Many autobiographies describe the social self-feeling of youth which, in the case of strenuous, susceptible natures, prevented by weak health or uncongenial surroundings from gaining the sort of success proper to that age, often attains extreme intensity. This is quite generally the case with the youth of men of genius, whose exceptional endowment and tendencies usually isolate them more or less from the ordinary life about them. In the autobiography of John Addington Symonds we have an account of the feelings of an ambitious boy suffering from ill-health, plainness of feature—peculiarly mortifying to his strong æsthetic instincts—and mental backwardness. “I almost resented the attentions paid me as my father’s son, ... I regarded them as acts of charitable condescension. Thus I passed into an attitude of haughty shyness which had nothing respectable in it except a sort of self-reliant, world-defiant pride, a resolution to effectuate myself, and to win what I wanted by my exertions.... I vowed to raise myself somehow or other to eminence of some sort.... I felt no desire for wealth, no mere wish to cut a figure in society. But I thirsted with intolerable thirst for eminence, for recognition as a personality.[46]... The main thing which sustained me was a sense of self—imperious, antagonistic, unmalleable.[47]... My external self in these many ways was being perpetually snubbed, and crushed, and mortified. Yet the inner self hardened after a dumb, blind fashion. I kept repeating, ‘Wait, wait. I will, I shall, I must.’”[48] At Oxford he overhears a conversation in which his abilities are depreciated and it is predicted that he will not get his “first.” “The sting of it remained in me; and though I cared little enough for first classes, I then and there resolved that I would win the best first of my year. This kind of grit in me has to be notified. Nothing aroused it so much as a seeming slight, exciting my rebellious manhood.”[49] Again he exclaims, “I look round me and find nothing in which I excel.”[50]... “I fret because I do not realize ambition, because I have no active work, and cannot win a position of importance like other men.”[51] This sort of thing is familiar in literature, and very likely in our own experience. It seems worth while to recall it and to point out that this primal need of self-effectuation, to adopt Mr. Symonds’s phrase, is the essence of ambition, and always has for its object the production of some effect upon the minds of other people. We feel in the quotations above the indomitable surging up of the individualizing, militant force of which self-feeling seems to be the organ.