It is a very natural result of the principles already noted that the fame and power of a man often transcend the man himself; that is to say, the personal idea associated by the world with a particular name and presence has often little basis in the mind behind that name and presence, as it appears to cool and impartial study. The reason is that the function of the great and famous man is to be a symbol, and the real question in other minds is not so much, What are you? as, What can I believe that you are? What can you help me to feel and be? How far can I use you as a symbol in the development of my instinctive tendency? The scientific historian may insist on asking, What are you? because the instinct he is trying to gratify is the need to make things consistent to the intelligence. But few persons have this need strongly developed, in comparison with those of a more emotional character; and so most will care more for the other questions. The scientific point of view can never be that of the most of mankind, and science, it seems to me, can hardly be more than the critic and chastener of popular faith, not its leader. Thus we may say of all famous and admired characters that, as personal ideas, they partake of the nature of gods, in that the thought entertained of them is a constructive effort of the idealizing imagination seeking to create a personal symbol of its own tendency. Perhaps there is no more striking illustration of this than that offered by the mediæval history of the papacy. It is notorious that the idea of the pope, as it was entertained by the religious world, and the pope himself, as he appeared to his intimates, were things having for the most part no close relation to each other. The visible pope was often and for long periods at a time a depraved or insignificant man; but during these very periods the ideal pope, the pope of Europe’s thought, might and often did flourish and grow in temporal and spiritual power. The former was only a symbol for the better definition of what the world needed to believe, a lay figure for garments woven by the co-operative imagination of religious men. The world needed to believe in a spiritual authority as a young girl needs to be in love, and it took up with the papacy as the most available framework for that belief, just as the young girl is likely to give her love to the least repugnant of those who solicit it. The same is true in a large measure of the other great mediæval authority, the emperor, as Mr. Bryce so clearly shows in his history of the Holy Roman Empire; and it holds true in some degree of all those clothed with royalty or other great offices. Fame may or may not represent what men were; but it always represents what humanity needs them to have been.