With some this ideal is quite definite and visible before the eye of the mind. I have heard the expression “seeing yourself” applied to it. Thus one woman says of another “She always sees herself in evening dress,” meaning that her ideal of herself is one of social propriety or distinction, and that it takes the form of an image of her visible person as it appears to others in a shape expressing these traits. This is, of course, a phase of the reflected self, discussed in the fifth chapter. Some people “see themselves” so constantly, and strive so obviously to live up to the image, that they give a curious impression of always acting a part, as if one should compose a drama with himself as chief personage, and then spend his life playing it. Perhaps something of this sort is inevitable with persons of vivid imagination. Once formed and familiarized the ideal self serves, like any ideal only more directly, as an incitement to growth in its direction, and a punishment to retrogression. A man who has become used to imagining himself as noble, beneficent and respected has a real picture in his mind, a fair product of aspiring thought, a work of art. If his conduct violates this imagination he has a sense of ugliness and shame; there is a rent in the picture, a rude, shapeless hole, shattering its beauty, and calling for painful and tedious repairs before it can be even tolerable to look upon. Repentance is the pain of this spectacle; and the clearer and more firmly conceived the ideal, the greater the pain. The ideal person or persons of an ethical religion are the highest expression of this creative outreaching of the mind after the admirable in personality. It can hardly be supposed, by anyone who is willing to go into the psychology of the matter at all, that they are radically different from other ideal persons, or in any way sharply divided from the mass of personal thought. Any comparative study of idealism, among nations in various stages of civilization, among persons of different intellectual power, among the various periods of development in one individual, can hardly fail, I should say, to leave a conviction that all hangs together, that there is no chasm anywhere, that the most rudimentary idealizing impulse of the savage or the child is of a piece with the highest religious conceptions. The tendency of such a view, of course, is not to drag down the exalted, but to show all as part of a common life.