The ascendency of personal authority is usually greater in proportion as the mind is of a simple, visually imaginative, rather than reflective turn. People of the sort commonly called “emotional,” with ready and vivid personal feeling but little constructive power, are likely to yield to an ascendent influence as a whole, with little selection or reconstruction. Their individuality is expressed chiefly in the choice of a master; having chosen, they are all his. If they change masters they change morals at the same time. The mental unity of which they, like all the rest of us, are in search, is found in allegiance to a concrete personality, which saves them the impossible task of abstract thought. Such people, however, usually feel an attraction toward stability in others, and secure it for themselves by selecting a steadfast personality to anchor their imaginations to. This, of course, is possible or congenial only to those who lack the mental vigor to make in a more intellectual manner that synthesis of which moral judgment is the expression. Those who have this vigor make use of many examples, and if they acknowledge the pre-eminence of anyone, he is likely to be vaguely conceived and to be in reality no more than the symbol of their own moral conclusions. The immediate power of personal images or influences over our sense of right is probably greater in all of us than we realize. “It is wonderful,” says George Eliot in “Middlemarch,” “how much uglier things will look when we only think we are blamed for them ... and, on the other hand, it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never complain, or have nobody to complain for them.” That is to say, other persons, by awaking social self-feeling in us, give life and power to certain sentiments of approval or disapproval regarding our own actions. The rule, already suggested, that the self of a sensitive person, in the presence of an ascendent personality, tends to become his interpretation of what the other thinks of him, is a prime factor in determining the moral judgments of all of us. Everyone must have felt the moral renewal that comes with the mere presence of one who is vigorously good, whose being enlivens our aspiration and shames our backsliding, who makes us really feel the desirability of the higher life and the baseness and dulness of the lower.