on. The ordinary reflexes and
instincts such as those which prompt us to eat, to defend ourselves
against blows and the threatening approach of animals,
to keep our equilibrium and recover our balance, are examples
of these.

The development and preservation of our social self is also
made possible as it is initially prompted by our specifically
social instincts. There is a native tendency, as already noted,
to get ourselves noticed by other people, to seek their praise
and avoid their blame. The instincts of self-display and
leadership, and many of the non-social instincts, such as
curiosity and acquisitiveness, are frequently called into play in
the service of the more directly social tendencies of the
individual. A large part of our activity, whatever be its other
motives, is determined to some degree by the desire to develop
the social self, to be a "somebody," to cut a figure in the
world.

In the enlargement of the social self, various people use
various means, and with varying degrees of vigor, intensity,
and persistency. There are a few who go through life with
almost no sense of selfhood, who go through their daily routine
with no more recognition of their acts as their own than
that displayed by an animal or a machine. In most men the
sense of their personality and their interest in it are high, and
the development of the self is sought in all possible or
legitimate ways. The ways in which the self is developed, and the
kind of self that is sought, help to determine whether a man is
self-seeking in the lowest sense of that epithet, or idealistic
and ambitious in the approved popular sense.

The kind of self we seek to build up depends, as we have
seen, largely on the type of praise and blame and the general
character of the moral tradition to which we have been exposed.
But whichever type of self a man does select as his
ideal or permanent self, all his activities will be more or less
consciously and more or less consistently controlled by it.
His habits of action, his habitual choices, his habitual feelings,
will be built up with this ideal self as a standard and control.
He will do those things which "carry on" toward the ideal
self, leave undone those things which do not. The man or
woman who wishes simply to cut a figure "socially" will cultivate
the wit, the gayety, the facility, the smartness, which are
the familiar ingredients of such a personality. The same
persons will be singularly blind to a