In the enlargement of the social self, various people use various means, and with varying degrees of vigor, intensity, and persistency. There are a few who go through life with almost no sense of selfhood, who go through their daily routine with no more recognition of their acts as their own than that displayed by an animal or a machine. In most men the sense of their personality and their interest in it are high, and the development of the self is sought in all possible or legitimate ways. The ways in which the self is developed, and the kind of self that is sought, help to determine whether a man is self-seeking in the lowest sense of that epithet, or idealistic and ambitious in the approved popular sense. The kind of self we seek to build up depends, as we have seen, largely on the type of praise and blame and the general character of the moral tradition to which we have been exposed. But whichever type of self a man does select as his ideal or permanent self, all his activities will be more or less consciously and more or less consistently controlled by it. His habits of action, his habitual choices, his habitual feelings, will be built up with this ideal self as a standard and control. He will do those things which "carry on" toward the ideal self, leave undone those things which do not. The man or woman who wishes simply to cut a figure "socially" will cultivate the wit, the gayety, the facility, the smartness, which are the familiar ingredients of such a personality. The same persons will be singularly blind to abysses of ignorance which would be painfully in the consciousness of those who had set up for themselves ideals of erudition and culture. A laborer will live and move and have his being serenely in clothes and in surroundings that "would never do" for a professional man who had committed himself to live according to the social standards of his class. Sometimes a man's actions will be directed toward the construction of an ideal self, on standards far in advance of those of his group. A man in developing such a self is, indeed, in some cases practically committing social suicide. The extreme dissenter from the current standards of action is attempting to build up what James has well called a "spiritual self," a self in the light of his own ideals, rather than those current among his contemporaries.