306 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
thought of the partial more isolated selves of his habit, into the 
way of action which we call ethical conduct.” ! 
The concrete body of this ideal, that is, the child’s actual 
mental picture of what is good in a person, is made up from his 
own acts and the acts which he conceives as possibly his own. 
“ And then, so far as he feels it to be inadequate, he seeks to find, 
in the persons projective to him some one or more whose actions 
are better than his.” 
Ethical conduct has one aspect which our author calls sentiment 
and defines as “ the emotional or active tendency of consciousness 
away beyond the confines of its actual interpretations.” 1 This 
general sentiment has three phases the ethical, social, and re- 
ligtous, which are of special importance in our present discussion. 
“ The most general and important phase of ethical sentiment,” 
he says, “is that known in theoretical ethics as the sense of 
obligation.” This arises, he shows, from a sense of incomplete- 
ness, of mal-adaptation, of social restraint compelling obedience to 
a law higher than any worked out by himself. When the child 
has attained an appreciation of right conduct he “ ejects ” this 
into his associates,? and by the dialectics of personal and social 
growth there is worked out a general public opinion. 
By social or public sentiment is meant that pressure of social 
suggestion and constraint on the individual of which the child, — 
and all persons, — are more or less conscious much of the time, 
this sentiment growing out of the conflicts between the habitual 
self and the public self. This public sentiment as felt and given 
intellectual form, becomes ethical judgment. The child judges 
and realizes that he is judged, — another dialectic process.® 
The religious sentiment of the growing child is merely an ex- 
tension of the ethical and social,° and has two elements, a feeling 
of dependence with three phases, spontaneous, intellectual and 
ethical, and a feeling of mystery engendered as a result of his ever 
increasing experience of the unexpected and inexplicable in his 
relations with persons.” 
1 Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 295. 2 Ibid., pp. 36, 297. 
3 Tbid., pp. 299, 331; cf. The Individual and Society, p. 72. 
§ Soctal and Ethical Interpretations, p. 315. 
5 [bid., p. 326. 8 [bid., p. 441. 7 Ibid., pp. 347. 
