The foundation of personality, therefore, is the power to clearly grasp an imaginary condition of ourselves which is preferable to any practical alternative; and then translate that potential picture into an accomplished fact. Whoever lives at a lower level than this constant translation of pictured potency into energetic reality: whoever, seeing the picture of the self he wants to be, suffers aught less noble and less imperative than that to determine his action misses the mark of personality. Whoever sees the picture, and holds it before his mind so clearly that all external things which favour it are chosen for its sake, and all proposed actions which would hinder it are remorselessly rejected in its holy name and by its mighty power;--he rises to the level of personality, and his personality is of that clear, strong, joyous, compelling, conquering, triumphant sort which alone is worthy of the name.
How much deeper this goes than anything we have had before! A man comes up for judgment. If Epicurus chances to be seated on the throne, he asks the candidate, "Have you had a good time?" If he has, he opens the gates of Paradise; if he has not, he bids him be off to the place of torment where people who don't know how to enjoy themselves ought to go.
The Stoic asks him whether he has kept all the commandments. If he has, then he may be promoted to serve the great Commander in other departments of the cosmic order. If he has broken the least of them, no matter on what pretext, or under what temptation, he is irrevocably doomed. Plato asks him how well he has managed to keep under his appetites and passions. If the man has risen above them, Plato will promote him to seats nearer the perfect goodness of the gods. If he has slipped or failed, then he must return for longer probation in the prison-house of sense.
Aristotle's judgment seat is a very different place. A man comes to him who has had a very sorry time: who has broken many commandments; who has yielded time and again to sensuous desires; yet who is a good husband, a kind father, an honest workman, a loyal citizen, a disinterested scientist or artist, a lover of his fellows, a worshipper of God's beauty and beneficence; and in spite of the sad time he has had, in spite of the laws he has broken, in spite of the appetites which have proved too strong for him, Aristotle gives him his hand, and bids him go up higher. For that man stands in genuine relations to some aspects of the great social end to which he devotes himself. And because some portion of the real world has been made better by the conception of it he has cherished, and the fidelity with which he has translated his conception into fact, therefore a share in the great glory of the splendid whole belongs of right to him. Good honest work, after an ideal plan, to the full measure of his powers, with wise selection of appropriate means, gives each individual his place and rank in the vast workshop wherein the eternal thoughts of God, revealed to men as their several ideals, are wrought out into the actuality of the social, economic, political, æsthetic and spiritual order of the world.