dom; and the man of years whose opinion of his own
social importance and moral worth is quite disproportionate to the
estimation which others form of his claims--these alike illustrate the
force and pertinacity of the belief.

There are, no doubt, many exceptions to this form of self-appreciation.
In certain robust minds, but little given to self-reflection, the idea
of personal value rarely occurs. And then there are timid, sensitive
natures that betray a tendency to self-distrust of all kinds, and to an
undue depreciation of personal merit. Yet even here traces of an impulse
to think well of self will appear to the attentive eye, and one can
generally recognize that this impulse is only kept down by some other
stronger force, as, for example, extreme sensitiveness to the judgment
of others, great conscientiousness, and so on. And however this be, it
will be allowed that the average man rates himself highly.

It is to be noticed that this persuasion of personal value or excellence
is, in common, very vague. A man may have a general sense of his own
importance without in the least being able to say wherein exactly his
superiority lies. Or, to put it another way, he may have a strong
conviction that he stands high in the scale of morally deserving
persons, and yet be unable to define his position more nearly. Commonly,
the conviction seems to be only definable as an assurance of a
superlative of which the positive and comparative are suppressed. At
most, his idea of his moral altitude resolves itself into the
proposition, "I am a good deal better than Mr. A. or Mr. B." Now, it is
plain that in these intuitive judgments on his own excellence, the man
is making an assertion with respect, not only to inner subjective
feelings which he only can be supposed to know immediately, but also to
external objective facts which are patent to others, namely, to certain
active tendencies and capabilities, to the direction of external conduct
in certain lines.[143] Hence, if the assertion is erroneous, it will be
in plain contradiction to others' perceptions of his powers or moral
endowments. And this is what we actually find. A man's self-esteem, in a
large preponderance of cases, is plainly in excess of others' esteem of
him. What the man conceives himself to be differs widely from what
others conceive him to be.

"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as others see us!"

Now, whence comes this large and approxi