At any particular stage of individual existence, these elements, together with the suggestions from the world without, are found more or less perfectly organized into a living, growing whole, a person, a man. Obscurely locked within him, inscrutable to himself as to others, is the soul of the whole past, his portion of the energy, the passion, the tendency, of human life. Its existence creates a vague need to live, to feel, to act; but he cannot fulfil this need, at least not in a normal way, without incitement from outside to loosen and direct his instinctive aptitude. There is explosive material stored up in him, but it cannot go off unless the right spark reaches it, and that spark is usually some sort of a personal suggestion, some living trait that sets life free and turns restlessness into power.
It must be evident that we can look for no cut-and-dried theory of this life-imparting force, no algebraic formula for leadership. We know but little of the depths of human tendency; and those who know most are possibly the poets, whose knowledge is little available for precise uses. Moreover, the problem varies incalculably with sex, age, race, inherited idiosyncrasy, and previous personal development. The general notions of evolution, however, lead us to expect that what awakens life and so gives ascendency will be something important or functional in the past life of the race, something appealing to instincts which have survived because they had a part to perform; and this, generally speaking, appears to be the case.
The prime condition of ascendency is the presence of undirected energy in the person over whom it is to be exercised; it is not so much forced upon us from without as demanded from within. The mind, having energy, must work, and requires a guide, a form of thought, to facilitate its working. All views of life are fallacious which do not recognize the fact that the primary need is the need to do. Every healthy organism evolves energy, and this must have an outlet. In the human mind, during its expanding period, the excess of life takes the form of a reaching out beyond all present and familiar things after an unknown good; no matter what the present and familiar may be, the fact that it is such is enough to make it inadequate. So we have a vague onward impulse, which is the unorganized material, the undifferentiated protoplasm, so to speak, of all progress; and this, as we have seen, makes the eagerness of hero-worship in the young, imaginative and aspiring. So long as our minds and hearts are open and capable of progress, there are persons that have a glamour for us, of whom we think with reverence and aspiration; and although the glamour may pass from them and leave them commonplace, it will have fixed itself somewhere else. In youth the mind, eager, searching, forward looking, stands at what Professor Baldwin calls the alter pole of the socius, peering forth in search of new life. And the idealist at any age needs superiority in others and is always in quest of it. “Dear to us are those who love us, ... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.”[[81]] To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
Most people will be able to recall vague yet intensely vivid personal impressions that they have received from faces—perhaps from a single glance of a countenance that they have never seen before or since—or perhaps from a voice; and these impressions often remain and grow and become an important factor in life. The explanation is perhaps something like this: When we receive these mysterious influences we are usually in a peculiarly impressionable state, with nervous energy itching to be worked off. There is pressure in the obscure reservoirs of hereditary passion. In some way, which we can hardly expect to define, this energy is tapped, an instinct is disengaged, the personal suggestion conveyed in the glance is felt as the symbol, the master-key that can unlock hidden tendency. It is much the same as when electricity stored and inert in a jar is loosed by a chance contact of wires that completes the circuit; the mind holds fast the life-imparting suggestion; cannot, in fact, let go of it.
“——all night long his face before her lived,
Dark-splendid, speaking in the silence, full
Of noble things, and held her from her sleep.”
It is true of races, as of individuals, that the more vitality and onwardness they have, the more they need ideals and a leadership that gives form to them. A strenuous people like the Anglo-Saxon must have something to look forward and up to, since without faith of some sort they must fall into dissipation or despair; they can never be content with that calm and symmetrical enjoyment of the present which is thought to have been characteristic of the ancient Greeks. To be sure it is said, and no doubt with truth, that the people of Northern Europe are less hero-worshippers than those of the South, in the sense that they are less given to blind enthusiasm for popular idols; but this, I take it, only means that the former, having more constructive power in building up ideals from various personal sources, and more persistence in adhering to them when thus built up, are more sober and independent in their judgment of particular persons, and less liable to extravagant admiration of the hero of the moment. But their idealism is all the more potent for this, and at bottom is just as dependent upon personal suggestion for its definition. Thus it is likely that all leadership will be found to be such by virtue of defining the possibilities of the mind. “If we survey the field of history,” says Professor William James, “and ask what feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this; that each and all of them have said to the human being, ‘the inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess’”;[[82]] and the same principle evidently applies to personal leadership.
We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first. The attention of the new-born child is fixed by whatever exercises the senses, through motion, noise, touch, or color. Persons and animals interest him primarily because they offer a greater amount and variety of sensible stimulus than other objects. They move, talk, laugh, coax, fondle, bring food and so on. The prestige they thus acquire over the child’s mind is shared with such other stimulating phenomena as cars, engines, windmills, patches of sunlight and bright-colored garments. A little later, when he begins to acquire some control over his activities, he welcomes eagerly whatever can participate in and so stimulate and guide them. The playthings he cares for are those that go, or that he can do something with—carts, fire-engines, blocks, and the like. Persons, especially those that share his interests, maintain and increase their ascendency, and other children, preferably a little older and of more varied resources than himself, are particularly welcome. Among grown-ups he admires most those who do something that he can understand, whom he can appreciate as actors and producers—such as the carpenter, the gardener, the maid in the kitchen. R. invented the happy word “thinger” to describe this sort of people, and while performing similar feats would proudly proclaim himself a thinger.
It will be observed that at this stage a child has learned to reflect upon action and to discriminate that which is purposeful and effective from mere motion; he has gained the notion of power. Himself constantly trying to do things, he learns to admire those who can do things better than himself, or who can suggest new things to do. His father sitting at his desk probably seems an inert and unattractive phenomenon, but the man who can make shavings or dig a deep hole is a hero; and the seemingly perverse admiration which children at a later age show for circus men and for the pirates and desperadoes they read about, is to be explained in a similar manner. What they want is evident power. The scholar may possibly be as worthy of admiration as the acrobat or the policeman; but the boy of ten will seldom see the matter in that light.