into poets or philosophers or lawyers or businessmen.  In which of these ways shall we “realize” ourselves? [Footnote:  Cf.  William James, Psychology, vol.  I, p. 309:  “I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest.  Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint.  But the thing is simply impossible.  The millionaire’s work would run counter to the saint’s; the bon vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay.  Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man.  But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed.”] It is evident that we need some deeper ground of choice.  May it not even be better drastically to choke our natures, better to get a new nature than to realize the old?  Surely there are perverted natures, which ought not to be developed.  In the name of happiness we can decide on development or non-development, as the need may be.  But the ideal of “self development” gives us no criterion.  It is too sweeping, too indiscriminate.

(2) Again, we may ask why we should develop ourselves.  This ideal is in need of justification to the has a eulogistic connotation in our ears; but to rely upon that is to beg the question.  Strictly, it means only the actualizing of potentiality, which may be potentiality for evil as well as for good.  Concretely, if developing our natures led to pain and sorrow we should do well to resist such development.  The plausibility of the formula lies in the fact that the development of one’s self along any line is normally pleasant and normally conduces to ultimate happiness.  The idea of it attracts us, and it is well that it should; it is intrinsically and extrinsically good.  But it is the fact of possessing that intrinsic and extrinsic goodness that makes it a legitimate ideal.  In sum, it is good to develop one’s powers only because and in so far as such development makes for happiness or is itself an aspect of happiness.  For happiness is the only sort of thing that is in itself intrinsically and obviously desirable, without need of proof.

(3) Practically, this ideal-tends to selfishness; it does not point to the fact that the best development of self lies in service.  The ideal is capable of this interpretation, but its emphasis is in the wrong direction.  It is essentially a pagan conception, and practically inferior to the Christian ideal of service.  Service cannot be the ultimate ideal, any more than the Chinese in the story could support themselves by taking in one another’s washing; and it needs to be justified, like self-development,