We have, then, in each readjustment of the activities of the self a reconstruction in knowledge of ethical reality--a reconstruction which at the same time involves the assignment of a definite value to the new mode of conduct which has been worked out in the readjustment. We conclude, then, that the ethical experience is one of continuous construction and reconstruction of an order of objective reality, within which the world of sense-perception is comprised as the world of more or less refractory means to the attainment of ethical purposes. In this process of construction of ethical reality current moral standards play the same part as concepts already defined--that is to say, the agent's present habits--do in the typical judgment of sense-perception. They play the part of symbols suggestive of recognized and heretofore habitual modes of action with reference to conduct of the type of the particular instance that is under consideration, serving thus to bring to bear upon the subject of the judgment sooner or later the entire moral self. The outcome is a new self, and so for the future a new standard, in which the past self as represented by the former standard and the new impulse have been brought to mutual adjustment. Our position is that this adjustment is essentially experimental and that in it the _general principle_ of the unity and expansion of the self must be presupposed, as in inductive inference general principles of teleology, of the conservation of energy, and of organic interconnection of parts in living things are presupposed. The unity and increase of the self is not a test or canon, but a principle of moral experimentation.[144]