28 
TRANSACTIONS OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
Taking up these instances in general, it may he said that when any 
of the powers, whether physical, mental, or moral, are damaged or 
changed, the self is said to he damaged or changed. Normally there are 
certain acts of physical strength and skill that each man can perform; 
and any failure in these abilities will cause remark on the change that 
is coming over the man, and any sense of the inability to do them will 
disturb him more or less profoundly depending on the importance he 
attaches to the power impaired. At the extreme would probably stand 
the skilled worker’s command of his tools, e. g., the painter’s loss of 
dexterity with his brush. Again, in each intellectual direction, every 
man has certain normal capacities, things he can count on himself to 
do. Depending on his mental caliber, he grasps situations with char- 
acteristic ease, quickness and adequacy, or their opposites; his memory 
has so much free play, scope and tenacity for faces, places, names, etc., 
and so with the powers of judgment, reasoning and the rest. A skilled 
accountant who lost his power of figuring, or an historian who lost his 
grasp of the dramatic interplay of persons and other forces on the hu- 
man stage, would certainly be, and feel him self to he, deranged. In a 
prett}^ familiar round of situations one has put forth an average of so 
much power for each, with such . and such effects, and naturally, 
depending on the situation, one counts on oneself, and others count on 
one, for that much; more or less, if striking, means derangement. And 
just so it is as to what a man can resist in the way of temptation, dare 
in the way of courage, forego in the way of generosity, and in general 
as to what he can do that has moral value. The voluntary actions that 
through inheritance or practice have become habits, those constitute a 
man’s character, and are the essence of his selfhood.* 
Again, all ethical authorities are agreed that a man is responsible 
only for his voluntary actions and their consequences. Indeed, they 
push the view so far as to maintain that, where an impulse is so strong 
as to force its way into action in spite of strenuous effort to restrain it, 
* Over and above the agent, or active self, psychologists distinguish the 
bodily self, the self of memory and expectation, and the social self. But im- 
portant as these undoubtedly are in the finished product, I believe they can 
be shown to be comparatively accidental elements caught up in the eddy 
of voluntary action. As will be indicated below, the social self is, as to 
its mind-stuff, made out of voluntary actions, while the other two selves are 
present as mind-stuff before volition, but have to await its appearance to get 
organized into selfhood. But aside from that question, allowing the other 
selves to be as essential as any one chooses, it can not be disputed that the 
voluntary actions constituting the agent are indispensable. On this whole 
question, cf. Psych. Rev. V. II, No. 6., article by Royce, and also Baldwin’s 
discussion of the genesis of the self in his “Interpretations”. 
