It is the result of physiological theories of ethics—certainly not intended by the authors of those theories—to make the impulses of an ideal self, like the sentiment of honor, seem far-fetched, extravagant and irrational. They have to be justified by an elaborate course of reasoning which does not seem very convincing after all. No such impression, however, could result from the direct observation of social life. In point of fact, a man’s honor, as he conceives it, is his self in its most immediate and potent reality, swaying his conduct without waiting upon any inquiry into its physiological antecedents. The preference of honor to life is not at all a romantic exception in human behavior, but something quite characteristic of man on a really human level. A despicable or degenerate person may save his body alive at the expense of honor, and so may almost anyone in moments of panic or other kind of demoralization, but the typical man, in his place among his fellows and with his social sentiments about him, will not do so. We read in history of many peoples conquered because they lacked discipline and strategy, or because their weapons were inferior, but we seldom read of any who were really cowardly in the sense that they would not face death in battle. And the readiness to face death commonly means that the sentiment of honor dominates the impulses of terror and pain. All over the ancient world the Roman legions encountered men who shunned death no more than themselves, but were not so skilful in inflicting it; and in Mexico and Peru the natives died by thousands in a desperate struggle against the Spanish arms. The earliest accounts we have of our own Germanic ancestors show a state of feeling and practice that made self-preservation, in a material sense, strictly subordinate to honor. “Death is better for every clansman than coward life,” says Beowulf,[57] and there seems no doubt whatever that this was a general principle of action, so that cowardice was a rare phenomenon. In modern life we see the same subordination of sensation to sentiment among soldiers and in a hundred other careers involving bodily peril—not as a heroic exception but as the ordinary practice of plain men. We see it also in the general readiness to undergo all sorts of sensual pains and privations rather than cease to be respectable in the eyes of other people. It is well known, for instance, that among the poor thousands endure cold and partial starvation rather than lose their self-respect by begging. In short, it does not seem too favorable a view of mankind to say that under normal conditions their minds are ruled by the sentiment of Norfolk: “Mine honor is my life: both grow in one; Take honor from me and my life is done.” If we once grasp the fact that the self is primarily a social, ideal, or imaginative fact, and not a sensual fact, all this appears quite natural and not in need of special explanation.