THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 197
adjust the self. We will not inquire here whether these two states of consciousness are simultaneous or consecutive or whether they are equally important. Enough for the present that similar consequences proceed from both. This superior self is a more or less vague image of the conscious self, somehow ampli- fied by addition of activities beyond those of the actual self. The whole partly detected around the self is not the common- place of people and things that the routine of life encounters. It is the mysterious more that broods in and over the familiar surroundings. The real individual is at last in one fraction of his personality a wistfulness after that other self, or a deference to that inscrutable whole. In other words, there are distinct sorts of human action which are impelled primarily not by supposed demand for health or wealth or sociability or knowl- ledge or beauty, but they are efforts either to become the larger self or to be adjusted to the containing whole.
We deliberately avoid implication that the desire with which we are dealing has originally any moral content in the subjective sense. To hold that from the beginning the feeling of ought- ness goes with this half-consciousness of an immanent self, or with this rudimentary cosmic perception, is pure speculation. We do not know the facts. What we do know is that in the most elementary manifestations which we are able to trace of the feeling of oughtness, or conscience, as a meaning factor in men's activities, it gets in its work by means of this premonition of a superior self, or by means of some presumption which reduces to an assumption about the containing whole. "Ought" is sanctioned by the sovereignty either of the potential self or of the imagined whole.
Whether the sense of oughtness is intuitive or an evolution from purely egoistic judgment of utility, we find it operating first and chiefest in connection with those personal relations which are most remote and mysterious. The thing which the naive man feels that he "ought" to do is the thing which has least visible connection with the kinds of action that have known utility. Obligation is not aboriginally an incident of action within the realm where cause and effect is understood. The
