If a person conceives his image as depreciated in the mind of another; and if, instead of maintaining an aggressive attitude and resenting that depreciation, he yields to it and accepts the image and the judgment upon it; then he feels and shows something in the way of humility. Here again we have a great variety of nomenclature, indicating different shades of humble feeling and behavior, such as shame, confusion, abasement, humiliation, mortification, meekness, bashfulness, diffidence, shyness, being out of countenance, abashed or crestfallen, contrition, compunction, remorse, and so on. Humility, like self-approval, has forms that consist with a high type of character and are felt to be praiseworthy, and others that are felt to be base. There is a sort that goes with vanity and indicates instability, an excessive and indiscriminate yielding to another’s view of one’s self. We wish a man to be humble only before what, from his own characteristic point of view, is truly superior. His humility should imply self-respect; it should be that attitude of deference which a stable but growing character takes in the presence of whatever embodies its ideals. Every outreaching person has masters in whose imagined presence he drops resistance and becomes like clay in the hands of the potter, that they may make something better of him. He does this from a feeling that the master is more himself than he is; there is a receptive enthusiasm, a sense of new life that swallows up the old self and makes his ordinary personality appear tedious, base and despicable. Humility of this sort goes with self-reverence, because a sense of the higher or ideal self plunges the present and commonplace self into humility. The man aims at “so high an ideal that he always feels his unworthiness in his own sight and that of others, though aware of his own desert by the ordinary standards of his community, country, or generation.”[60] But a humility that is self-abandonment, a cringing before opinion alien to one’s self, is felt to be mere cowardice and servility.