The prime condition of ascendency is the presence of undirected energy in the person over whom it is to be exercised; it is not so much forced upon us from without as demanded from within. The mind, having energy, must work, and requires a guide, a form of thought, to facilitate its working. All views of life are fallacious which do not recognize the fact that the primary need is the need to do. Every healthy organism evolves energy, and this must have an outlet. In the human mind, during its expanding period, the excess of life takes the form of a reaching out beyond all present and familiar things after an unknown good; no matter what the present and familiar may be, the fact that it is such is enough to make it inadequate. So we have a vague onward impulse, which is the unorganized material, the undifferentiated protoplasm, so to speak, of all progress; and this, as we have seen, makes the eagerness of hero-worship in the young, imaginative and aspiring. So long as our minds and hearts are open and capable of progress, there are persons that have a glamour for us, of whom we think with reverence and aspiration; and although the glamour may pass from them and leave them commonplace, it will have fixed itself somewhere else. In youth the mind, eager, searching, forward looking, stands at what Professor Baldwin calls the alter pole of the socius, peering forth in search of new life. And the idealist at any age needs superiority in others and is always in quest of it. “Dear to us are those who love us, ... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.”[81] To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration. Most people will be able to recall vague yet intensely vivid personal impressions that they have received from faces—perhaps from a single glance of a countenance that they have never seen before or since—or perhaps from a voice; and these impressions often remain and grow and become an important factor in life. The explanation is perhaps something like this: When we receive these mysterious influences we are usually in a peculiarly impressionable state, with nervous energy itching to be worked off. There is pressure in the obscure reservoirs of hereditary passion. In some way, which we can hardly expect to define, this energy is tapped, an instinct is disengaged, the personal suggestion conveyed in the glance is felt as the symbol, the master-key that can unlock hidden tendency. It is much the same as when electricity stored and inert in a jar is loosed by a chance contact of wires that completes the circuit; the mind holds fast the life-imparting suggestion; cannot, in fact, let go of it.