brought up by the protests of other little beings. It is a beautiful piece of evidence to the essential truthfulness of the process depicted above, where it was said that the alter is one with the ego as a self, and that it is impossible for the child to attach predicates to the one without, ipso facto, attaching the same predicates to the other. To say that little brother need not obey, when I am called on to obey, is to say that little brother is in some way not a person, that is all. So we constantly have to explain to our children 'the dollie cannot feel,' 'the leather elephant cannot eat,' 'the woolly dog need not be beaten when he gets in the way.' 'These things,' in short, we say to our children, 'are not selves; they have the shapes of possible selves, it may be, and they have so far served as convenient alters for us to practise on, but they need not be expected to take up with you the responsibilities of family life.'
So, once born in the fire and smoke of personal friction, the socius lives, a presence of which the child can never rid himself. It is the germ of the ideals of life, the measure of the life to come, both in this world and the next; for it is this self that the child thereafter pursues in all his development, making it his only to find that it is farther beyond him. He is "ever learning, but never coming to a knowledge of the truth."
Taking up the sense of morality, therefore,—the sense that we mean when we use the word 'ought,’—we now have it. Let the child continue to act by the rule of either of his former partial selves,—the private habitual self or the accommodating capricious self of impulse and sympathy,—and this new ideal of a self, a self that fulfils law, comes up to call him to account. My father, says the child, knows and would say what and how; and later, when the father-self has proved not to know all whats and all hows, then my teacher, my book, my inspired writer, my God, knows what and how still. In so far as I have learned from him, I also know; and this I expect you, my brother, my friend, my alter, to know too, for our common life together. And the sense of this my self of conformity to what he teaches and would have me do—this is, once for all, my conscience.
