IV

SELF-DIRECTION

I


In the last chapter I began to discuss the nature of goodness
distinctively personal. This has its origin in the differing
constitutions of persons and things. Into the making of a person four
characteristics enter which are not needed in the formation of a
thing. The most fundamental of these I examined. Persons and things
are unlike in this, that each force which stirs within a self-
conscious person is correlated with all his other forces. So great and
central is this correlation that a person can say, "I have an
experience," not--as, possibly, the brutes--"I am an experience." Yet
although a person tends thus to be an organic whole, he did not begin
his existence in conscious unity. Probably the early stages of our
life are to be sought rather in the regions of unconsciousness. Rising
out of unconscious conditions into reflex actions--those ingenious
provisions for our security at times when we have no directing powers
of our own--we gradually pass into conditions of consciousness, where
we are able to seize the single experience and to be absorbed in it.
Out of this emerges by degrees an apprehension of ourselves contrasted
with our experiences. Even, however, when this self-consciousness is
once established, it may on vivacious or morbid occasions be
overthrown. It by no means attends all the events of our lives. Yet it
marks all conduct that can be called good. Goodness which is
distinctively personal must in some way express the formation and
maintenance of a self-conscious life.