Who does not feel at times what Goethe calls the joy of dwelling in one’s self, of surrounding himself with the fruits of his own mind, with things he has made, perhaps, books he has chosen, his familiar clothes and possessions of all sorts, with his wife, children, and old friends, and with his own thoughts, which some, like Robert Louis Stevenson, confess to a love of re-reading in books, letters, or diaries? At times even conscientious people, perhaps, look kindly at their own faults, deficiencies, and mannerisms, precisely as they would on those of a familiar friend. Without self-love in some such sense as this any solid and genial growth of character and accomplishment is hardly possible. “Whatever any man has to effect must emanate from him like a second self; and how could this be possible were not his first self entirely pervaded by it?” Nor is it opposed to the love of others. “Indeed,” says Mr. Stevenson, “he who loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a plenitude of knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his neighbors.” Self-love, Shakespeare says, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting; and many serious varieties of the latter might be specified. There is, for instance, a culpable sort of self-dreading cowardice, not at all uncommon with sensitive people, which shrinks from developing and asserting a just “I” because of the stress of self-feeling—of vanity, uncertainty, and mortification—which is foreseen and shunned. If one is liable to these sentiments the proper course is to bear with them as with other disturbing conditions, rather than to allow them to stand in the way of what, after all, one is born to do. “Know your own bone,” says Thoreau, “gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”[54] “If I am not I, who will be?”