Idealism in this vague form has neither first, second, nor third person. It is simply an impression of the desirable in personality, and is impulsively applied to your conduct, my conduct, or his conduct, as the case may be. The sentiment occurs to us, and the connection in which it occurs determines its moral application. We sometimes speak as if it required an unusual effort of virtue to apply the same standards to ourselves as to others; and so it does, in one sense; but in another it is easier and more common to do this than not to do it. The simplest thing, as regards the mental process concerned, is to take ideas of conduct as they come, without thinking specially where they come from, and judge them by the standard that conscience presents to us. Injustice and personal wrong of all sorts, as between one’s self and others, commonly consist, not in imagining the other man’s point of view and refusing to give it weight; but in not imagining it, not admitting him to the tribunal at all. It is in exerting the imagination that the effort of virtue comes in. One who entertains the thought and feeling of others can hardly refuse them justice; he has made them a part of himself. There is, as we have seen, no first or second person about a sentiment; if it is alive in the mind that is all there is to the matter. It is perhaps the case, however, that almost every person of imagination has at times a special and somewhat definite ideal self, concerning which he has the “my” feeling, and which he would not use in judging others. It is, like all ideals, a product of constructive imagination working upon experience. It represents what we should like to see ourselves, and has an especially vigorous and varied life in early youth, when the imagination projects models to match each new aspiration that gains power over it. In a study of the “Continued Stories” of children, by Mabel W. Learoyd, many interesting facts are given illustrating sustained self-idealization. These continued stories are somewhat consecutive series of imaginations on the part of the young, recalled and described at a later period. Two-thirds are said to embody an ideal, and the author, in an idealized form, is the hero of many of them.[103] An instance of this same process continued into old age is the fact mentioned by Mr. E. W. Emerson in his “Emerson in Concord,”[104] that the poet’s diary contains frequent allusion to one Osman, who stands for an ideal self, a more perfect Emerson of his aspiration. It would always be found, I think, that our ideal self is constructed chiefly out of ideas about us attributed to other people. We can hardly get any distinct view of ourselves except in this way, that is by placing ourselves at the standpoint of someone else. The impressions thus gained are worked over and over, like other mental material, and, according to the imaginative vigor of the mind, more or less reorganized, and projected as an ideal.