Another conspicuous point where our errors touch production is seen in the arts especially; the particular mistake here being in the persistence of the ego concept; our confusion of self-expression with social service. The social consciousness, unrecognised, presents itself to our minds as a huger self-consciousness. We have often wondered at the inordinate selfishness of man, compared to which the innocent egoism of the beasts is angelic. This tremendous range and depth of selfishness is because of that essential enlargement of self which comes with socialisation—the individual of a given society is that society—feels it as a “self.” The Roman, to the limits of his capacity, is Rome. The socialised individual carries in him the enlargement of his society. He has a wider soul, perforce, that is our human quality. This larger self, a thing frankly essential to social existence, enabling the individual to so think, feel, and act with and for his society, comes into action long before it is recognised by the “local office”—the mind of the individual. The mind has to learn its own contents as well as its outside environment. Our traditional labelling of those contents is no more correct than our primitive misconceptions of geography or physics. What we personally call a quality does not affect its nature, but does affect our own conscious behaviour. The ability we display to mistake and miscall our own qualities and those of other people, is apparently immeasurable. So we feel this social soul, this larger aliveness; a power of caring for millions, of wanting for millions, and of doing for millions; and, since we ourselves feel it in ourselves, we call it self-consciousness. A man, joining a regiment of old and splendid fame, comes to feel and act strongly from the regimental consciousness. He feels it with his own mental machinery; but it is not an enlargement of his personal self-consciousness—that is forever limited to his personality. This larger self—society, and its accompanying social consciousness—we calmly appropriate as a personal quality, and proceed to act on it. Having the capacity to think, feel, act for a thousand, we proceed to think, feel, and act a thousand times more for ourselves. Therefore we are naturally appalled at the limitlessness of “human selfishness.” The whole mistake is natural enough—the conscious mind always lagging behind our unconscious growth; but to-day the social consciousness is finally forcing itself on the perception of the individual; and that which we have called selfishness, and which is really socialness misused, will be lifted from vice to virtue as we re-name it. Once properly recognised, we have quite ability enough to measure the man who uses a public power for a private end; to measure and condemn. But while this misconception still exists we have a minor confusion as to “self-expression” and “social service.”