The Function of Method 91 



lowest stage the child or the individual performs actions through 

 instinct or habit; the activity is almost entirely unconscious in 

 the sense that it is not intellectually regarded as a process through 

 which the individual may express himself; and consequently it 

 corresponds to that level of conduct which is controlled by law, 

 where there is the same blind, unquestioning obedience to objec- 

 tive authority. In the second of these phases of personal develop- 

 ment there is the birth of self-consciousness. The child or the 

 individual begins to objectify the activity in which he is engaged, 

 begins to see himself as others see him, and for the first time 

 realises, with a flash of that inspiration which illumines the birth 

 of personality, the ever-widening gap between the real and the 

 ideal. Shortcomings from the attainment of the standard set 

 before one are apt to loom disproportionately large, for this is 

 the stage of self-criticism, where all one's activities are subjected 

 to a control that is more direct, supervisory, and immediate than 

 in the earlier stage of being under the law. Each action is 

 measured by a standard of conformity, social, intellectual, and 

 ethical, showing that the individual is in a transition stage, repre- 

 sented psychologically in the development of self-consciousness, 

 socially, in the adjustment of personality to the manifold aspects 

 of institutional life, and ethically, in the temporary adoption of 

 a scheme of utilitarian morality strangely shot through with 

 prophesies of pessimism and idealism. 



Both these stages, which correspond exactly to those phases of 

 external control that we have been considering, lead on, in the 

 ordinary course of development to the third and last stage, which 

 involves on the one hand inner and organic control by principle, 

 instead of outwardly by law and rule, and on the other hand the 

 fullest self-realisation as a spiritual self-controlled personality. 

 How this final stage differs from those which genetically precede 

 it now remains to be seen. 



The species of control exercised by law, whether of nature or 

 of the state, and by the conventions and rules of social and voca- 

 tional activity, are to a greater or less degree a restraint upon 

 individual activity, and yet at the same time conformity with 

 what is demanded assures to the individual an ever-increasing 

 degree of freedom. The observation of laws and social customs 

 introduces an element of regularity, uniformity, or unity into the 

 actions of men, so that one's plans of action can be the more 



