Persons of great ambitions, or of peculiar aims of any sort, lie open to disorders of self-feeling, because they necessarily build up in their minds a self-image which no ordinary social environment can understand or corroborate, and which must be maintained by hardening themselves against immediate influences, enduring or repressing the pains of present depreciation, and cultivating in imagination the approval of some higher tribunal. If the man succeeds in becoming indifferent to the opinions of his neighbors he runs into another danger, that of a distorted and extravagant self of the pride sort, since by the very process of gaining independence and immunity from the stings of depreciation and misunderstanding, he has perhaps lost that wholesome deference to some social tribunal that a man cannot dispense with and remain quite sane. The image lacks verification and correction and becomes too much the reflection of an undisciplined self-feeling. It would seem that the megalomania or delusion of greatness which Lombroso, with more or less plausibility, ascribes to Victor Hugo and many other men of genius, is to be explained largely in this way. Much the same may be said regarding the relation of self-feeling to mental disorder, and to abnormal personality of all sorts. It seems obvious, for instance, that the delusions of greatness and delusions of persecution so common in insanity are expressions of self-feeling escaped from normal limitation and control. The instinct which under proper regulation by reason and sympathy gives rise to just and sane ambition, in the absence of it swells to grotesque proportions; while the delusion of persecution appears to be a like extravagant development of that jealousy regarding what others are thinking of us which often reaches an almost insane point in irritable people whose sanity is not questioned.