fixity, connectedness in inner selfhood. By my ideal I learn to know myself. The contrast of ego and non-ego grows, however, still more and more complex as all the foregoing motives join in endlessly varied interweaving, in that long drama of social warfare and of social harmony, of friendship and of enmity, of private interest and of public spirit, which passes before us as mind daily meets mind in the expression of feeling and of opinion, in the play of love and of hate, throughout our long, and, by nature, far too flickering existence. Everywhere it is the social non-ego by the light of which the social ego is seen, too often with a luridly confused irrationality, — in happy lives, however, with a gradually attained relative fixity and clearness.
But what motive, above all, tends, in this chaos of empirical self-consciousness, towards an ideal unity, fixity, and clearness in my insight into what, after all, I am for my own consciousness? I have already pointed out that this unifying motive is, above all, the presence of an ideal of what, amidst all the confusion of my life, I mean to be. I repeat, by my ideal I learn to know myself as one self, with one contrast that runs through all the endlessly varying contrasts of ego and non-ego. Surely no teacher needs to be reminded that one common name for all these motives that tend towards unity of selfhood and of character in a growing mind is: Whatever tends to give one’s life the unity of a conscious plan. A sane self-consciousness involves a more or less clearly defined ideal of conduct, such as can be central in all the processes that tend to bring the special
