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 approximately uniform discrepancy between our self-esteem and others’ esteem of us?  By trying to answer this question we shall come to understand still better the processes by which the most powerful forms of illusion are generated.

It is, I think, a matter of every-day observation that children manifest an apparently instinctive disposition to magnify self as soon as the vaguest idea of self is reached.  It is very hard to define this feeling more precisely than by terming it a rudimentary sense of personal importance.  It may show itself in very different ways, taking now a more active form, as an impulse of self-assertion, and a desire to enforce one’s own will to the suppression of others’ wills, and at another time wearing the appearance of a passive emotion, an elementary form of amour propre.  And it is this feeling which forms the germ of the self-estimation of adults.  For in truth all attribution of value involves an element of feeling, as respect, and of active desire, and the ascription of value to one’s self is in its simplest form merely the expression of this state of mind.