oses his misery!"

wrote Matthew Arnold. And it does seem to be true that a
man whose will is never divided or confused by contending
currents of desire, whose character is unified and whose action
is consistent, is saved from the perturbations, the confusions,
the tossings of spirit which possess less organized souls. But
to find one's self, and to keep one's self whole and undivided,
is a difficult achievement and a rare one. Even men whose
interests and activities are fairly well defined find their
characters divided and their wills, consequently, confused. A
man's duties as a husband and father may conflict with his
professional ambitions; his love of adventure, with his desire
for wealth and social position; his artistic interests, with his
philanthropic activities; his business principles, with his
religious scruples. A man can achieve a selfhood by thrusting
out all interests save one, and achieving thereby unity at the
expense of breadth. There are men who choose to be, and
succeed in being, first and last, scholars or poets or musicians
or doctors. All activities, interests, and ideals that do not
contribute to that particular and exclusive self are practically
negligible in their conduct. Such men, although they have
attained a permanent self, have not achieved a broad, comprehensive,
or inclusive one. They are like instruments
which can sound only one note, however clear that may be;
or like singers with only a single song. All lives are necessarily
finite and exclusive; every choice of an interest or ideal
very possibly precludes some other. A man cannot be all
things at once; "the philosopher and the lady-killer," as
James merrily remarks, "could not very well keep house in
the same tenement of clay." But a strong character need
not necessarily mean a narrow one, nor need a determined will
be the will of a fanatic. The self may be--in the case of rare
geniuses it has been--diverse in its interests, activities, and
sympathies, yet unified and consistent in action. A character
may be various without being confused; versatility is not
synonymous with chaos. A man's interests and activities
may be given a certain order, rank, and proportion, so that
his life may exhibit at once the color, consistency, clarity, and
variety of a finished symphony.

The consciousness of "self" which starts as a mere continuum
of bodily sensations comes to be the net result of one's
social and intellectual as well as physical