of those who
witnessed his life and conversation such an impression of his moral
grandeur that eighteen subsequent centuries have done homage to
him as the Almighty in person, was ignominiously put to death, as
what? As a blasphemer.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. II.]

One would suppose that men would have learned not only
to tolerate and be receptive to novelty in belief after these
repeatedly tardy recognitions of greatness. There are dozens
of instances in the history of religious, social, and political
belief, of men and women who, suppressed with the bitterest
cruelty in one generation, have been in effect, and sometimes
in fact, canonized by posterity. And a certain degree of tolerance
and receptiveness has come to be the result. But
while we no longer burn religious and social heretics,
condemnation is still meted out in some form of ostracism.
Prejudice, custom, and special interest frequently move men
to suppress in milder ways extremists, expression of whose
opinions seems to them, as unusual opinions have frequently
seemed, fraught only with the greatest of harm.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE "SELF"

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A SENSE OF PERSONAL SELFHOOD.
The expression of individuality in opinion is only one way
men have of expressing their personality, individuality, or
self. From the beginnings of childhood, men experience an
increasing sense of "personal selfhood" which finds various
outlets in action or thought. So familiar, indeed, in the normal
man is his realization that he is a "self," that it seldom
occurs to him that this conception was an attainment gradually
accomplished through long years of experience with the
world about him. The very young baby does not distinguish
between Itself and the Not-Self which constitutes the
remainder of the universe. It is nothing but a stream of
experiences, of moment to moment pulsations of desire, of
hunger and satisfaction, of bodily comfort and bodily pain. As it
grows older, it begins dimly to distinguish between Itself and
Everything-Else; it finds itself to be something different,
more vivid, more personal and interesting than the chairs and
tables, the crib and bottle, the faces and hands, the smiles and
rattles that are its familiar setting. It discovers that "I am
I," and that everything else ministers to or frustrates or remains
indifferent to its desires. It becomes a person rather
than a bundle of reactions