If there are any who hold that nothing is real except what can be seen and touched, they will necessarily forego the study of persons and of society; because these things are essentially intangible and invisible. The bodily presence furnishes important assistance in the forming of personal ideas, but is not essential. I never saw Shakespeare, and have no lively notion of how he looked. His reality, his presence to my mind, consists in a characteristic impression made upon me by his recorded words, an imaginative interpretation or inference from a book. In a manner equally natural and simple the religious mind comes to the idea of personal deity by a spontaneous interpretation of life as a whole. The two ideas are equally real, equally incapable of verification _to the senses_. CHAPTER IX LEADERSHIP OR PERSONAL ASCENDENCY LEADERSHIP DEFINES AND ORGANIZES VAGUE TENDENCY—POWER AS BASED UPON THE MENTAL STATE OF THE ONE SUBJECT TO IT—THE MENTAL TRAITS OF A LEADER: SIGNIFICANCE AND BREADTH—WHY THE FAME AND POWER OF A MAN OFTEN TRANSCEND HIS REAL CHARACTER—ASCENDENCY OF BELIEF AND HOPE—MYSTERY—GOOD FAITH AND IMPOSTURE—DOES THE LEADER REALLY LEAD? But how do we choose our heroes? What is it that gives leadership to some and denies it to others? Can we make out anything like a _rationale_ of personal ascendency? We can hardly hope for a complete answer to these questions, which probe the very heart of life and tendency, but at least the attempt to answer them, so far as possible, will bring us into an interesting line of thought. It is plain that the theory of ascendency involves the question of the mind’s relative valuation of the suggestions coming to it from other minds; leadership depending upon the efficacy of a personal impression to awaken feeling, thought, action, and so to become a cause of life. While there are some men who seem but to add one to the population, there are others whom we cannot help thinking about; they lend arguments to their neighbors’ creeds, so that the life of their contemporaries, and perhaps of following generations, is notably different because they have lived. The immediate reason for this difference is evidently that in the one case there is something seminal or generative in the relation between the personal impression a man makes and the mind that receives it, which is lacking in the other case. If we could go farther than this and discover what it is that makes certain suggestions seminal or generative, we should throw much light on leadership, and through that on all questions of social tendency.