According to almost unanimous opinion, the different kinds of personalities that can be contained in one person, and in connection with this, the different types of self-esteem of a person can be represented in the form of a hierarchical scale with the physical personality at the bottom, the spiritual one at the top, and the various types of material (located outside our body). ) and social personalities in between. Often the natural inclination to take care of ourselves makes us want to expand various aspects of the personality; we deliberately refuse to develop in ourselves only that in which we do not hope to succeed. In this way, our altruism is a «necessary virtue,» and the cynics, describing our progress in the field of morality, not entirely without reason, recall the well-known fable about the fox and the grapes. But such is the course of the moral development of mankind, and if we agree that in the end those types of personalities that we are able to retain for ourselves are (for us) the best in internal merits, then we will have no reason to complain that we we comprehend their highest value in such a painful way.
Of course, this is not the only way in which we learn to subordinate the lower types of our personalities to the higher ones. In this submission, undoubtedly, ethical evaluation plays a certain role, and, finally, judgments expressed by us about the actions of other persons are of no small importance here. One of the most curious laws of our (psychic) nature is the fact that we enjoy observing in ourselves certain qualities that seem disgusting to us in others. The physical untidiness of another person, his greed, ambition, irascibility, jealousy, despotism or arrogance cannot arouse sympathy in anyone. Left absolutely to myself, I might perhaps have willingly allowed these inclinations to develop, and only after a long time did I appreciate the position that such a person should occupy among others. But as I constantly have to make judgments about other people, I soon learn to see in the mirror of other people’s passions, as Gorwich puts it, a reflection of my own, and I begin to think about them quite differently from how I feel them. At the same time, of course, the moral principles inculcated from childhood extremely accelerate the appearance in us of a tendency to reflection.
In this way, as we said, the scale on which people hierarchically arrange different types of personalities according to their dignity is obtained. A certain amount of bodily egoism is a necessary lining for all other types of personality. But they try to diminish the sensual element or, at best, to balance it with other properties of character. The material types of personalities, in a broader sense of the word, are given preference over the immediate personality — the body. We regard as a miserable creature one who is unable to sacrifice a little food, drink, or sleep for the general improvement of his material well-being. The social personality as a whole is superior to the material personality in its totality. We should value our honor, friends and human relations more than health and material well-being. The spiritual personality, on the other hand, should be the highest treasure for a person: we should rather sacrifice friends, a good name, property, and even life than lose the spiritual benefits of our personality.
In all kinds of our personalities — physical, social and spiritual — we distinguish between the immediate, real, on the one hand, and the more distant, potential, on the other, between a more short-sighted and a more far-sighted point of view on things, acting contrary to the first and in favor of last. For the sake of general health, it is necessary to sacrifice momentary pleasure in the present; one must let go of one dollar, meaning to get a hundred; it is necessary to break friendly relations with a famous person in the present, bearing in mind at the same time to acquire a more worthy circle of friends in the future; one has to lose in elegance, wit, learning, in order to more reliably acquire the salvation of the soul.
Of these broader potential types of personality, the potential social personality is the most interesting because of some paradoxes and because of its close connection with the moral and religious sides of our personality. If, for reasons of honor or conscience, I have the courage to condemn my family, my party, my circle of loved ones; if I change from a Protestant to a Catholic, or from a Catholic to a freethinker; if from an orthodox allopathic practitioner I become a homeopath or some other sectarian of medicine, then in all such cases I indifferently endure the loss of some part of my social personality, encouraging myself with the thought that better public judges (above me) can be found in comparison with those whose sentence is directed at this moment against me.
In appealing to the decision of these new judges, I may be chasing a very distant and hardly achievable ideal of the social personality. I cannot expect it to be carried out in my lifetime: I can even expect that later generations, who would approve of my course of action if they knew it, will know nothing of my existence after my death. Nevertheless, the feeling that fascinates me is undoubtedly the desire to find an ideal of the social personality, an ideal that would at least deserve the approval of the strictest possible judge, if there was one. This kind of personality is the final, most stable, true and intimate object of my aspirations. This judge is God, the Absolute Mind, the Great Companion. In our time of scientific enlightenment, there is a lot of controversy on the question of the effectiveness of prayer, and many grounds pro and contra are put forward. But at the same time, the question of why we pray in particular is hardly touched upon, which is not difficult to answer with reference to the irrepressible need to pray. It is possible that people act in this way contrary to science and will continue to pray for the whole future time until their psychic nature changes, which we have no reason to expect. <…>
All perfection of the social personality consists in the replacement of the lower court over oneself by the higher one; in the person of the Supreme Justice, the ideal tribunal appears to be the highest; and most people either constantly or in certain cases of life turn to this Supreme Judge. The last offspring of the human race can in this way strive for the highest moral self-esteem, can recognize a certain power, a certain right to exist.
For most of us, a world without an inner refuge at the moment of the complete loss of all external social personalities would be some kind of terrible abyss. I say «for most of us» because individuals probably vary greatly in the degree of feeling they are capable of experiencing towards the Ideal Being. In the minds of some people, these feelings play a more significant role than in the minds of others. The people most gifted with these feelings are probably the most religious. But I am sure that even those who claim to be completely devoid of them are deluding themselves and actually have at least some degree of these feelings. Only non-herd animals are probably completely devoid of this feeling. Perhaps no one is able to make sacrifices in the name of law without embodying to some extent the principle of law for which a certain sacrifice is made, without expecting gratitude from it.
In other words, total social altruism can hardly exist; complete social suicide hardly ever occurred to a person. <…>