306 PSTCHOLOOY. 



farther on. Language has synonyms enough for both pri- 

 mary feelings. Thus pride, conceit, vanity, self-esteem, 

 arrogance, vainglor^^ on the one hand; and on the other 

 modesty, humility, confusion, diflidence, shame, mortitica- 

 tion, contrition, the sense of obloquy and personal despair. 

 These two opposite classes of affection seem to be direct and 

 elementary endowments of our nature. Associationists 

 would have it that they are, on the other hand, secondary 

 phenomena arising from a rapid computation of the sensi- 

 ble pleasures or pains to which our prosperous or debased 

 personal predicament is likely to lead, the sum of the repre- 

 sented pleasures forming the self-satisfaction, and the sum 

 of the represented pains forming the opposite feeling of 

 shame. No doubt, when we are self-satisfied, we do fondly 

 rehearse all possible rewards for our desert, and when in a 

 fit of self-despair we forebode evil. But the mere expecta- 

 tion of reward is not the self-satisfaction, and the mere 

 apprehension of the evil is not the self-despair, for there is 

 a certain average tone of self-feeling which each one of us 

 carries about with him, and which is independent of the 

 objective reasons we may have for satisfaction or discontent. 

 That is, a very meanly-conditioned man may abound in 

 unfaltering conceit, and one whose success in life is secure 

 and who is esteemed by all may remain diffident of his 

 jDowers to the end. 



One may say, however, that the normal provocative of 

 self-feeling is one's actual success or failure, and the good 

 or bad actual position one holds in the world. " He put in 

 his thumb and pulled out a plum, and said what a good boy 

 am I." A man wdth a broadly extended empirical Ego, 

 with powers that have uniformly brought him success, with 

 place and wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to be 

 visited by the morbid diflidences and doubts about himself 

 w^hich he had wdien he was a boy. " Is not this great 

 Babylon, which I have planted ?" * Whereas he who has 

 made one blunder after another, and still lies in middle life 

 among the failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow 



* See the excellent remarks by Prof. Bain on the ' Emotion of Power ' 

 in his ' Emotions and the Will. ' 



