It has a great place in all active, aspiring lives, especially in the plastic period of youth. We feed our characters, while they are forming, upon the vision of admired models; an ardent sympathy dwells upon the traits through which their personality is communicated to us—facial expression, voice, significant movements, and so on. In this way those tendencies in us that are toward them are literally fed; are stimulated, organized, made habitual and familiar. As already pointed out, sympathy appears to be an act of growth; and this is especially true of the sort of sympathy we call hero-worship. All autobiographies which deal with youth show that the early development of character is through a series of admirations and enthusiasms, which pass away, to be sure, but leave character the richer for their existence. They begin in the nursery, flourish with great vigor in the school-yard, attain a passionate intensity during adolescence, and though they abate rapidly in adult life, do not altogether cease until the power of growth is lost. All will find, I imagine, if they recall their own experience, that times of mental progress were times when the mind found or created heroes to worship, often owning allegiance to several at the same time, each representing a particular need of development. The active tendencies of the schoolboy lead to admiration of the strongest and boldest of his companions; or perhaps, more imaginative, he fixes his thoughts on some famous fighter or explorer; later it is possibly a hero of statesmanship or literature who attracts him. Whatever the tendency, it is sure to have its complementary hero. Even science often begins in hero-worship. “This work,” says Darwin of Humboldt’s “Personal Narrative,” “stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.”[80] We easily forget this varied and impassioned idealism of early life; but “the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” and it is precisely then and in this way that the most rapid development of character takes place. J. A. Symonds, speaking of Professor Jowett’s early influence upon him says, “Obscurely but vividly I felt my soul grow by his contact, as it had never grown before;” and Goethe remarks that “vicinity to the master, like an element, lifts one and bears him on.” If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one’s self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life. “Whilst we converse with what is above us we do not grow old but grow young”; and that is what hero-worship means. To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.