50 THE MISUSE OF METAPHORS IN 



tender care that receives and guides him is impressing on 

 him habits . . . the icy chains of universal custom are 

 hardening themselves round his cradled life." Watch his 

 growth on the hearth, in the school, in the pursuit of his 

 avocation. " He learns to speak, and here he appropriates 

 the common heritage of his race ; the tongue that he makes 

 his own is his country's language, it is (or it should be) 

 the same that others speak, and it carries into his mind the 

 needs and sentiments of the race (over this I need not stay) 

 and stamps them in indelibly. He grows up in an 

 atmosphere of example and general custom, his life widens 

 out from one little world to other and higher worlds, and 

 he apprehends through successive stations the whole in 

 which he lives and in which he has lived." 1 He appears 

 before us at last as a formed character, a distinct personality, 

 who confronts the world in his own fashion, and bears on 

 his own shoulders the weight of the responsibilities of his 

 station in life and its duties. His history teaches us that 

 his self, or character, and his world have grown together, 

 and that they are not merely counterparts of each other, 

 but the same thing looked at in different ways. The pro n 

 cess began at a point where there was neither a self nor a 

 world, but the indistinct, inarticulate, blurred possibilities 

 of both. 2 The process ends, on the one hand, with a char- 

 acter formed, which can face the world and even condemn 



1 Bradley's Ethical Studies. 



2 And it does not matter whether we call him, or his world, "a 

 manifold," after Kant, or an " undifferentiated continuum" after Dr. 

 Ward, for both are equally false. It is not possible to proceed either 

 from mere difference to unity or from mere unity to difference. We 

 require both in their relation ; that is, we must assume that the crudest 

 experience, as well as the crudest fact of experience, is already a 

 " system." 



