The first characteristic, then, of personality is its unity, however this unity may be explained or qualified. We are conscious of ourselves as living agents, relatively distinct from other people and the world around us. The development of this consciousness of self and of our ejection of it into other persons has been described by Baldwin and others, and need not detain us here. We each have a definite point of view, peculiar to ourselves, from which we look out upon the world, and a particular set of interests which are not the same for other people as they are for us. To borrow Professor Alexander's terms, we enjoy our own experience, we contemplate the people and things outside us. And this unity of experience involves the corollary that our thoughts and feelings and desires have no independent significance; they are significant only as elements in the whole, which is ourselves. We feel, as William Wallace puts it, " that we exist in our several modifications, that the various feelings, desires, emotions are ours, belong to us, have a common ground and a mutual interdependence, thus constituting a system with necessary relations."[1]
This unity of the self has important consequences for education. For instance, it follows that in our work as 'teachers we must recognise the individual point of view and interests of each boy or girl. All education must be based upon sympathetic insight into the minds of those we teach. We must not treat them simply as units with attributes which for practical purposes are the same. If this principle were always followed we should not find
- ↑ Lecture, p. 286.
