Meaning of “The individual must look upon himself as an…”

The Woman’s Bible, Stanton commentary; the line appears in her critique of idealizing women’s self-sacrifice and is preserved in the Project Gutenberg text.

Self-Control, Its Kingship and Majesty, later discussion of individual possibility. The sentence is motivational rhetoric about human potential rather than a measurable universal prediction.

Thrift, Chapter II, “Habits of Thrift,” Project Gutenberg #14418. In a discussion of self-improvement and moral independence, Smiles presents self-respect as the impulse that makes a person rise, develop intelligence and improve condition.

Life Without and Life Within, “The Poor Man”; Fuller argues that difficult experience can produce realistic knowledge of one’s resources and a grounded degree of self-reliance.

Walt Whitman, 'Song of the Open Road,' section 5 in the represented 1882 Leaves of Grass text. 'I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness' follows the speaker's declaration of being loosed from imagined limits. It remains poetic first-person self-discovery rather than empirical psychology.

Self-Help, Chapter I, “Self-Help—National and Individual,” Project Gutenberg #935. This is the opening chapter’s statement of Smiles’s self-help argument, where individual initiative is presented as a source of personal growth and, in his period framework, national strength.