Ambition is to life just what steam is to the locomotive.
—J. C. Jaynes
No toil, no hardships can restrain ambitious men inur'd to pain.—Horace
Ambition is one of the great forces of human life. We may describe it as a strong, fixed desire in the heart to get honor, or to attain the best things. It is a kind of hunger or thirst for success that makes men dare danger and trial to satisfy it. A man is of little use in the world unless he have ambition to set him in motion. Small talent with great ambition often does far more than genius without it.
The severest censure that can be passed upon a man is that of the poet, "Everything by turns and nothing long." The words contain a sad revelation of wasted opportunities, wasted powers, wasted life. These words apply, with a painful degree of exactness, to the career of Lord Brougham. Few men have been more richly endowed by nature. Few men have exhibited a greater plasticity of intellect, a greater affluence of mental resources. He was a fine orator, a clear thinker, a ready writer. It is seldom that a man who sways immense audiences by the power of his eloquence attains also to a high position in the ranks of literature. Yet Brougham did this; while, as a lawyer, he gained the most splendid prize of his profession, the Lord Chancellorship of England; and as a scientific investigator, merited and received the applause of scientific men.
All this may seem to indicate success; and, to a certain extent, Brougham was successful. Nevertheless, having been everything by turns and nothing long—having given up to many pursuits the powers which should have been reserved for one or two—he was on the whole, a failure. Not only did he fail to make any permanent mark on the history or literature of his country, but he even outlived his own fame. He was almost forgotten before he died. He frittered away his genius on too many objects.
It has long been a question of debate whether circumstances make men, or men control circumstances. There are those who believe that men are governed by their environments; that their surroundings determine their lives.
The other school of philosophers boldly assert the opposite view. Men may control their surroundings. They are not the sport of the winds of circumstance. Carlyle, who is a member of this school, does not hesitate, in one of his essays, to say that "there have been great crises in the world's history when great men were needed, but they did not appear."
This much is certain, we have many instances in which people have risen above their surroundings. Warren Hastings's case is one in point. Macaulay tells the story with his accustomed brilliancy and attractiveness. When Hastings was a mere child, the ancestral estate, through some mismanagement, passed out of the hands of the family. Warren would often go—for the family remained in the neighborhood—and gaze through the bars upon what had once been his home. He registered a mental vow to regain that estate. That became the ambition of his life; the one great purpose to which he devoted all his energies. Many years passed; Hastings went to other climes; but there was ever with him the determination to get that estate; and he succeeded.
After all, would it not appear that the true theory is that of a golden mean between these two extremes? Circumstances sometimes control men or, at any rate, some kind of men; men, especially men of strong will power sometimes control their environments. Circumstances give men an opportunity to display their powers. The fuller study of this subject clearly shows the need of some principles of morality that are not dependent upon any chance companionship, and that may belong to the man himself, and not merely to his surroundings.
An ambition to get on in the world, the steady struggle to get up, to reach higher, is a constant source of education in foresight, in prudence, in economy, in industry and courage; in fact is the great developer of many of the strongest and noblest qualities of character.