rather than in the passive, or feeling, side. Yet with those who use the phrase, there is often a tendency, it seems to me, to rest in it as a finality, instead of taking it as a statement of a problem. As warning off from certain defective conceptions, in pointing to an outline of a solution, it is highly serviceable; whether it has any more positive and concrete value depends upon whether the ideas of self and of realization are worked out, or are left as self-explaining assumptions.
As a part of the attempt to give the conception of ‘self-realization’ a somewhat more precise content, I propose in this paper to criticize one idea of the self more or less explicit in much of current discussion. I thus hope to bring out, by way of contrast, what appears to me the important factor of the conception of self as the ethical ideal. The notion which I wish to criticize is that of the self as a presupposed fixed schema or outline, while realization consists in the filling up of this schema. The notion which I would suggest as substitute is that of the self as always a concrete specific activity; and, therefore, (to anticipate) of the identity of self and realization. It is extremely difficult to find an explicit statement of the doctrine of the presupposed or schematic self, and of realization as the filling up of this outline, and I am, accordingly, to some extent, under the difficulty of having to build up the notion criticized through the very process of criticism. One or two considerations, however, will show that the notion is not a figment or man of straw. Such a theory as that of T. H. Green, for example, with its assumption of an “eternally complete consciousness” constituting the moral self to be realized by man, illustrates what I mean by a fixed and presupposed self. Any theory which makes the self something to be realized, which makes the process of moral experience a process of gradually attaining this ideal self, illustrates the same conception. Any theory which does not make the self always ‘there and then,’ which does not make it a reality as specific and concrete as a growing tree or a moving planet must, in one form or another, set up a rigid self, and conceive of realization as filling up its empty frame-
