Where they are weak they mingle
with the animal motives and curiosity like travellers in a busy
market-place, but where the sense of self is strong they become rulers
and regulators, self-seeking becomes deliberate and sustained in the
case of the human being, vanity passes into pride.
Here again that something in the mind so difficult to define, so easy
for all who understand to understand, that something which insists upon
a best and keenest, the desire for beauty, comes into the play of
motives. Pride demands a beautiful self and would discipline all other
passions to its service. It also demands recognition for that beautiful
self. Now pride, I know, is denounced by many as the essential quality
of sin. We are taught that "self-abnegation" is the substance of virtue
and self-forgetfulness the inseparable quality of right conduct. But
indeed I cannot so dismiss egotism and that pride which was the first
form in which the desire to rule oneself as a whole came to me. Through
pride one shapes oneself towards a best, though at first it may be an
ill-conceived best.
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