The egoism of everyone retains something of the infantile quality. But family discipline, social experience, and the awakening of powers of observation and thought result in new forms of expression. This ego interest becomes associated with an ideal of self and its importance which the individual guards as his honor, his reputation. Every man is intent upon keeping up his feeling of self-importance; each feels that one so important deserves special consideration. Egoism in normal people becomes to some extent liberated from its infantile interests and is sublimated, that is, attached to ends that are socially permissible. The original impulse remains, but it wrestles with new problems. The wish to be admired is a factor in all ambition, also in romantic love. A love affair is even more a mutual admiration society than a phenomenon of sex interest. The impulse to command which in the nursery led the child to throw toys on the floor for others to pick up, later becomes a desire for leadership, a struggle for political power, a passion for manipulating or reforming others. We also find the infantile egoism transferred to religion, where it plays an important part in adult life. Many of the very images and emotional attitudes of infancy may thus be kept alive. The believer may still feel that he is loved as the infant is loved by the parent,--loved now by the Heavenly Father. He may again feel that he can have what he desires by asking the father in prayer. Self-importance survives as belief in the immortality of the soul and as assurance of salvation. Thus with development and experience, the same ego interest becomes transformed in the tasks it progressively sets itself, and in widening the range of the ends for which it strives. Each stage of development presents its peculiar problems, its peculiar goods and evils, its possible alternative attitudes toward the values of experience. Therefore it ought to be quite as possible to determine a person’s mental age by noting the kind of things which satisfy his ego interest, as by any other device of mental measurement. In common practice this is the way in which we judge people.