The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own. Self-feeling has its chief scope _within_ the general life, not outside of it, the special endeavor or tendency of which it is the emotional aspect finding its principal field of exercise in a world of personal forces, reflected in the mind by a world of personal impressions. As connected with the thought of other persons it is always a consciousness of the peculiar or differentiated aspect of one’s life, because that is the aspect that has to be sustained by purpose and endeavor, and its more aggressive forms tend to attach themselves to whatever one finds to be at once congenial to one’s own tendencies and at variance with those of others with whom one is in mental contact. It is here that they are most needed to serve their function of stimulating characteristic activity, of fostering those personal variations which the general plan of life seems to require. Heaven, says Shakespeare, doth divide “The state of man in divers functions, Setting endeavor in continual motion,” and self-feeling is one of the means by which this diversity is achieved. Agreeably to this view we find that the aggressive self manifests itself most conspicuously in an appropriativeness of objects of common desire, corresponding to the individual’s need of power over such objects to secure his own peculiar development, and to the danger of opposition from others who also need them. And this extends from material objects to lay hold, in the same spirit, of the attentions and affections of other people, of all sorts of plans and ambitions, including the noblest special purposes the mind can entertain, and indeed of any conceivable idea which may come to seem a part of one’s life and in need of assertion against someone else. The attempt to limit the word self and its derivatives to the lower aims of personality is quite arbitrary; at variance with common-sense as expressed by the emphatic use of “I” in connection with the sense of duty and other high motives, and unphilosophical as ignoring the function of the self as the organ of specialized endeavor of higher as well as lower kinds.