It is true, also, that in sensitive persons self-feeling often reaches a pitch of irritability that impedes production, or vulgarizes it through too great deference to opinion. But this is a matter of the control and discipline of particular aspects of the self rather than of its general tendency. When undisciplined this sort of feeling may be futile or harmful, just as fear, whose function is to cause us to avoid danger, may defeat its own aim through excessive and untimely operation, and anger may so excite us that we lose the power of inflicting injury. If the people of our time and country are peculiarly selfish, as is sometimes alleged, it is certainly not because a too rigid or clearly differentiated type of self-consciousness is general among us. On the contrary, our most characteristic fault is perhaps a certain superficiality and vagueness of character and aims; and this seems to spring from a lack of collectedness and self-definition, which in turn is connected with the too eager mode of life common among us. I doubt, however, whether egotism, which is essentially a falling short of moral standards, can be said to be more prevalent in one age than another. In Mr. Roget’s “Thesaurus” may be found about six pages devoted to words denoting “Extrinsic personal affections, or personal affections derived from the opinions or feelings of others,” an expression which seems to mean nearly the same as is here meant by social self-feeling of the reflected or looking-glass sort. Although the compiler fishes with a wide net and brings in much that seems hardly to belong here, the number of words in common use indicating different varieties of this sort of feeling is surprising and suggestive. One cannot but think, What insight and what happy boldness of invention went to the devising of all these terms! What a psychologist is language, that thus labels and treasures up so many subtle aspects of the human mind! We may profitably distinguish, as others have done, two general attitudes—the aggressive or self-assertive and the shrinking or humble. The first indicates that one thinks favorably of himself and tries to impose that favorable thought on others; the second, that he accepts and yields to a depreciating reflection of himself, and feels accordingly diminished and abased. Pride would, of course, be an example of the first way of feeling and acting, humility of the second. But there are many phases of the aggressive self, and these, again, might be classified something as follows: first, in response to imagined approval we have pride, vanity, or self-respect; second, in response to imagined censure we have various sorts of resentment; and the humble self might be treated in a similar manner.