The benefits derived from employing the psychological method in ethics are, however, by no means exclusively social. The use of this method reacts directly upon the user in several significant ways. In the first place, the man who employs even as few as twenty-five of the newer categories in making a trait analysis of his fellows, soon becomes aware of the fact that his former analysis of himself is in need of revision. Exaggerated self-preference is thus broken down, and replaced, not by its opposite,—self-abasement,—but by an estimate which arises from comparisons and contrasts resulting from the use of an objective standard. Again, the user of this method learns that human behavior is not the product of some mysterious mental element called “character,” but that character itself is the product of traits, and, furthermore, that every trait has had a developmental history, which is at every point a record of the effect of environmental stimulus upon original nature. His own character thereafter becomes subject to scientific scrutiny, and he realizes, for example, that his previous emotional repugnances were not always signs of incorruptibility, but very frequently, indeed, signs of the extent to which his own desires had been prevented from reaching their maturity. And, only to mention one more of the many benefits of such new scientific insight, the use of this method reveals that times out of number purely moral judgments are employed to quench, rather than to quicken thought, and are uttered not so much to indicate that discriminative sympathies are being acquired, as to show that they have long since ceased to germinate. Henceforth the employment of the psychological method goes hand in hand with the urgency to prevent as many young minds as possible from suffering on account of a retarded development.