The organization of character : a study in the psychology of the moral self

This essay embodies the results of an investigation into the nature of character or the moral self as an organized system. It strives to give, in broad outline, an answer to the question: what are the psychological elements involved in the structure of character. It makes no pretence at being an exhaustive study of so many-sided and complex a subject as character, but merely represents an attempt to ascertain the manner of the formation of character as a systematic whole. The conception of character as an organized system which we shall try to elucidate in the following pages has for its prototype the conception or human nature as an ordered whole arrived at as early in the history of psychological and ethical thought as the time of Plato. In its essence, that is to say, our conception is as old as reflection on the nature of man itself; modern psychology merely enables us to envisage it in terms of the more recently discovered facts of mental structure and function