The men we admire most, including those we look upon as peculiarly good, are invariably men of notable self-assertion. Thus Martin Luther, to take a conspicuous instance, was a man of the most intense self-feeling, resentful of opposition, dogmatic, with “an absolute confidence in the infallibility, practically speaking, of his own judgment.” This is a trait belonging to nearly all great leaders, and a main cause of their success. That which distinguishes Luther from the vulgarly ambitious and aggressive people we know is not the quality of his self-feeling, but the fact that it was identified in his imagination and endeavors with sentiments and purposes that we look upon as noble, progressive, or right. No one could be more ambitious than he was, or more determined to secure the social aggrandizement of his self; but in his case the self for which he was ambitious and resentful consisted largely of certain convictions regarding justification by faith, the sacrilege of the sale of indulgences, and, more generally, of an enfranchising spirit and mode of thought fit to awaken and lead the aspiration of the time. It is evident enough that in this respect Luther is typical of aggressive reformers in our own and every other time. Does not every efficient clergyman, philanthropist, or teacher become such by identifying some worthy object with a vigorous self-feeling? Is it ever really possible to separate the feeling for the cause from the feeling that it is _my_ cause? I doubt whether it is. Some of the greatest and purest founders and propagators of religion have been among the greatest egotists in the sense that they openly identified the idea of good with the idea of self, and spoke of the two interchangeably. And I cannot think of any strong man I have known, however good, who does not seem to me to have had intense self-feeling about his cherished affair; though if his affair was a large and helpful one no one would call him selfish. Since the judgment that a man is or is not selfish is a question of sympathies, it naturally follows that people easily disagree regarding it, their views depending much upon their temperaments and habits of thought. There are probably few energetic persons who do not make an impression of egotism upon some of their acquaintances; and, on the other hand, how many there are whose selfishness seems obvious to most people, but is not apparent to their wives, sisters and mothers. In so far as our self is identified with that of another it is, of course, unlikely that the aims of the latter should be obnoxious to us.