Character and Conduct – 18 October – Our True Selves and Our Traditional Selves

I HAVE sometimes thought that this facility of men in believing that they are still what they once meant to be – this undisturbed appropriation of a traditional character which is often but a melancholy relic of early resolutions, like the worn and soiled testimonial to soberness and honesty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the need of a dram has driven into peculation – may sometimes diminish the turpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood.   It is notorious that a man may go on uttering false assertions about his own acts till he at last believes in them:  is it not possible that sometimes in the very first utterance there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, a reproduction of a traditional self which is clung to against all evidence?   There is no knowing all the disguises of the lying serpent.   When we come to examine in detail what is the sane mind in the sane body, the final test of completeness seems to be a security of distinction between what we have professed and what we have done;  what we have aimed at and what we have achieved;  what we have invented and what we have witnessed or bad evidenced to us;  what we think and feel in the present and what we thought and felt in the past.

GEORGE ELIOT

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These quotes are from ‘Character and Conduct’ A selection of helpful thoughts from various authors arranged for daily reading.

Collected by Constance M Whishaw and first published in 1905 as a follow up to her volume of Daily Readings for members of the Being and Doing Guild who asked for an additional volume

In her preface Whishaw writes:

‘This collection of noble thoughts expressed by men and women of past and present ages who have endeavoured to leave the world a little better than they found it.’

It is my hope in publishing them here readers may be inspired to imitate the example of the authors.