310 PSTCHOLOOY. 



tenemeut of clay. Such different characters may conceiv- 

 ably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But 

 to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less 

 be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, 

 deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the 

 one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves 

 thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are 

 real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real tri- 

 umphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is 

 as strong an example as there is of that selective industry 

 of the mind on which I insisted some pages back (p. 284 ff.). 

 Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of 

 a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses 

 one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith 

 reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted 

 expressly as its own. 



I, who for the time have staked my all on being a 

 psychologist, am mortified if others know much more 

 psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the 

 grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me 

 no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I ' pretensions* 

 to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse. So 

 we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he 

 is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the 

 world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the 

 globe minus one is nothing ; he has ' pitted ' himself to 

 beat that one ; and as long as he doesn't do that nothing 

 else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, in- 

 deed he is not. 



Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat, 

 suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned 

 the attemijt to * carry that line,' as the merchants say, of 

 self at all. With no attempt there can be no failure ; with 

 no failure no humiliation. So our self-feeling in this world 

 depends entirely on what we hoxik ourselves to be and do. 

 It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our sup- 

 posed potentialities ; a fraction of which our pretensions 

 are the denominator and the numerator our success : thus, 



Success rM 1 <• 1- 1 • 1 



Self-esteem = =f5 — r • Such a traction may be increased 



Pretensions "^ 



