If a person of energetic and fine-strung temperament is neither vain nor proud, and lives equably without suffering seriously from mortification, jealousy, and the like; it is because he has in some way learned to discipline and control his self-feeling, and thus to escape the pains to which it makes him liable. To effect some such escape has always been a present and urgent problem with sensitive minds, and the literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self. To the commoner and somewhat sluggish sorts of people these passions are, on the whole, agreeable and beneficent. Emulation, ambition, honor, even pride and vanity in moderation, belong to the higher and more imaginative parts of our thought; they awaken us from sensuality and inspire us with ideal and socially determined purposes. The doctrine that they are evil could have originated only with those who felt them so; that is, I take it, with unusually sensitive spirits, or those whom circumstances denied a normal and wholesome self-expression. To such the thought of self becomes painful, not because of any lack of self-feeling; but, quite the reverse, because, being too sensitive and tender, it becomes overwrought, so that this thought sets in vibration an emotional chord already strained and in need of rest. To such minds self-abnegation becomes an ideal, an ideal of rest, peace and freedom, like green pastures and still waters. The prophets of the inner life, like Marcus Aurelius, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, and Pascal, were men distinguished not by the lack of an aggressive self, but by a success in controlling and elevating it which makes them the examples of all who undergo a like struggle with it. If their ego had not been naturally importunate they would not have been forced to contend with it, and to develop the tactics of that contention for the edification of times to come. The social self may be protected either in the negative way, by some sort of withdrawal from the suggestions that agitate and harass it, or in the positive way, by contending with them and learning to control and transform them, so that they are no longer painful; most teachers inculcating some sort of a combination of these two kinds of tactics.