What the man conceives himself to be differs widely from what others conceive him to be.
"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us!" Now, whence comes this large and approximately uniform discrepancy between our self-esteem and others' esteem of us?
By trying to answer this question we shall come to understand still better the processes by which the most powerful forms of illusion are generated.
It is, I think, a matter of every-day observation that children manifest an apparently instinctive disposition to magnify self as soon as the vaguest idea of self is reached.

It is very hard to define this feeling more precisely than by terming it a rudimentary sense of personal importance.

It may show itself in very different ways, taking now a more active form, as an impulse of self-assertion, and a desire to enforce one's own will to the suppression of others' wills, and at another time wearing the appearance of a passive emotion, an elementary form of _amour propre_.

And it is this feeling which forms the germ of the self-estimation of adults.

For in truth all attribution of value involves an element of feeling, as respect, and of active desire, and the ascription of value to one's self is in its simplest form merely the expression of this state of mind.
But how is it, it may be asked, that this feeling shows itself instinctively as soon as the idea of self begins to arise in consciousness?
The answer to this question is to be found, I imagine, in the general laws of mental development.