of childhood, men experience an increasing sense of "personal selfhood" which finds various outlets in action or thought. So familiar, indeed, in the normal man is his realization that he is a "self," that it seldom occurs to him that this conception was an attainment gradually accomplished through long years of experience with the world about him. The very young baby does not distinguish between Itself and the Not-Self which constitutes the remainder of the universe. It is nothing but a stream of experiences, of moment to moment pulsations of desire, of hunger and satisfaction, of bodily comfort and bodily pain. As it grows older, it begins dimly to distinguish between Itself and Everything-Else; it finds itself to be something different, more vivid, more personal and interesting than the chairs and tables, the crib and bottle, the faces and hands, the smiles and rattles that are its familiar setting. It discovers that "I am I," and that everything else ministers to or frustrates or remains indifferent to its desires. It becomes a person rather than a bundle of reactions. It develops a consciousness of "self."
In its simplest form this consciousness of self is nothing more than a continuous stream of inner organic sensations, and the constant process of the body and limbs "and the special interest of these as the seat of various pleasures and pains." This is what James calls the "bodily self." As it grows older, the baby distinguishes between persons and things. And as, in setting off his own body from other things, it discovers its "bodily self," so in setting off its own opinions, actions, and thoughts from other people, it discovers its "social self." It is because Nature does in some degree the "giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us," that we do discover our "selves" at all. "The normal human being, if it were possible for him to grow up from birth onward in a purely physical environment, deprived, that is, to say, of both animal and human companionship, would develop but a very crude and rudimentary idea of the self."[1]
[Footnote 1: McDougall: loc. cit., p. 183.]
The social self. A man's social self, that is, his consciousness of himself as set over against all the other individuals with whom he comes in contact, develops as his relations with other people grow more complex and various. A man's self, apart from his mere physical body, consists in his peculiar organization of instincts and habits. In common language this constitutes his personality or character. We can infer from it what he will, as we say, characteristically do in any given situation. And a particular organization of instincts and habits is dependent very largely on the individual's social experience, on the types and varieties of contact with other people that he has established. There will be differences, it goes without saying, that depend on initial differences in native capacity. But both the consciousness of self and the overt organization of instinctive and habitual actions are dependent primarily on the groups with which an individual comes in contact. In the formation of habits, both of action and thought, the individual is affected, as we have seen, largely by praise and blame. He very early comes to detect signs of approval and disapproval, and both his consciousness of his individuality and the character of that individuality are, in the case of most persons, largely determined by these outward signs of the praise and blame of others. And since, in normal experience, a man comes into contact with several distinct groups, with varying codes of conduct, he will really have a number of distinct personalities. The professor is a different man in his class and at his club; the judge displays a different character in the court and in the bosom of his family.
The self that comes to be most characteristic and distinctive of a man, however, is determined by the group with which he comes most habitually in contact, or to whose approvals he has become most sensitive. Thus there develop certain typical personalities or characters, such as those of the typical lawyer or soldier or judge. Their bearing, action, and consciousness of self are determined by the approvals and disapprovals of the group to which they are most completely and intimately exposed.
Both the consciousness of self which most men experience and the overt expression of that selfhood in act are thus seen to be a more or less direct reflex of the praise and blame of the groups with which they are in contact. Men learn from experience with the praise and blame of others to "place" themselves socially, to discover in the mirror of other men's opinions the status and locus of their own lives. As we shall see in a succeeding section, the degree of satisfaction which men experience in their consciousness of themselves is dependent intimately on the praise and blame by which their selfhood is, in the first place, largely determined. In the chapter on the "Social Nature of Man," we examined in some detail the way in which praise and blame modified a man's habits. The total result of this process is to give a man a certain fixed set of overt habits that constitute his character and a more or less fixed consciousness of that character.
On the other hand, a man's character and self-consciousness may develop more or less independently of the immediate forces of the public opinion to which he is exposed. One comes in contact in the course of his experience not merely with his immediate contemporaries, but with a wide variety of moral traditions. Except in the rigidly custom-bound life of primitive societies, a man is, even in practical life, exposed to a diversity of codes, standards, and expectations of behavior. His family, his professional, his political, and his social groups expose him to various kinds of emphases and accent in behavior. And a man of some intelligence, education, and culture may be determined in his action by standards whose origin is remote in time, space, and intention from those operative in the predominant public opinion of his day. He may come to act habitually on the basis of ideal standards which he has himself set up through reflection, or which he has acquired from some moral system or tradition, far in advance of those which are the staple determinants of character for most of his contemporaries. He may be one of those rare moral geniuses, singularly unsusceptible to praise and blame, who create a new ideal of character by the dominant individuality of their own. Or, as more frequently happens, he may follow the ideals set up by such a one, instead of accepting the orthodoxies which are generally observed. He may follow Christ instead of the Pharisees, Socrates instead of the habit-crusted citizens of Athens. We are, indeed, inclined to think of a man as a peculiarly distinctive personality, when his sense of selfhood, and the overt actions in which that selfhood finds expression, are not determined by the current dogmas of his day, but by ideal standards to which he has reflectively given allegiance. But so much is the self, both in its consciousness and expression, socially produced that men acting on purely imagined ideal standards, current nowhere in their day and generation, have imagined a group, no matter how small or how remote, who would praise them or a God who noted and approved their ways.