Prescott Lecky's Self-Consistency was published in 1945, four years after the author's death, at the age of 48. Subtitled A Theory of Personality, the book defended a simple but startling thesis:

Lecky regarded self-consistency as the object of a cognitive or epistemic motive from which all other motives are derived. “The subject must feel that he lives in a stable and intelligible environment,” Lecky wrote: “In a world which is incomprehensible, no one can feel secure.” The subject therefore constructs an organized conception of his world – an “organization of experience into an integrated whole” – and this organization just is his personality, because the effort to maintain its consistency is what gives shape to his thought and behavior.

Central to the personality, so conceived, is the subject's conception of himself. “The most constant factor in the individual's experience,” according to Lecky, “is himself and the interpretation of his own meaning; the kind of person he is, the place which he occupies in the world, appear to represent the center or nucleus of the personality.” Because the subject's world-view is thus centered on his self-view, his efforts to maintain coherence in the one are centered on maintaining coherence in the other.